Overcoming The 4 Types Of Performance Stress, with Sarah Niblack

Christopher: Did you know there are four different types of fear response for musicians – and that you probably mostly use just one of them?

Even more interesting, the antidote to each is different. In today’s episode, I’m going to be sharing a clip from Sarah Niblack’s masterclass here at Musical U, where she revealed these four types of fear response, which can help you to quickly learn more effectively how to handle it when it arises.

So in yesterday’s episode, we had our mini-interview with Sarah Niblack of SPARK Practice. I hope you enjoyed that one. And I’m back today to share a little clip from her masterclass she did right after that interview.

The topic was “Intentional Practice as a Performance Superpower”, and I absolutely loved it for a whole host of reasons!

Partly because combining the practicing and the performing is such an important thing, and it’s something I think people don’t talk enough about. But also because Sarah really tackled the emotional and psychological side of things. You know, it’s what we would call Heart in our H4 Model of Complete Musicality.

And again, it’s something that just doesn’t get talked about enough. We think so much about practicing and getting the notes right, and then we step out on stage. And even if we’ve done the kind of practical things to prepare, we probably haven’t actually rehearsed the performance skills it takes to play at the top of our game.

So Sarah did a whole section on becoming mindful of what’s going on emotionally, and specifically in terms of fear and stress.

In the bit I’m about to share with you, she introduces a really powerful way for you to become aware of how you typically respond to performance stress. And that can then be the first step to learning to find the antidote and what you can do in the practice room to really prepare to handle that just in your stride as it arises during the big performance.

A couple of quick notes before we dive in:

The topic was, as I said, “Intentional Practice as a Performance Superpower”. And so there was a light kind of superhero analogy she used along the way. So in a moment, when you hear her refer to us musicians as being “superheroes”, that’s what she’s talking about. How the very act of performing music is a feat of bravery akin to being a superhero!

Also, Sarah couldn’t see the attendees chat while she was screen sharing, so that’s why you’re going to hear me reading out some of the replies from our members who were there with us live for this masterclass.

Cool. Let’s dive in!

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Sarah: Alright. Something to know is that as superheroes, we’re not immune to fear. This is also part of what makes us magical, right?

And so let’s jump into a little bit, and if you have questions about this, please do write them down and let’s talk about it. I love questions. The harder, the better. Everything is on the table, from shadow, to beta-blockers, to how to learn scales. It’s all open bar, okay? That’s why I’m here.

Okay. So as superheroes, we have a lot of amazing power, and part of it is understanding how our fear system works, because that’s what’s going to help protect us, but also something that we can make friends with.

So, think for a second. If your symptoms of stress when you’re getting on stage, or you’re learning something new, or you’re frustrated and it’s not going very well – do they start in your brain or do they start in your body?

Everybody’s different. There are no wrong answers. Go ahead and drop it in the chat.

And please let me know what we’re seeing. Thank you so much.

Christopher: My pleasure, I will be your beautiful assistant today, Sarah!

Sarah: You are beautiful! Thank you so much.

Christopher: So Marcia, Brian, Annette, and Sherry are all saying “body”.

Body tension, hands shaking. Goho and Jim K also adding body. Heavily on body.

Sarah: Heavily on body, that’s cool. There’s also a lot of people who experience symptoms first in the brain that then trigger a physical response. So that’s going to be something like catastrophizing, thinking about something in the future and getting really stressed out about it, already thinking “oh, my gosh, I need this to be over. I don’t even want to do it. I’m just going to cancel it”.

Or some forms of procrastination happen in the brain and then translate into physical symptoms as well.

So are we 100% body?

Christopher: No, I think Paul definitely what you just said resonated with him. He says “that’s me, yeah”.

And I can relate to it personally, I think I’m more of a niggling thought becomes more.

Sarah: Yes, okay.

So this is one of my favorite dichotomies of how we experience stress, because this also empowers us to get our stress antidote that works.

Not every stress antidote works for everybody else.

And you’ll see in a second how this relates to this idea of intentional practice. But we’re setting the stage so that you have the tools that you need to be able to then move into the intentional practice with gusto.

Alright, so the second one, I don’t know why I didn’t change these emojis, but the first one is fight. And then we have flight, freeze and fawn. These are very silly actually.

So fight. And go ahead and put in the chat what you resonate with.

Fight is going to be this motivation to “control the menace”. If you feel threatened, you think if I can control the menace then it won’t hurt anybody. This could be “I have to know exactly what’s going on”. “I have to make sure I know all the ingredients of what I’m eating”. “I need to kind of be the boss of things”.

