Levitate!

My summer vacation this year was spent attending the PianoTexas festival. It was an incredible experience: I felt like I’d stepped through a wardrobe into a fantasy world, assisting lions pursued by witches, with adrenaline pumping and riding the emotional highs and lows from the stress of putting myself out there to perform on a public stage.

Now back to reality, I found time to regroup and reflect on the experience: not just on the musical learnings I took home with me, but also on the mental and emotional impact. 

Following a stressful experience with the Boston competition last summer, where immense pressure and anxiety clouded my mental well being throughout the months of preparation, I acknowledged that I would have benefitted from receiving professional help with strengthening my mental skills for performing. So in the lead up to PianoTexas, as I felt my stress level rising and recognized the emerging pattern of a downward mental spiral, I quickly sought to enlist a sports psychologist for mental skills training.

Mental skills training goes beyond isolated one-off performance tips one sometimes receives. As the word “skill” suggests, developing one’s mental strength also requires deliberate work and effort over a period of growth. As the word “training” suggests, this work involves a deliberate process of planning and preparing personalized strategies for performing to one’s best, and implementing them both in the practice room and during the performance itself.

The first assignment my mental skills coach gave me was to keep a journal. Passe as it may sound, writing down my stray thoughts and pent up emotions was revealing, in a concrete way, of the kind of emotional roller coaster I was going through each day—hyper confidence after a good practice, followed by frustration, self-doubt and defeat after a bad one (in addition to the stress from work and health issues.) Yet, reflecting on my mental state and emotional patterns, written out in words, was what gave me clarity on how to preempt and mitigate the emotional extremes I went through.

Over the course of several sessions with my coach, we dug deep into some of my existing practice habits, preparation processes and performance approaches, to identify specific target areas for growth. “I try to pretend that I’m just at home, but different venues and pianos are sometimes so difficult to get used to and it makes me anxious and flustered,” I said. “What is it about your home environment that you find helpful in quelling your anxiety?” This led to a discussion (and another homework assignment) about identifying specific attentional cues in my home practice environment that will help simulate a feeling of familiarity in an unfamiliar performance situation, and to work on mentally visualizing them at my next performance: is it the look and touch of my piano keys, the shape of my music stand, the placement of my piano in my room, the trees outside my window?

We talked about visualization, attentional cues and mantras—all established concepts in sports psychology. After a period of self-exploration, during which I analyzed my thoughts and mental states during my practicing sessions, I became aware that, beyond being obviously “not nervous” when practicing or doing run through at home, the state of mind I am in is a laser focus on execution and getting it to perfection, but where nobody cares if I messed up and “I can just stop any time I want”. At home, there is no fear of failure, no expectations hanging over my head, no negative emotional load, and most importantly, I did not feel bound to have to play anything at all—this agency freed my mind to actually focus on the music and all the practice I had put in. My new mantra, “I can stop any time”, encapsulates this mindset of freedom, and it became a mechanism for me to transfer these mental states from practice to the performance stage.

Mental skills training taught me how to control my mental state of mind and my emotional (over-)reactions during times of stress. Not just the daily ups and downs of the preparation process, but also during a performance: errors would make me flustered, spiraling into a swell of negative thoughts and consequently making even more errors. But with the mental skills preparation I had put in, I found it easier to stabilize my emotional state regardless of how well or poorly I played, and to view my failures and successes within a bigger framework of growth.

So, did mental skills training help me at PianoTexas? To be honest, it’s hard to tell. Admittedly, I still struggled at times to adjust to a new and unfamiliar environment that affected me in ways that I hadn’t planned for, and there were many instances where I didn’t perform up to my potential. On the other hand, I don’t know either how I would have fared had I not done any such preparation. But what I do know is that it equipped me with “emergency” tools to pull myself out from a state of panic just before my first performance of the festival. And at another performance, a variant of my mantra, “I don’t have to play from memory if I don’t want to,” rolling through my head just moments before I was due to step on stage, helped assuage my anxiety about memory slips: it reframed my mindset from being forced, to having the choice, to do so. Ultimately, I chose to play from memory, as was the original plan, and it went well after all.

Developing my mental strength is a work in progress, and I look forward to continuing to grow from future experiences. Most importantly, this effort to address my mental health challenges helped me find fulfillment in my endeavors, something I did not feel when preparing for last year’s competition. When I started working with my coach, I had expressed that my goal was to enjoy the journey this time around. On that count, I’m pleased to say I was successful.