Noa Kageyama, Performance Psychologist (The Juilliard School): Making Performers Bulletproof, Part I
Noa Kageyama. Photo by Rosalie O'Connor
Noa Kageyama first picked up the violin at age 2 and spent the next 20+ years battling performance anxiety. As a student at Juilliard, he discovered sport psychology and went on to get a Ph.D. in psychology. He is now on the faculty of Juilliard, teaching performing artists how to use principles of sport psychology to perform to their full abilities under pressure. He also writes a performance psychology blog, The Bulletproof Musician, which has more than 100,000 monthly readers, runs workshops and maintains a private coaching practice. TWoA talked to Noa about beating performance anxiety, building confidence, effective practice and building mental resilience.
Discovering the Power of Sport Psychology
Noa got introduced to sport psychology as a student at Juilliard. This discovery transformed his whole experience of playing the violin at a highly competitive level: “I had spent, up until that point, probably a couple of decades not really thinking that deeply about practicing, or about how to prepare for performances and the natural pressures that we experience – nerves and all that. I just assumed that with enough time, experience and repetition, I would somehow intuitively ‘figure it out,’ whatever that meant. But a couple of decades into it, I still felt like I hadn’t figured it out! I started to wonder: ‘When is this going to happen? How many times do I need to perform, or compete, or go to auditions? What’s going to click suddenly that makes it all make sense?’”
Noa had been watching other musicians. After thirty, forty, fifty years of playing, these performers certainly looked like they had figured it out, but he was frustrated that twenty years into playing the violin, he seemed to be still just plugging away with no real answers. The turning point came rather unexpectedly. As a student at Juilliard, he enrolled in Don Greene’s course on performance psychology, or sport psychology for musicians. He wasn’t sure what to expect or what he would learn, but he was intrigued.
The experience was life changing: “It changed so much of how I approached everything. It changed how I was practicing. I was much more thoughtful and strategic.” Instead of just playing passages over and over until they sounded better, he started to pause and think of what had just happened, recording himself on occasion. Practicing much more strategically and thoughtfully proved to be a much more effective approach to improving from practice session to practice session: “Once you start hearing yourself improve in ways that are lasting and that stick from one day to the next, it makes you not mind practicing so much. I did end up practicing more and I found myself even getting intrigued while practicing instead of just counting down the minutes until I felt I had put in enough time.”
He also started approaching performances differently: “I had more strategies for what to do during performance and how to carry myself in the moments before going on stage, how to stay focused on stage and not worry about the sort of things I used to worry about and actually get more engaged in the experience of performing. I started to enjoy performing even more than I did before. Nerves were not as much of a factor at that point. All in all, these things started to meld together and result in a much more positive experience for me both in the practice room and on stage.”
The Bulletproof Musician
After graduating from Juilliard, Noa put down his violin and went on to study psychology. He is now back at Juilliard as a faculty member, but also runs an inspiring blog and podcast, The Bulletproof Musician. Feeling “bulletproof” means acquiring skills that help you cope with all those things that might get to you or undermine your ability to perform at your best: audience criticism, or, in sports, bad weather or competitors or opponents: “People would use the word ‘bulletproof’ to describe being more resilient to those things, more protected. The ability to pass those things without being negatively affected. That reminded me of those times where I did feel a bit more ‘bulletproof’ in performance, whether it was my level of preparation or playing with other people I looked up to or trusted. It didn’t matter what the audience was doing, or how close they were sitting to us, whether the room was really cold or hot. Those things stopped mattering as much. That’s the aspirational goal that we all have as musicians: to be able to just go on stage and play like we know we can and not get distracted by the pianist who is playing faster than they did before, or the person in the front row who just won’t stop whispering too loudly. All these things would not matter as much for me at those moments. That’s where the idea for the name came from.”
