Overcoming performance anxiety with classical guitar: starting slowly

Overcoming Performance Anxiety

This is a major challenge - for me and many of my friends - later-in-life amateur classical guitar players.  We would love to be able to play for friends, for family, maybe at social gatherings ...   Most of us are too nervous to try, and if we did once step out of our comfort zone, the experience was so stressful perhaps we have decided it's not for us:  we will confine ourselves to playing in our living room for our own pleasure.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but apart from hating to be defeated by anything, I feel I've lived long enough to want to give back in some way. No I can't play like a professional musician and never will, but I can play well enough to give others pleasure if I can just stop shaking and play for goodness' sake!

Despite the fact that I have no problem giving public talks, including at national venues, I am a poster child for guitar performance anxiety (and not in a good way).  It took me 2 years before I managed to play a short piece all the way through for my teacher.  I think I have read everything there is to read about overcoming the problem.  I even paid money for a dedicated course involving a lot of visualization - that one I gave up before making it through the first section so I can't comment on whether it would have worked.  I tried beta blockers (once - didn't help), asked my long-suffering guitar teacher to sit still during multiple (like 20) attempts to play (that didn't work either).  I had one disastrous attempt at an 'open mic' where I stopped and started about 6 times in a 2 minute piece and needless to say have not been back since. In fact, telling myself I could do it, meditative breathing, practicing in front of safe people (believe me, there are no 'safe' people!) - none of it worked.

There are lots of theories about why some adult amateur musicians have a crippling problem with performance anxiety. The one that feels right to me is that we are accomplished in our own fields, perhaps even acknowledged experts.   In our adult lives, we are rarely in a situation where we are beginners, being evaluated, corrected, perhaps failing to meet expectations.  We have a confidence in our performance built from experience and a track record of success.  However when playing the guitar, suddenly we are beginners again.  There is a fear of failure: of failing to live up to our own or others' expectations, of being judged and found inadequate...

The solution that is often recommended is just to keep doing it - keep trying to play the open mics until it becomes familiar and less stressful.  It's recommended enough that I'm sure it works for a lot of people.  Not me though - my one disastrous attempt at an open mic now looms large in my memory and merely thinking about it ramps up the fear. However, the concept of getting experience in a low-risk setting and gradually building a track record of success? ... I can see that having potential.  But what is a low-risk setting? Certainly not an open mic where people are sitting watching me play, complete with their expectations of being entertained.  Particularly not at the guitar society where the audience of guitar players know what the music is supposed to sound like and can pinpoint every mistake!  And not in my guitar lesson - because after all, the teacher's job is to point out weaknesses in our playing so we can improve - Let's face it however positive our teachers are, deep in our reptile brains we know exactly what's going on.  So I set myself to thinking where I could start...

I started small. My idea was just to play in a public place - merely in the presence of people who were going about their business.  So I sat on a park bench in our local park and played to myself for half an hour.  Not many people about and no-one paid any attention.  So far so good.  I repeated the process a couple of times with similar results, so figured, yes I could do that - it was just like practicing in a different setting. The problem now was that it was tooooo quiet - there weren't enough people...   While pondering this problem (on a bench where I had been playing) someone I hadn't noticed came up to me and said they worked in a nursing home and would I play for the Alzheimers patients in an informal setting?  She said they liked quiet peaceful music.  In fact they often respond to music when other interventions had failed.  I promised I would think about it.  I pondered it over the next week or so and eventually came to the conclusion that it was about as low a risk setting as I could ask for.   I didn't know anyone there, the patients were not in a position to criticize, and expectations (of me) were not high.  I didn't have that much I could play from memory, but I assumed I could play the same things over.  And the worst that could happen was that I wouldn't be asked back.  So I turned up with my guitar and lots of advice from my guitar teacher - principally "go slowly, REALLY slowly!" and a number of easy pieces that theoretically I could play without making too many mistakes.  It turned out to be in a small recreation room with patients lined up in their wheelchairs, some sleeping, some being attended to by nurses.  At first I was all nerves, but faced with the expectant faces of a few of the old-timers I just kept going -  past the mistakes, restarting when I got lost and making it a goal to keep going because I simply was not going to walk out. In the end I calmed down somewhat and managed to play for about 35 minutes.  Certainly not a command performance or one I could be proud of musically.   When I packed up my guitar I expected the activities person to say "thank you for coming, we'll call you". But surprisingly they asked when I could come back, and a couple of the patients thanked me and said what beautiful music....

That first time it took me several hours for my heart rate to get back to normal so I could process the experience, but eventually I began to get a positive feeling about it.  Yes I had screwed up, multiple times, but I had continued playing and survived.   Several people seemed to like it.  No-one pointed out the mistakes or suggested I would do better next time. In fact the appreciation seemed genuine.  So when I went back the next week, it was with the knowledge that I had done it once, so I could darn well do it again.  Yes I still made lots of mistakes, but the stress level was just a little bit less. By the 5th time, the stress was -almost- manageable and even the mistakes were becoming marginally less frequent (I was playing mostly the same things over so now I had practiced performing them several times). And I was looking forward to seeing some of the patients - would the old gentleman who used to be a violin player participate?  Nowadays he can only raise his hands and bob them up and down in time with the music - in perfect time mind you.  Would the old ladies recognize some of the songs and start to sing along again? - I've taken to interspersing strumming and singing old time songs with the classical music.  I don't have much of a singing voice, but I can hold a tune enough to get them singing.  And the way I feel about it has changed  - I feel like I'm actually contributing something rather than putting myself out there.  In other words it's about them not about me and that makes all the difference.

What I've learned by this experience is that when I can screw up, I can continue playing and it will be OK.   Absolutely no-one there is counting mistakes, and I get another chance to go back next week and try again! I've had lots of experience playing through major distractions - beeping of monitors, alarms going off, someone pushing their walker right in front of me while I'm trying to play, or yelling out questions at me in the middle of pieces.  I've learned that I really have to know some of the music far better than I do currently to be able to continue seamlessly when I get distracted.  Maybe I'll finally do what my guitar teacher says to get things more firmly lodged in my memory! Most importantly I have started down the road to developing a track record of success that I hope will build my confidence so that if someone says "play something for us" I actually say yes...

 (Pablo Picasso) "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone"