One of the best things you can do to overcome stage fright will be to know your music inside and out. If you really know your music, it’ll boost your confidence and reduce your stress.
Also, you need to accept that it’ll be okay if you make mistakes.
- If you worry about making mistakes, you’ll put a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself, making your performance anxiety worse.
- This in turn will make it more likely that you’ll make mistakes.
- If you accept that a few mistakes won’t ruin everything, it’ll help you relax and play better.
In fact, if you have a mistake free performance, enjoy it, because they’re rare.
In addition, if you don’t stop, groan, make bad faces, or say “Oops,” it’s unlikely that anyone will notice anyway.
- We have wax cylinder recordings of master musicians from the late 19th century, and they made mistakes that would be unacceptable today.
- Why could they get away with it back then? Because they performed live, and the brain’s short-term memory can only hold seven bits of information before it becomes overwhelmed.
- In a live performance with literally thousands of notes, any mistake you make will likely be forgotten… unless it becomes noticeable.
- Most people come away from a performance with a general sense of having enjoyed it or not – with maybe a few memories of what they saw.
- Therefore, if you make a mistake, you must try to avoid drawing attention to it.
- Also, this means you can make mistakes and still have a solid performance.
- So, it’s not whether you make mistakes, but how you deal with them.
Once you realize that mistakes aren’t that big a deal, you’re well on your way to overcoming your stage fear.