A positive performance mindset is the gateway to becoming totally absorbed in and connected to the music you are performing. You are in your positive performance mindset when you are free from expectations, fear of making mistakes, doubts about correctness of your technique, or other cognitive activities keeping you from fully expressing the feeling and emotion in your music. Although a positive performance mindset is a state of being you attain during performance, it consists of mental performance skills that must be developed in practice.
A positive performance mindset results from effectively managing your thoughts, emotions, and physiology, before and during a performance. The three primary mental performance skills making up your performance mindset are;
1) Courage: directing your will to overcome self-doubts and fears,
2) Trust: letting go of your desire to consciously control correctness
3) Acceptance: perceiving an outcome “as is” without any judgment as to good or bad.
Courage, trust and acceptance may not be the descriptors typically used by musicians when talking about their best performances. More often you will hear words like; calm, focused, relaxed, positive, and prepared. However, these descriptors are often the result of well executed mental performance skills. Although courage and acceptance, in and of themselves, are important mental performance skills, it is your ability to trust during performance what you have trained in practice that is the ultimate performance goal.
If you are like most musicians your mental practice skills are very well developed because this is where you spend the most time. There are three primary mental practice skills: self-instruction, self-monitoring of correctness, and analysis of mistakes. Your mental practice skills are important for developing and refining correct movement patterns, or memorizing a musical score, but are not sufficient for making you a better performer. The problem is any one of these mental skills will get in your way during performance and, if these are the only mental skills you are developing during practice, then you can expect they will be the ones showing up during performance. Your best performances occur when you are not judging, analyzing, or instructing.
