MAKE SOMETHING THAT MATTERS.
Ideas, tools, and performance coaching for doing difficult things well.
Develop the clarity to see what matters, the courage to act when the outcome is uncertain, and the confidence to bring more of what you are capable of into the world.
Ability is only part of the equation.
Ideas, guides, and coaching on performing under pressure — for musicians, performers, and the people who train them. Because knowing how to do something and being able to reach it when it counts are not the same skill.
You can do it in the practice room.
You play the excerpt correctly forty times at home, and then once, at the wrong time, differently.
Your hands are steady until someone opens the door.
Music you have known from memory for months is suddenly not there.
One small error in the first line, and the next page is spent thinking about it.
Your teacher hears one player in lessons. The jury hears someone else.
Afterward, you can describe how it felt more clearly than what you actually played.
None of this means you are underprepared, or that you are simply a nervous person. Performance anxiety is common among trained musicians at every level, and performing under evaluation is a different skill from playing well. Most musicians are never taught it directly.
The gap is trainable.
When performance is being evaluated, attention changes. Movements that have run automatically for years begin to receive conscious supervision, and that supervision disrupts them. Researchers call this explicit monitoring (Beilock & Carr, 2001). At the same time, physical activation rises, and a small error starts to feel like a verdict.
These are documented, predictable responses. They are not a personality trait, and more practice hours alone do not change them. What does help is practicing under conditions that resemble the ones you will perform in, and learning where to put your attention when those conditions arrive.
The goal is not to make anxiety go away. The goal is to make your ability available while anxiety is present.
Written for musicians, performers, and the people who teach them.
Professional and adult musicians
Orchestral auditions, recitals, chamber concerts, solos in services, community orchestra performances. This includes musicians returning to performing after years away and finding it harder than they remember.
Students and pre-professionals
Juries, chair placements, college pre-screens, graduate auditions, competitions. These are the years when ability is ranked most often.
Teachers
Studio teachers, applied faculty, and directors with students who play well in lessons and differently on stage, and who were never given training in how to prepare them for it.
Start with these.
Why Musicians Often Play Worse in Auditions Than in Practice
The practice room and the audition room are different environments, and they ask different things of attention. This piece explains what changes under evaluation and how to prepare for the room you will actually play in.
Propranolol and Performance Anxiety in Musicians
Beta blockers act on the body's response to stress. This piece looks at what the research shows about their use by musicians, and at the parts of performing that remain the performer's to prepare.
Excellence Is a Process. Perfectionism Is an Evaluation.
Serious work depends on high standards and careful evaluation. This piece looks at what happens when that evaluation never switches off, and how separating the making from the judging changes practice.
NORTH · NOISE · NEXT
Confidence varies from one day to the next. A sense of direction holds up better. NORTH · NOISE · NEXT is a three-question framework for finding that direction in the minutes before you perform.
North — What matters here?
Noise — What is pulling at me?
Next — What is the next move?
The purpose of the exercise is orientation. Pressure may still be present, and your attention can keep moving in the direction you chose. This works in the same sense that a compass does not control the weather, but it preserves direction within it.
THE PERSPECTIVE BEHIND BREAKTHROUGH
Twenty-five years on both sides of the audition.
Dr. Elizabeth Rennick, DMA, MSW, is a performance educator, professional oboist, and university music professor. She is the founder of Breakthrough Performance Center, where she writes about performing under pressure, performance anxiety, perfectionism and the nature of creativity for musicians and the teachers who train them.
Doctor of Musical Arts, University of Iowa
Master of Social Work, clinical certificate, University of Kentucky
Former tenured Associate Professor of Oboe, Eastern Kentucky University
Golden Apple Award for teaching, selected by students
Invited performer, International Double Reed Society conferences
Teaching performance-anxiety management for more than twenty years
I went back to graduate school in behavioral health to understand what I was watching.
Ways to work together.
Breakthrough offers performance education and coaching.
EXPLORE
Ideas & Resources
Read, reflect, and discover practical ideas for working with fear, perfectionism, pressure, confidence, creativity, and meaningful action.
WORK TOGETHER
Performance Coaching
Individual online coaching built around a specific upcoming performance or a pattern that keeps repeating. The work focuses on where attention goes under pressure, how you recover after a mistake, what you do in the last minutes before you walk out, and how to trust the preparation you already have. Packages include a six-session option for audition preparation, and you can begin with a free 20-minute consultation.
LEARN TOGETHER
Workshops & Trainings
Class visits, studio workshops, and faculty sessions on preparing musicians to perform under pressure. Offered for music schools, pre-college programs, educator conferences, summer festivals, and youth orchestras.
The abilities you have built are meant to be used. Every performance is an act of making music, and what you make in that moment would not exist in quite the same way without you.