The Musician’s Two Modes

And how you can leverage them to get better at performing

The musician’s two modes, and how you can leverage them to get better at performing

A number of students, as well as a number of non-musician friends and acquaintances, have expressed to me their frustrations with stage fright. Musicians, of course, usually perform, so music students urgently want to know how to conquer their nerves and get good at performing. But there are many other situations in life that require us to perform: school presentations, business meetings, speaking at a town hall or other political forum, acting in a play, presenting to a book club or church group, and - something a lot of us do in many contexts! - teaching.

How to perform well and confidently is another of those life lessons people expect to learn from music lessons. Performance anxiety is something almost everyone has experienced, and yes, taking music lessons can help you learn to deal with it.

Just like anything, you have to practice performing to be comfortable performing. But the way to practice performing isn’t what you probably think it is.

Many students who struggle with performance anxiety think, or have been told, that if they just throw themselves in the deep end enough times, they’ll learn to swim. These musicians dutifully force themselves into performing over and over, hoping that constant exposure to the spotlight will dull their nervous response. It doesn’t work. You can’t learn to swim by practicing drowning. Even worse, this desensitization method usually backfires, traumatizing the musician with awful, miserable experiences that make them even more afraid to get up in front of an audience.

There has to be a better way to get comfortable performing!

What’s the difference between performing and practicing, anyway? We all know that performing is a vastly different experience from practicing. How is it different, though? Is the presence of other people the only determining factor in whether your music-making is practice or performance?

Actually, other people have almost nothing to do with it. The difference between practicing and performing is in your intention.

When you practice, you’re trying to learn your music - your focus is on yourself and your mental and physical processes. You’re taking the music in.

When you perform, you’re making music to be received by others; the music is coming out of you. Your focus is on your audience and on the music itself.

These two different goals - internalizing the music and expressing the music - require different methods and totally different mindsets. I’ll call these mindsets Learning Mode and Expression Mode. Let’s look at them in more detail.

Musicians with major performance anxiety are often great practicers. Practicing well requires you to constantly evaluate yourself. You have to judge how correctly you played or sang to determine what you need to work on, and you have to be in an analytical frame of mind to diagnose your problems and decide what methods to apply to fix those problems. Self critique comes naturally to someone with an anxious mindset, and after a few weeks of daily practice, this judgmental mindset becomes your default every time you sit down at the piano or open your mouth to sing. And it’s not a bad thing - practice mode is essential to learning to play or sing!

But to perform, your intention has to be to express the music. You can’t do this well without having practiced the technical execution first, of course, but your attention must be focused on the big picture. You have to turn off the part of your brain that judges and evaluates what happened and catalogues that information. You’re not learning right now, so that evaluation and cataloguing is just wasted energy, and it’s drawing your attention away from what you’re creating in the present moment. Your purpose is to communicate. Turn your focus away from yourself and towards the content you’re communicating and the needs of the audience you’re addressing.

Whereas practice mode is a rational, cerebral type of mindset, performing mindset is more emotional and experiential. Like anything emotional, it can be unpredictable and surprisingly powerful. If you aren’t used to being in this state of mind, it can really sweep you away. It’s not something you want to attempt for the very first time when you’re onstage in front of an audience. You’d never go out there and try to perform a piece of music that you haven’t practiced, and if you did, neither you nor anyone would be surprised if it went poorly. So why on earth would you expect yourself to give a solid, expressive performance if you’ve never practiced expressing your music before?

To sum up what I’ve said so far, there are two mental modes every musician can use: there’s Learning Mode, where you’re taking in musical information, and Expression Mode, where you’re putting out the music that’s inside you. The best musicians can easily access either mode and use both modes equally. This allows them to learn music effectively and to perform joyfully.

How can you become like those musicians? How can you be good at, and even LOVE, performing?

If you want to become a more confident performer, follow these four steps:

• Learn how to deactivate your practice mode

• Develop your performance mindset

• Teach yourself how to access your performance mindset

• Practice making music in expression mode

Learn how to deactivate your practice mode

Practice mode is absolutely great and necessary - for learning. You can’t make improvements in your musical abilities without being able to critique yourself. After a few weeks of lessons, you were probably already used to continually evaluating whether you were getting your notes right as you played or sang. You need to know how to question and critique what you’re doing in order to make improvements. If this is the only way you practice, it becomes your default mindset every time you start to make music.

How can you break out of that self-critique mode? You have to notice when it’s happening. So basically, I’m asking you to stop yourself from analyzing by analyzing whether you’re analyzing. Easy, right?

Some red flags that tell you you’re in practice mode:

Can’t memorize - Being stuck in an analytical mindset often has the effect of making memorization impossible. When you’re focused exclusively on perfect execution, you’re so busy policing yourself that you can’t even hear the music you’re making or feel what your body is doing to create the sound. If you find you can’t mentally recall how your music is supposed to sound, it’s a sign that you’re overly focused on following your instructions to the letter.

Pauses and stutters - Another sign is a compulsion to repeat a note, a chord, or a passage, or to pause while you find the correct note, rather than risk making an error. When you’re practicing performing, you have to go straight through in tempo. If you can’t let yourself move on to the next part of the music until you’ve gotten each note exactly right, you’re in practice mode.

