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From:  Greypins@a...
Greypins@a...
Date:  Wed Apr 25, 2001  3:37 am
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Dealing with Anxiety When Performing


In a message dated 4/24/2001 6:05:13 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
dredeman@y... writes:
dredeman@y... writes:

<<
I once talked to a teacher of parachute jumping and he told me, that if you
jump and you see a tree, or a brook, you should not look at it. If you
continue looking at it, you will land exactly in that tree or brook, whereas
if you look at some nice place to land, all will go well. Just another way
of saying that I agree it is very wrong to think about the things that might
go wrong.>>

as some golf instuctor on television once said "the sub-conscious mind
doesn't know the difference between a fear and a request".

<<You also wrote:
'You have to tell yourself how good you are before you sing - you have to
pump yourself up.'

However, I think there also is a deeper psychological reason, why some
people (or maybe all of us, once in a while) may start to think bad about
ourselves, shortly before the moment you have to prove yourself in front of
an audience. If you suffer from the combination of superiority and
inferiority feelings (and many artistic people do), you might often have a
unrealistic image of your own qualities, just to compensate for your hidden
inferiority feelings. As is the case with compensation mechanisms like that,
they might very well fail at the moment you need them most, leaving you with
the other side of your smaller or bigger neurosis, inferiority feelings.>>

in between 'inferior' and 'superior' lies 'mediocre'. what has become
commonplace to someone who has been working on a project, in depth, over a
long period of time, may be a complete revelation to someone to whom the
material is new. to attempt to culminate all that work, over such a long
period of time, into one performance is not possible. what is more likely
is to show whatever aspect is working on that day, to show just one layer of
the onion rather than the whole plant (borrowing from hesse). biting off
more than one can chew is certainly nerve racking. the opposite is doing
something that is unquestionably doable, leaving room for more if things go
well.

mike



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