Season 1: Episode 1: Dr. Jon Skidmore, Psychologist & Performance Coach

Welcome to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, Eric Hunter, and Clara Chung. Thanks for joining to the very first episode of our podcast. It's a show where three of us invite a guest speaker each month who is in the fields of piano pedagogy, performing arts, recording, music technology, and the wellness of piano studios, as well as the mental health of students, parents, and teachers.

We're very excited about this opportunity to explore a variety of piano-related topics and share them with you. We already have several exciting guest speakers lined up for the coming months.

We can't wait to learn from each guest and discuss the topic with them on this platform. If you want to find out more about who we are, what we do, and why we started the podcast, please watch our introductory video on our YouTube channel or click on the link listed below.

Our first guest is Dr. John Skidmore, who is a psychologist, performance coach, musician, teacher, and author of Conquer Anxiety. He's going to talk to us about his coaching program, the 5 Stages of Peak Performance. So please join me in welcoming Dr. John Skidmore. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you, thank you very much. It's really just a pleasure and a privilege to be here, and I'm grateful I have a chance to talk about one of my favorite things, and that's really about how we can become better performers. And, you know, it's so exciting to see you as music teachers taking this topic on Oftentimes I felt that in the quest for the perfectionism, the perfection that we often find in the performing arts, the understanding of health and mental health is often neglected. And so I really appreciate your commitment to that, and I'm grateful to be here today.

Oh, thank you so much. Actually, I had a student who was dealing with this performance anxiety due to his past performance at this piano competition, and I was desperate because I wanted to help him. But I was not being prepared to— I was not prepared to help him at all. So I went on Google search and I happened to come across this article, Mastering Their Inner Game: 3 Mind Coaches on Managing Performance Anxiety by Ali Snow. And then she was talking about 3 different performance coaches and their methods, and one of them was yours. And so I Googled your name actually, and I found your website, and I purchased your book, Conquer Anxiety. And then it was just a mind-blowing thing to read, and I quickly wanted to share the information with my colleagues, Eric and Clara. And how do you feel about the book?

Oh, we love it.

Oh, it's great.

Thank you.

Yeah, it's just a very practical approach and very contemporary as well, so we just fell in love. So thank you so much. And so could you introduce yourself to the audience as well as us, what you do, what is your background in terms of your degree and career?

Certainly. I grew up in a musical family like most of us have and was grateful for that. And so I got to enjoy piano lessons and trumpet lessons and voice lessons and participate in a lots of different musical programs through my growing up years. My mom actually had a master's in fine arts, and so music was a big part of our family. And, but no one ever really taught me how to perform. I had a lot of great experiences. I had a vocal scholarship as I got a bachelor's degree in psychology and performed in lots of different groups. But it wasn't until I was working on a master's degree in counseling, and I was also singing with the premier performing choir at Brigham Young University, And it was like, whoa, the stuff I'm learning over here in this counseling program was what I wished I would have understood and known my entire life as a performer. One of the things I love to do is help young performers learn and develop the skills of performing. I wasn't taught that. I was simply told to take a deep breath, practice a lot, just keep doing it, keep trying it, just keep doing it, you'll get better at it. And don't be nervous, don't worry about it, you have nothing to be afraid of. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

That's right. Yeah.