Feeling Bulletproof: Attention Control
Noa believes that attention control is the key to feeling bulletproof: “I remember reading something about tennis: it is really tempting, if you could choose between control and power, to want to choose power. There is something appealing about being able to hit the ball really hard. But this person was arguing that if you can choose between the two, you should really choose control because if you have absolute precise control over where exactly you put the ball and how you put it there, you can be a magician on the court and just do amazing things, as opposed to power without that control.”
Research shows that the same applies to anxiety and performance: “Increasingly, the one thing that I find myself working on perhaps more than anything else with musicians is the ability to control your attention, to know what to think about and when and how to keep your attention there. Because if you are backstage and you start worrying about how the day is going to go, or you start worrying about someone you saw in the audience, or you start worrying about the fact that your heart started to beat faster, well, that’s going to make you more anxious, which is going to make it harder to stay focused on the music. And then you start worrying about memory: ‘Do I really have this in my memory? How does the beginning go? I can’t remember how the beginning goes! Is it up bow or is it down bow? What’s the fingering like?’ And then we get even more anxious, which makes it even harder to stay on track and to stay in the present. We start worrying about difficult passages coming up: ‘What happens if I miss that note?’ “
Having the ability to control what you focus on, whenever you want to, makes it a lot easier to stay in the present and to keep yourself on an even keel – enabling musicians to be much more engaged with the music itself: “As we know when we’ve had those good performances, where we are in the zone and just focus on our part or the intersection of our part and the cellist’s part or the pianist’s part and how everything comes together: those are the times where our heart might be beating faster than normal, we might feel the increased physical activation but we experience it more as excitement than anxiety or fear or panic. Those are the times when we can have a much more positive experience.”
Constructive Comparisons
Constantly comparing yourself negatively to students who are more advanced than you can have a profound impact on self-esteem. Negative self-talk and low self-esteem hamper progress and the ability to perform at your best. But there is a way to compare yourself to better players or dancers in a constructive way: “This is going to sound really simple, but it’s probably easier said than done. Having people around you who are able to perform at a higher level for whatever reason can be a really helpful thing because it gives you a sense of something to shoot for, something to aim for. If we don’t have that it’s easy to lose interest or kind of wander around in circles, not really sure what to aim for. The difficulty of course nowadays is that it’s not just people in our community or our studio or our school: the entire world is on YouTube. We see the five-year-old playing something that’s way beyond our level. It’s easy to think ‘what’s the point even of going down this path’ because we see these examples on YouTube which make us feel like we can’t do anything right.”
The key to constructive comparison is to stop comparing yourself. Instead, analyse what you see: “We should see things and take away individual things that we would love to be able to add to our playing. Then stop there. Don’t compare. Just pick and choose things that we would love to add to what it is that we can do.”
Building a Growth Mindset
Instead of getting intimidated by somebody else’s abilities, get inspired. Noa describes the type of self-talk that can lead to a positive growth mindset: “‘Sure, there are people who can do that better than I can, but I would love to be able to do that. That’s my goal.’ And then it becomes a matter of comparing of where you are today with where you want to be: ‘Am I getting closer to that destination that I’d love to get to? Are there things that I can do to get to that destination more effectively or more efficiently?’ It’s a daily, or weekly, or monthly process of comparing notes and really just comparing you with yourself as opposed to you with somebody else who is on their own journey. They will run into things that frustrate them as well at some point or another.” The ultimate goal is to focus on your own path.
American psychologist Carol Dweck has driven the research into motivation and mindset over the last couple of decades. She coined the phrases “growth mindset” versus “fixed mindset:” “It’s a fundamentally different way of pacing ourselves and approaching our lives, whether it’s related to music or our studies in school or our relationships, even our ability to cook food that we enjoy. It’s all about approaching everything that we do in life from a process of how to grow and how to evolve and how to improve as opposed to hitting certain performance levels that would then mean that we have arrived somewhere.”
(Click here to read the second part of the interview.)
Are you curious to learn how to practice confidence and how to manage performance anxiety and more? Subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of the page or follow us on Instagram @teenworldarts to make sure that you don’t miss the second part of our interview with Noa. In the meantime, check out The Bulletproof Musician.
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