08 Jun Professional Performance Mentoring
Professional Performance Mentoring
wITH AMY LITTLEWOOD
“Hi everyone! It was really good to meet some of you at the concert in May.
As you know, I’ll be joining you all on the lead up, and (where possible) on concerts days in my capacity as a performance mentor. Alongside my playing work as a violinist, I work with musicians as a mentor to help them prepare for performances, to reach a deeper level of readiness and to help cope with the pressures associated with performing.
There’s a perception sometimes that the work I do only involves helping people with ‘problems’, however, I work with all sorts of people: those who feel that their playing in performance doesn’t match the level that they achieve in their practice, those who want to get that extra 10% out of their potential, and of course those who are indeed affected by performance anxiety.
Practicing your instrument and ensuring you’re able to play your piece of music is only one aspect of preparation. The skills required to perform: to walk out on stage and play, to play under pressure with ‘one chance to get it right’, to play to the best of your potential in front of an audience and to recover effectively from mistakes – this all takes a whole set of skills that are separate to purely practicing the notes of the piece!
So, I’ll be giving a talk on the skills and techniques for performance – that go beyond just note learning as a preparation tool. For those who want a talk on the effects pressure can have on nerves, I’ll hold a separate talk where I’ll look at performance anxiety.
I’ll then be online for some private one-to-one chats where we can talk over any aspects of your performing – I’ll be here to chat about anything you feel could be improved or better supported, or indeed to bounce ideas off – perhaps to enhance how you currently prepare? After talking with a few of you at the concert in May, we identified many areas of preparation that are often neglected, and ways in which better types of preparation can bring better results – whether those are techniques bought in well in advance, just before a concert or indeed mid concert – there are all sorts of things you can do to be better equipped, in order to play to the best of your potential and enjoy playing.
I find that many of these aspects of performing are not taught in one-to-one music lessons, so I feel passionately about bringing these techniques into focus and making sure we comprehensively support ourselves with the right types of preparation….rather like sportspeople do when performing for events – never is it just physical preparation, it’s mental resilience and a deeper type of readiness that plays the biggest part towards ‘on stage success’.
I look forward to meeting more of you over the coming months… and don’t forget… you don’t have to have a ‘problem’ in order to speak to me!!!!”