And, um, so as I continue to develop my understanding of performance, optimal psychology, sports psychology, these kinds of things, more and more interest and intrigue developed in how can I really help people bring their best. I mean, as a performing artist, We know how much time we spent perfecting and practicing and working and working and working to get this right. And there's nothing more frustrating than being able to go out there and we're hoping it's going to show up good and turn out great and it doesn't. Now, if the performance is actually based in poor preparation, that's just the easiest fix. You just got to practice it. You'll get it. But those aren't the frustrating ones. The frustrating ones are the ones where we prepared this, we know this, this is a pressure situation, this is an important situation. And we don't do what we have prepared, we haven't, we just, it doesn't show up. We get distracted, we get anxious, we get worried, and suddenly we're not in the flow of things, and oh, that is so frustrating. So as I finished my doctoral degree in clinical psychology, I actually did my dissertation on the experience of peak performance with musicians. And so really got into this quite deeply and found a lot of the key factors of what it really takes to create a peak performance. And there's no question about it, it takes preparation. You've got to have a skill to present, you've got to have something to give. But peak performance is really about the mindset. It's really about putting yourself mentally in a place where you can freely and comfortably and confidently share your gift. And we're not taught very often how to do that. Now, my next step really when I finished my degree was to develop a class. I've been teaching a class on the psychology of music performance for almost 30 years and I've had a chance to work with thousands of performers and to really refine and develop my approach to performing. And what's so exciting about this is I think it really simplifies performing. See, what I really found as I coach performers and I've brought the psychological tools and skills that I've developed as a clinical psychologist— I am a I'm a licensed psychologist. I practice in Orem, Utah. I specialize with anxiety disorders. But as I brought all these skills and tools from the psychology world with my experience as a musician and in my teaching role, I've been able to develop and synthesize it into a 5-stage process. And I want to emphasize the word process. See, it's really natural for our young performers to look at a performance as a good event or a bad event, a winning kind of thing, a losing kind of thing. And the younger the performer is, and even sometimes older performers, winning and losing often turns into, "I'm a winner, I'm a loser." And suddenly that's where a lot of our anxiety starts to come from. But as we start to look at this idea of performance as a process versus an event, we've got to look at these stages. And a simple way to define these 5 stages is this: first, we start with a vision or goal. We want to perform something. We have an intention here. But not only do we create this vision or goal, we develop an attitude, a mindset to support every part of this goal. See, we want that mindset to be the foundation of the goal. You've seen performers where it's like underneath it all is, I hope I do really, really well and I am scared to death of screwing up. I am scared to death of just having it not turn out the way it's supposed to. That's at the foundation of their performance. Rather than, okay, I want to design a mindset. I want to be able to say, I want to step in there with confidence, with creativity, with expression, inspiration, power, boldness, and I want to bring that to every part of this process. So that's really what I call Stage 1. You have your vision and goal, you understand your personal commitment to why you're doing this, and you're designing your mindset. So there was a student who approached me about the stress and anxiety she was having with her senior recite. She told me this was something she felt like she was not prepared for, and she was just not practicing or getting herself ready for this, and consequently there was a lot of anxiety. Well, as I asked her these questions that relate to Stage 1— what are you doing, why are you doing this, what's your mindset— it was pretty clear. She was doing this because they were making her, and she was hating this. And that was reflected in everything she was doing regarding her preparation. Well, it didn't take much of a conversation with her for her to realize that she was the one that chose to get a degree in music, and she had heard about this thing called a senior recital. She knew what it was. And why was she doing this? She loved to teach. She loved to see students grow and progress and express themselves musically. This was something that was very exciting to her. At that moment, her energy shifted and she realized, "Oh, this is my choice. I'm excited about this. I can let this be part of that process." So she shifted to Stage 1 in a very powerful way, and her senior recital changed in that moment. She had been preparing for this for a long time. Now this is stage 2. What do we do to prepare musically? What she was not doing was preparing her mindset. She was letting the habit and history, she was letting bad habits just take over mentally, and that was such a, such a challenge for her. And so it was exciting to have her in this class, in this program, and she was learning some very specific skills mindset skills to support her musical skill set that she was developing. And that became very exciting for her. Now, Stage 2 is really about the mindset and the skill set. There's very specific things that we do as performers. Stage fright actually gets like all the attention, like