You would be hard pressed to find a performer who has never experienced stage fright. Your hands shake, your voice breaks, and you freeze. It is a completely normal reaction to doing something as difficult and personal and playing music in front of others. Even many famous artists never get rid of all of their nerves. Paul McCartney, Barbara Streisand, and Katy Perry have all said that stage fright was something they had to manage throughout their careers.

Wait, you might be thinking, does that mean my stage fright will doom me for the rest of my life? No! The fact that even some of the biggest performers in the world continue to deal with it after decades of performing experience implies that it is just one of many challenges of the craft that can be addressed and overcome.

Look Inward

The first piece of advice to musicians experiencing stage fright is to practice well. That’s important, and we’ll talk about it, but there’s actually something else that it might be better to focus on first: yourself!

Stage fright is an anticipatory anxiety: one is worried that something bad or embarrassing is going to happen. That worry can trigger the classic fight or flight response. It sneaks up on you, and before you realize it, you are overwhelmed.

What you can do to nip that sequence of events in the bud is to get better at noticing when you start to get anxious. What is the order of thoughts in your mind that lead to the anxiety? What does it feel like in your body? Instead of running away from the fear, try to look at it passively and with curiosity.

Don’t expect much from doing this once or twice; just make a habit out of it. Eventually, it can help you get better at noticing anxiety and intervening before it becomes too much to handle.

Relaxation Techniques

So how do you intervene? Everyone is different, so you’ll probably have to experiment with different relaxation techniques. Mindful breathing is a classic one. Breathing is perhaps the only constant in people’s lives that they have some control over, so it serves as a good “ground” to return to in any stressful situation. Some people also find it helpful to keep objects with them, like a lucky rock or a picture of a loved one, to refer to in order to refocus their attention.

Whatever your relaxation technique is, make sure to devote serious time to practicing it. Right before you perform your piece—or a difficult passage—declare an intention to pay attention to your anxiety. Instead of hoping it won’t come up, expect it to, and plan to work with it. Keep an open mind about how you will react, and be ready to be surprised. You might learn something!

Let Go of Perfection

That point about expecting anxiety to come up instead of dreading it is crucial. Stage fright is often rooted in a wish for perfection. Oh my gosh, what if I mess up? Well, treat that as a serious question: What if you do? What’s the worst thing that can happen? You might feel embarrassed, and, sorry to say, maybe someone in the crowd will judge you. That is what it is. On some level, performing requires making the courageous decision to accept such possibilities, and to accept that perfection is impossible, even for the best musicians.

By reframing expectations this way, it is possible to turn down the volume on those screaming what ifs. No matter how much you practice, mistakes are possible, and imperfection is inevitable. If you make a mistake, life will go on. There’s no need to waste your energy trying to prevent the inevitable.

Playing To Vs. Playing With

Another thing you can reframe is your relationship to the audience. Stage fright often involves the worry that one is going to be judged critically by the audience. It is normal and easy to fall into thinking that way, since so much music education is geared toward the achievement of high-stakes execution. Performance is framed as a presentation to the audience for critical appraisal.

Critical evaluation is all well and good, but music is deeper than that. Musicians use sounds, instruments, and their bodies to express deep feelings and build connections between people. Even if you’re the only person on-stage, you are actually making something with the audience, not simply in front of them. If you can make a habit of this framing, audiences can become less scary. Instead of representing a looming threat of disaster, they become an essential ingredient in the success of your performance. That makes it easier to accept whatever comes your way.

How to Practice

Now that we’ve established all those points about the mentality of stage fright, let’s talk about how you can actually practice to prepare for it.

One obvious solution is to practice a lot. Play the piece from start to finish. Play with a metronome, and push your speed, even past what you ultimately plan to play it at. Devote time to especially difficult passages until you are more confident with them.

It can also be helpful to practice performing for smaller audiences. At first, maybe it’s just your teacher at Arabella’s Voice Studio, or a close loved one. Then try a small group of people you trust. Then incorporate people you don’t know as well.

But as we said before, there’s no way to ensure you will never make a mistake, so it is just as important, if not even more important, to learn how to keep going when you make a mistake.

This is one of the hardest things for many musicians to learn. It is common to want to stop after a mistake and get a redo. The problem with that is that, instead of fixing the performance, it just interrupts it. Now everyone knows a mistake has been made, and the flow is disturbed.

Instead of stopping, look for ways to practice continuing no matter what. My first jazz teacher told me, “There are no wrong notes as long as you convince me you meant to play it.” Sure enough, there are countless recordings of jazz greats playing something that sounds off and then following it up with something that makes it seem fine in retrospect. Confidence can be very persuasive to an audience. If you calmly accept whatever happens and work it into the performance, it is easier for them to go along with it.

To practice this musical perseverance, take a difficult passage, and try to improvise a different ending to it. Intentionally play a wrong note and try different ways to respond to it. If you’re reading from sheet music, cover up a measure with a sticky note and fill in the blank. Reduce whatever is missing or messed up down to some essential element, like a target note or a simple rhythm, and build around that.

Remember What’s Important

Performing is hard, even for people who do it for a living. Whenever you give it a shot, celebrate the attempt. When we think about it too much like a test of our worth, we forget that music is a beautiful, miraculous thing, and that we are simply lucky to be alive in a world where we can share it with each other. Stage fright is common and can be quite unpleasant, but the show must always go on, and we should be grateful that it does.