Introduction:
In preparing for a performance, you may have a whole range of fears, anxieties and negative thoughts associated with the upcoming event. While this is completely normal and is something that everyone experiences, it is important that you deal with these; otherwise, they can undermine your self-confidence.
What we look at here are techniques explicitly focused on managing performance stress.
Firstly we look at “Thought Awareness,” a technique you can use to understand your fears and negative thoughts. We then look at rational thinking and positive thinking as ways of countering the negative thoughts you have identified.
Using the Tool:
Thought Awareness
You are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities or expect failure. Negative thinking can damage confidence, harm performance and paralyse mental skills.
Unfortunately, negative thoughts have a tendency to flit into our consciousness, do their damage and then flit back out again, with their significance having barely been noticed. Since we barely notice these negative thoughts, we do not challenge properly, which means they can be completely incorrect and wrong. This does not stop them doing damage.
Thought awareness is the process by which you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going through your head.
To use the technique, observe your “stream of consciousness” as you think about the upcoming event. Do not suppress any thoughts. Instead, just let them run their course while you make note of them.
As you notice negative thoughts, write them down and then let them go.
Examples of common negative thoughts might be:
- Fear about the quality of your performance or of problems that may interfere with it;
- Worry about how the audience or the press may react to you;
- Worries about how you appear to others, for example, important people;
- A preoccupation with the symptoms of stress;
- Dwelling on the negative consequences of a poor performance;
- Self-criticism over less than perfect rehearsal and practice, or
- Feelings of inadequacy.
Thought awareness is the first step in the process of eliminating negative thoughts: You cannot counter thoughts that you do not know you think.
Rational Thinking
The next step in dealing with negative thinking is to challenge the negative thoughts that you wrote down using the Thought Awareness technique.
Look at every thought you wrote down and rationally challenge it. Ask yourself whether the thought is reasonable. Does it stand up to fair scrutiny? What evidence is there for and against the thought? Would your friends or mentors agree with the thought or disagree with it?
Looking at some of examples, the following challenges could be made to some of these common negative thoughts:
- Quality of performance: Have you trained yourself as well as you reasonably should have? Have you gathered the information you need and prepared properly for the event? Have you conducted a reasonable number of rehearsals? If so, you've done as much as you can to give a good performance.
- Problems of distraction and issues outside your control: Have you conducted appropriate contingency planning and created a performance plan? Have you thought about how you will manage all likely contingencies and prepared a solution? If so, you will be well prepared to handle potential problems.
- Worry about other people’s reaction: If you perform the best you can, then you should be completely satisfied. If you give a good performance, fair people are likely to respond well. If people are not fair, then this is something outside your control, and the best thing to do is to ignore and rise above any unfair comments.
- Problems during practice: If some of your practice was less than perfect, then remind yourself that the purpose of practice is to identify problems so that they will not be repeated during the performance. Similarly, ask yourself whether it is reasonable to expect perfect performance at all times. All that is important is that you perform well when you need to.