that's the big issue, but really it's more complicated than that. It's more about attention, focus, and control, attitude management, goals and objectives. There's lots of things that's tied into the skill set and the mindset together. And when we start to combine these two, we really have a very powerful experience. I just recently, I had a chance to put out there on a blog, I asked a group of voice teachers what their favorite thing to help students deal with performance anxiety was. And, you know, I heard a response back from somebody, which is such a typical traditional response. Well, I have them practice a lot, then I find lots of places for them to perform before they're supposed to perform, and then they perform fine. Well, again, this equation was lacking. What are the mental skills? Where's the visualization? Where's the relaxation skills? Where are the skills to shift a negative attitude into a positive one? See, they're still missing in that equation. And that's— I would just call that the traditional equation. Just practice a lot and just practice a lot and just keep doing it. And that does work for a fair number of performing artists. It really does. I also see a lot that this doesn't work for, and that's where, that's where, uh, they really do struggle. So if we go from stage 1 about the mindset and designing it into Stage 2, where we're practicing skill set stuff, we're practicing mindset stuff. We have a whole new toolbox. One of my favorite things to shift from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is a great phrase: my preparation is complete. It's a declaration. See, when you declare that preparation complete, you've come to that point where you're not going to practice anymore. You're not going to try to adjust, modify anything anymore. My preparation is complete. See, that's the start of Stage 3, which is all about, this is what I'm going to do to get myself ready to perform. This is what I'm going to do to get myself to be in that place emotionally and musically to share the gift that I've created, that I'm ready to share. Well, there's a whole set of skills we can bring into Stage 3, and most of those are about maintaining an appropriate mind— mindset. Dealing with anxiety, organizing yourself effectively, and just staying in that spot of mental readiness. Well, the performance— there comes a point in time where we start, we actually do this thing we've been preparing. And, you know, when you think of the disproportionate number of hours we spend practicing when compared to actually performing, and oh wow, way out of balance. But yet we need to be able to get out there and really get ourselves in this space where we can share what we've got developed. The characteristics of a peak performance— I thought this was fascinating as I got into this with my dissertation— they match the characteristics of a child at play in a sandbox. I'm here to play. I'm here to enjoy. I'm here to share. I'm here to express. And what a great place that is. Now, the performance comes and goes very quickly. And typically the vast majority of what we prepared for, what we've wanted, shows up and we're excited about that. There might be some things that don't go so well. Um, but typically we do pretty well. Now, there are surprises. And I think it's interesting that most of the worst performance ever stories that I hear about are often associated with a surprise of some sort. Something unexpected, something unpredictable, something, you know, they missed their entrance or this happened or that happened and I reacted poorly to it or didn't know how to react to it. And so to really start to recognize, we want to be able to get into that flow state, we want to be able to step into that and just share freely what we have. There's a lot of things we can do to help ourselves do that. But again, these are things we're rarely taught. Well, when the performance is over, we have stage 5. And stage 5 is so important. Stage 5 has the biggest impact on our next performance. Because what we do, what we say, what we experience post-performance is what we remember. And The post-performance bashing is just way too common for performing artists. They get so upset about little mistakes here or little problems there, and then they start to take it very personally. Um, I've talked to too many performing artists who have altogether quit performing because of basically what they did to themselves post-performance. Now, the exciting thing about these 5 stages is what they do. And these are outlined in much more detail in my book, "Conquer Anxiety: How to Overcome," or "How to Optimize Overcoming Anxiety and Optimize Your Performance." It shifts the performance from the midbrain, is this going to be a good or bad thing, and brings it to the frontal cortex where you can say, this is what worked and this is what didn't. And this is what I want to do next time. And this is what I learned from this. And this is all part of the experience of being a performer. And as we do that, then we're in a position to move forward. That midbrain is famous for the phrase "fight or flight." And it's certainly no fun to fight during a performance. And if we're taking flight and avoiding performing, we're just missing out, and so are all those that we could impact. And so by bringing the 5 stages into the conversation as a student, as a teacher, I like to refer to these as the 3 promises of the 5 stages. First and foremost, your eagerness, your interest, your willingness, your excitement about performing is going to be there. You're going to want to be doing this. This is fun. This is enjoyable. You're ready to do this. Secondly, as you're in that kind of mindset and that kind of energy, your quality goes up. You're just performing better. You're doing more of what you want to do out there. And the third