Cringes - Do you catch yourself saying “sorry” to your teacher when you’re playing through a piece and you make a mistake? Have you ever said it out loud when you’re alone? Or if you don’t say that specific word, maybe you grunt or sigh or make a face when you mess up. If you’re reacting to your own musical errors, you’re focusing on judging yourself. You’re seeing correctness as more important than musicality. There’s a time for that, and it’s when you’re learning, not when you’re performing.

Forgetting the big picture - There’s more to a performance than the notes! The way you look, the way you move, everything you say and do both before the first note and after the last note is part of your performance, too. Practice those extra-musical elements of performance. If you’re not paying attention to your body movements and facial expressions, you’re not practicing performing.

If you’re trying to practice performing and you catch yourself doing any of these red flags, recognize what you’re thinking, then move on. You don’t need to berate yourself for having the wrong mindset - that will actually just make you think about it more. Give the thought some space to play out, then let it go.

Develop your performance mindset

Developing your performance mindset is a personal psychological process. Identify what your ideal performing state of mind is like. Ask your teacher and any other experienced performers you know to give you some guidance in determining what this could be.

A few guidelines: You should be able to hear the music you’re making. You should feel emotionally connected to the music. You should be aware of your body and what it feels like when it’s working to create your performance. You should be present in the moment and devoid of judgment. You should release your fear of mistakes or of other people’s judgments. Exactly what it looks and feels like will be unique to you, and your performance mindset will evolve and expand the more you use it.

Performing is fundamentally a type of communication. You should be noticing and responding to your audience. Sufferers of stage fright are more than familiar with the advice to imagine the audience looking ridiculous or not existing. I think the better attitude is to believe your audience members are rooting for you. It’s true! They want to hear you give a good performance. They intend to enjoy your artistry and overlook any shortcomings your performance may have. By being there, waiting to hear you, they are saying, “I want to hear and appreciate your music!”

If you’re recording or livestreaming and the audience won’t be physically present, all the better! You’re free to imagine your ideal audience hanging on your every note. Believe you’re making music for people who are emphatically loving what you’re doing.

One thing you shouldn’t strive for in your performing mindset, though, is absence of nerves. You will be nervous. You will always be nervous. You’re supposed to be nervous! It’s a sign that you care, that your music is important to you, and that your listeners’ experience is important to you. If you ever reach the point where you nonchalantly walk out onstage and sit there like you’re waiting for a bus, you’ve gone wrong. You might strive for an inner sense of calm and control amid the excitement, and you will probably (but maybe not!) want to resist feeling fear, but don’t try to feel apathetic. Read more about stage fright from The Bulletproof Musician, a fabulous research-based blog for musicians.

Teach yourself how to access your performance mindset

Once you have envisioned your ideal performing mindset, work on achieving it. You don’t have to be making music in order to find this state of mind. Try yoga or mindfulness meditation. Dancing to music you love might help you unlock this expressive mindset, or lip syncing into your hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror. Body awareness is key to influencing your mindset - your brain is part of your body, after all. Using visualizations, developing little performance rituals, or repeating mantras or personal affirmations might help you activate it when you’re ready to perform. If you have a therapist or counselor of any kind, they could help you immensely with discovering and activating your ideal performance mindset.

Practice making music in expression mode.

The last step, and the key to getting truly comfortable performing, is to exercise your performance mode, so that it will be strong enough to support you when you play or sing for a live audience. Every time you practice, spend time “performing” pieces you already know fairly well. Solo improvisation or playing/singing along to a recording is a great performance exercise, too. Your audience is just yourself, or imaginary people, or God. It does not matter if you make mistakes, or if you play or sing well at all. Focus your attention on expressing the musical ideas. Feel the music flowing through you, coming from inside you and going out into the world. Try not even to remember whether you made a mistake.

Once it’s working reliably, strengthen your focus by adding distractions - random noise, a radio playing on the other end of the room, an unfamiliar location, a person listening to you. If you have a performance coming up, wear the outfit you’re planning to wear, or dress up in a wacky or dramatic stage costume that you’d never really wear. Karaoke is also a great way to test-drive your performance persona, because no one at a karaoke place especially cares if your musicianship is on point, but they will notice if you’re an engaging performer and will cheer and applaud accordingly.

You will never be done developing and practicing your expression mode. I’ve listed these steps as four chronological steps, but you’ll be doing all of them simultaneously for as long as you make music.

You’d never perform a piece of music that you only practiced once, or that you’ve never practiced but you’ve heard how it goes. If you try to perform and you’ve never used your expression mode before, you’re trying to perform something you’ve never practiced. Don’t give yourself a hard time if that’s happened to you! It’s perfectly natural.

Your performance mindset is something you have to work on using as much as you work on the technical side of music-making. If the only time you even try to do expression mode is in a real performance, you are never going to get used to it, let alone make it work for you. Incorporate it into your daily music-making, and you’ll finally be able to enjoy communicating with your audience through performing.

Performers, leave a comment about what your ideal performance mindset is like, or how you activate it when you’re about to perform!

Look for a follow-up in a few weeks about how to psych yourself up without psyching yourself out. Sign up for the mailing list if you don’t want to miss it.