Noa Kageyama, Performance Psychologist (The Juilliard School): Making Performers Bulletproof, Part II
Noa Kageyama. Photo by Rosalie O’Connor.
This is part II of our interview with Noa Kageyama (click here to read part I). Noa first picked up the violin at age two 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.
Practicing Confidence
Training to become a classical musician or dancer is incredibly challenging, both physically and mentally. Being self-critical is an important pre-requisite for improving, but too much self-criticism can be counterproductive. The natural tendency is to focus on what isn’t going well and to feel bad about it: “We don’t tend to put as much time, attention and focus on the things that sound pretty good and the things that are improving. It can feel to us that we are never getting anywhere, that we are terrible. Sometimes it even feels like we are regressing and getting worse. But the reality is that we are always generally moving forward and getting better. We just don’t notice those things as much as we notice the things that need work.”
Noa has an easy strategy to combat negative self-talk: “A simple exercise that you could do is that after each practice session, you write down on paper, or on your phone, two simple things: one thing that actually sounded pretty good, and one thing that improved. The important thing when you do this exercise is to be very specific. If you say something like: ‘My intonation was good’ – that’s extremely broad and vague. It should be more something like: ‘The high F-sharp in measure 17 that I have to shift up to with not a lot of time to get there was finally spot on. I was able to do it consistently, it feels pretty solid.’ Those things are much more tangible and help us start appreciating that we are getting better and that we are doing things that sound good. It seems trivial just to write down two things. But as you are going through your practice session, you are going to start paying attention not just to the things that don’t sound good and need work, but to the things that are sounding good and are improving, because you will think: ‘Oh, that sounded pretty good, maybe I will write that down at the end of the session.’ And then you continue playing and you think: ‘That was better, too, maybe I will write that down instead?’ And then you are paying attention to both sides of things.” This strategy gives you a much more balanced sense of where your playing or dancing is at that day.
Managing Performance Anxiety
Performance anxiety can be another stumbling block for performers. Noa believes that managing performance anxiety starts with understanding the nature of anxiety: “Anxiety is not necessarily what we think it is. Anxiety has two components. There is the physiological component: our heartrate goes up, we start sweating, our breathing changes, we feel the butterflies. But there is also a mental component where we worry, and we have doubts, and we start getting distracted. Our mind blanks out. Those two things affect performance differently. Anxiety is a physical activation state plus worry, doubt and fear. Excitement on the other hand is that same physical activation state, more or less, but where our mind is not worried, and we are not doubting ourselves. We are kind of looking forward to things, or we are excited. Performance anxiety and general excitement are actually quite similar.”
It is therefore misleading to think that one is either calm or anxious before a performance: “The choice that we really want to make is: am I going to be anxious or am I going to be excited? The goal is to push ourselves towards excitement.” But how do you push yourself towards feeling excited rather than anxious? Start with interpreting the physical signs you experience on the day of a performance as excitement rather than anxiety: “There is some research which suggests that even just a mantra like ‘I’m excited!’ and trying to embrace that energy can lead to much better performance.”
Practice Performing
Ideally, managing performance anxiety starts with actively “practicing” performing: “We tend to not practice or prepare for performances very consistently, or at all. If you ask most young musicians how often they record themselves, usually you get a guilty look.” Used accurately, recordings can form a crucial role in preparing for a performance. Musicians often shy away from recording themselves, waiting until they feel a piece is more or less ready. Moreover, they tend to record themselves towards the end of a practice session when they are properly warmed up and comfortable. This defeats the purpose of recording yourself because it creates an illusion of what your playing is actually like: “We don’t like hearing what we sound like when we start practicing, but that’s actually a much more representative snapshot of where our skills are really at. If we were to record ourselves first before we practice, that would then enable us to better prioritise the things that we need to spend time working on.” Noa suggests regularly recording yourself at the start of your practice session from the early stages of learning a piece.
Once you get closer to a performance, Noa recommends doing “practice performances” and run-throughs, simulating playing for an audience and so forth. Doing this weeks or even months before the actual performance helps to familiarize you with the emotions of performing, preparing you to handle the emotions of an actual performance: “The only problem is: this means front-loading the discomfort much sooner in the process which is something that we tend to not want to do. Of course, the pay-off is great: we feel much more comfortable with pressure and discomfort when the performance comes around. But it’s easy for us to procrastinate and push it off and wait until it’s, as the famous violin teacher Galamian said: ‘It’s too little, too late.’”
A Growth Mindset Approach to Injury
Musicians are not as injury prone as athletes or dancers, but overuse injuries do happen. How do you stay positive while recovering from a music related injury? Once again, a growth mindset approach can help. Be patient and remember that in the greater scheme of your life-long journey, one week, one month, or even sixth months or a year won’t matter as much as it feels like at the moment.
If you are able to reflect on the reasons that led to the injury, you might learn how to avoid injuries in the future or how to approach your work differently: “It’s hard in the moment to experience gratitude, but if it helps us prevent worse injuries in the future or perhaps enables us to learn something that will enable us to practice more effectively, it has exponential benefits into the years ahead of us and our career.”
Noa’s Advice to His Younger Self
Looking back on his own journey, what advice would Noa give to his younger self? “Unfortunately, I don't think fourteen-year-old me would have listened to forty-something-year- old me. I wish I would be able to transmit into fourteen-year-old-me's head that practice is not just about repetition after repetition, but about having a clear idea of what it is that you're going for in the first place. Take a moment after each repetition, to reflect on what just happened: ‘Did I hit the goal that I had for myself? If I didn't - why didn't I? What did I do differently? Or what could I do differently that would enable me to get closer to it?’” Noa is convinced that more deliberate practice would have led to a much more positive practice and performance experience at a much younger age.
The second message to his younger self would emphasise the importance of patience. Learning takes time. Noa remembers Itzhak Perlman saying that the things you learn slowly, you forget slowly, whereas the things that you learn quickly, you forget quickly: “If we learn something, it's going to take a little while. It's not going to be happen overnight. But then those changes start to build up and aggregate over time. I don't know whether this would resonate with 14-year-old me, but when relatives would see me after not seeing me for a year or two, I wouldn’t notice a huge change in myself, but they certainly would. A lot of times our skills improve slowly, very gradually, in ways that we don't realise. Until someday, suddenly, it's like: ‘Oh, wow, I've really grown quite a bit!”