element that is just the third promise really is you're enjoying the experience. I have talked to too many performers who have lost the joy in sharing this gift. I had a student once that described performing as the cruelest form of torture. And she meant that. She was not being sarcastic. She was not joking. This was now a torturous experience to her. And it was very exciting for her to announce, I enjoyed my masterclass last week. I actually had fun doing this. And that was something that she had lost. And I've talked to others that have talked about, oh yeah, thanks for reminding me that performing is supposed to be fun. We're supposed to be able to step out there and enjoy this experience along with our audience rather than get caught in the fear or the worry about it being perfect or right, or is someone going to be happy or disappointed. So the Five Stages as a tool demystifies performing. One of the things you can do literally is post-performance step back and say, okay, what did my experience in Stage 1 look like? How did that work? Most of the time we don't design a mindset to start a performance process or experience. We just expect it to be good and we know we're going to work hard, we're going to practice a lot. But to talk about being creative, to talk about being full of joy or excited, confident, expressive, free, we don't design that at the beginning. Well, we can go into stage 2 and say, okay, well, what worked about my physical preparation, my musical preparation, What worked about my mental preparation? What didn't? Um, I can't tell you how many times I talked to somebody and said, well, have you practiced the breathing exercises? Oh, I forgot about those. Well, did you do any kind of visualization? No, I, I didn't do that. So again, to look at the different places where these skills come into play. Did you declare your preparation complete? No, I went from the practice room right to the stage. So it's great to be able to look at where these fit. When you stepped out there on— in your performance, were you able to be there emotionally or mentally? Were you in that flow, or were you, you caught with distractions, with anxiety, with whatever's going on? Okay, what did you do post-performance? Did you do a what worked, what didn't, what am I doing next time? Or did you do the bashing thing? And that's just way too prevalent. And so looking at these 5 stages as tools to simply elevate where you're at in your performing and to elevate your confidence, to elevate your willingness, is really what they do. And it's really quite exciting to practice this. I have a little workbook called Teaching the 5 Stages to Young Performing Artists. And in this workbook, I've got some of the activities that I like to use because these activities are so important. We rarely practice performing, and we expect a lot of performances. We kind of gear up for the big performance, but to, to just practice performing. And one of my favorite exercises to help students practice performing is singing simple songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. But it's not about how they sing the song, it's about the attitude they bring to the experience. And especially in small groups, you can organize all kinds of things to— I'm thinking of pianists, you guys are pianists. So let's say that you had 3 or 4 pianists in a room. Well, if you each had one of them take a different type of weather, thunder, rain, wind, lightning, and say, okay, how would you depict this on the piano? How would you play this on the piano? Well, they can do this. Then you start to have them become an ensemble doing this and they get to play together. Anyway, something like that is, almost difficult because it's like, well, what's the right way to do this? They could do Twinkle Twinkle Little Star because they know how to do that. There's a right way to do that. But to do something like a storm, they have to like commit to this and just play with this. So I have lots of different activities and exciting little exercises that students can do, that teachers can do in groups or individually that really are a lot of fun. One of my favorites is also having people sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in gibberish. Like, there's not a right way to do that, and so you have to basically set yourself up to do it. Like, I'm going to be competent in doing this. Um, I was doing a workshop with a group of piano teachers one time, and I watched this— I wish I had this on a video because it would have been so beautiful. But I just simply said, you know, I bet there's somebody here in this room that could play my favorite song, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Well, there are 60 teachers in this room, and this wave of anxiety just like hit all of them. It's like, I'm not prepared. Well, somebody finally put their hand in the air, and what was so interesting is I said— she played just a delightful, simple rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And I asked her a question, "Could you elevate that? Could you elevate that?" We did that 3 or 4 times, and she went from a simple rendition to a very complex rendition, but it just got more and more amazing. And then something interesting happened. She got self-conscious. Like, she, you know, she was like, "Oh, I can't play it that consistent, amazing all the way through." She got nervous about it, and that's where it ended. But it was just really a simple exercise of saying, okay, just do this simply, add something to it, add something to it, add something to it. It's just another way of, can you be more expressive with it? So there's so many different things we can do to help teach performing. And as we bring the, uh, whatever it is we're doing back into the 5 stages, it really just makes a very simple yet profound difference.