We can find ourselves showing this like control also by surprise. Sometimes if we’re a little bit afraid and we show up and we just want to like jump in and handle it, that is actually a fight response.

Flight, the base motivation is “if I can outrun or outwork the menace, it’ll leave me alone”. So this means outrun, just get out of the way, totally not be there physically, get off stage, et cetera. Or “outwork” is like “if I practice so much then my teacher won’t be able to criticize me about this”. “If I work so hard, nobody can say anything about it”.

Freeze: if I become “same”, like the slide we saw earlier, “and I don’t exist anymore, and the other person’s or animal’s brain registers it as not being different than the background, then they’ll leave me alone”.

Okay? And remember, each of these has a brain part of it and a body part of it.

So Freeze in the brain is like deer in the headlights. You’re still, your body’s still there, but your brain is gone, okay? And the body part of it could just be like that feeling of like “I don’t know how to play!” You just disappear, okay?

And then the Fawn or Friend, the motivation of that is “if I can appease the menace, if I can make friends with the menace, then it won’t hurt anybody”.

So in the body, this can be very much like kind of being a puppy. Like “I’m gonna go just make friends with it, it’s gonna be great! And you’re so pretty, I like your hair!”

And in the mind it can also be like that, but it can be like losing the pulse of something because you want to play with everybody else. It can be a lot of “do they like me? I want to make sure that they approve of what I’m doing”. You know, we let our external factors really influence more so than the other profiles.

What are we seeing in the chat. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn?

Christopher: So do pop one of those words in whichever you relate most to.

We’ve had some really interesting comments.

Sarah: Yeah?

Christopher: So Juan says his daughter’s anxiety taught him that fighting fear can lead to more fear. Greg shares that staying focused on the situation overrides the fear. Randy says “keep breathing!”

Sarah: Yep.

Christopher: And also “crippling self judgment undermines performance potential”.

Sarah: Yep.

Christopher: Now, Brian, flight. Vicky, fight. Annette, freeze. Paul, freeze. Sherry, freeze, sometimes flight. Marcia, all of them. Steph, fight, then flight. Jim, freeze, followed by flight. Roger, freeze. Docsqueezebox flight. Nicholas, freeze or fawn.

Sarah: Yeah! See how everybody’s different? And this is part of what makes what we do so exciting, that everybody has a different profile, and we actually need all of these different profiles to have a really enriching experience.

It’s not something that we’re used to thinking about. And also, if we go back for a second to think about these symptoms of in the head versus in the body, there are different antidotes that work for each.

This is something that we’re going to be talking about tomorrow in the mindfulness workshop. But just as a little teaser, as an antidote to stress:

If we’re very much in the mind, we need somatic exercises to connect us with the body first, to be able to then make choices about what we want to do. If we’re more in the body, we need to shake out the, like, get out the extra energy to be able to come back to what I call “nervous system neutral” and then be able to make choices.

So even this is a really fundamental difference that helps us in our musical endeavors, but also just outside of that as well.

So think about, you know, what kind of stress antidote really works for you, and then also how that’s different to the people around you. And you might start to see a big difference in like “oh, that person needs to get back into their body. The way that I need to use my stress antidote is going to freak them out! And if they know that, then they’ll be okay with me doing my thing”, and the same for the other people.

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Christopher: What did you think? I hope that you were answering along to the questions there, just like our members who were there with us live!

If you were able to identify your primary fear response, did it spark some thoughts about how you could address that in future and actually practice dealing with it?

Even just becoming aware of whether it’s more head or more body or whether it’s fight, flight, freeze, or fawn that you typically fall into can go a long way to making sure that you’re not kind of blindsided in that performance situation.

And the more you become aware of these things, the more you’re mindful of them as they come up during practice, the more you’ll be able to perform at your best with confidence, with joy, and in that free-flowing way that we all aspire to with every performance.

So I hope you found that as enlightening as I did. Sarah went on to do a terrific workshop after that with our Next Level members, where she went deep into all of this, as well as the whole SPARK Practice approach.

You can learn more about Sarah and SPARK Practice at sparkpractice.com. We will, of course, have that link in the shownotes.

That’s it for this one! I’ll be back next time to get your input on the cover design for the new Musicality book. I can’t wait to share the candidate designs with you, and I really hope you’ll vote and give your feedback to help us select what will be the cover for our forthcoming book.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music!

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