This is not just performing arts or like musicians, but I think your method can also be applied to, let's say, students who are preparing for exams or speech or job interview, maybe eventually down the road.

Do you think?

Oh, absolutely. It's always interesting to watch students in my class come back in and say I used this to take my— to prepare myself for my chemistry test. I did this for my internship application and my internship interview, and it was really helpful. You see, it's really about life as a performance, and there's so many different types of performances we have, whether it's in the role of as a piano teacher or as a father, as a mother, as a, you know, family member, as a community member. You know, we all have many different levels of We all have gifts and talents that we'd like to share, and to use this as a process to help us improve and to strengthen what we're sharing is a, is a great thing to do. And one thing I really get excited about is when I can see a 12-year-old using these 5 stages to give a presentation in class as well as a piano recital, and they now have some tools they can do to manage things. It just is— it opens doors. It opens lots of doors.

Thank you, Dr. Skidmore, so much for being with us. I, like I said earlier, I read your book and I just think it's full of so much immensely useful practical information and really fills a gap that performing musicians have been needing for a long time. Also, I think all of us could really relate to what you were describing that so many of these musicians and performers that you've worked with have experienced. I wanted to ask you, as practicing psychologist, how do you define anxiety in general and what is specifically unique about performance anxiety?

Anxiety in general is a natural response. As we go back into the history of humankind and our brain and surviving, this mechanism has really become vital to ensure our survival. So the natural state of the body is at rest, is at peace, until activated. Well, that stress response is activated, and it's really designed for the occasional rattlesnake encounter. There's a danger. It's a clear and present danger. We know this is dangerous. We take immediate action. A flood of super juice neurochemicals go from head to toe. We are tensed up. We're ready to fight. We're ready to run. We bolt away. We're now safe. And then we relax and we go on enjoying life. Well, so the first distinction I'd make between anxiety and performance anxiety is, first off, the sense of physiological activation is virtually the same. The same flood of neurochemicals, the same increase in tension, the same shifts in attention focus. All this stuff is occurring. It's the same response as if it's an actual danger, except it's not. Now, our midbrain— and that's where our anxiety comes from— is fully developed by the time a child is 2 years old. And so it's learning very quickly what is pleasurable and what is painful. And when people start to associate an audition, a mistake, a disappointment, frustration, even frustration in learning something and not having mastered it, but yet now they're angry or they're scared or they're worried about that. See, it can activate this stress response as well. So one of the big differences is if you encounter the rattlesnake, all the energy goes into getting yourself away from that and you're now safe. So you relax. But if you have a senior recital coming up and it's 3 months away, and every time you think about it, and every time you're reacting to it, and you go back to that lesson and it doesn't move the way you want it to, and it's like, oh, I'm getting worried. See, this is just compounding the stress. And so performance anxiety was really based in fear. Not danger. A very important distinction to make. An audition, a recital, a master class, Carnegie Hall, it's not a dangerous place. It's not a dangerous experience. But yet we're reacting to it as if it is. And so it makes it actually harder to deal with the anxiety of it because you just don't run away from it clearly. Unless people are actually stopping the performance experience, which is a lot of people have done that.

And then they're out of the situation.

Then they're out of the situation and they're fine until they get put back into it.

Right, right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You brought up the midbrain. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the different parts of the brain and how they're impacted by anxiety, because I found that very interesting.

You know, recognizing that our brain is impacted by anxiety is just really, really important. With the technology we have these days, we can actually see what happens when the brain is triggered or activated. That's the word I like to use. We are now activated. And you could say that once we're activated, the midbrain takes over. And we can actually see where the logical processing centers that are up here and the decision-making centers and the memory centers and those places where we've learned so many skills, motor skills, they're not as important because the midbrain says, "I know what I have to do to survive, and I'm going to go do that right now." Fight or flight. See, when someone says, "I sat down and my mind went blank," what they're really saying or describing is, "I got activated. My midbrain took over, and I'm now disconnected from the memories, from information that I would use to play the piano," and I'm accessing all my information about surviving. And yes, the mind can go blank. It's literally— it's almost like it just disconnects. And it's not like they forgot that concerto. It's still in their brain somewhere. It's just not connected to it.

Yeah.

And so recognizing that we have our analyzer— this is how I like to simplify the brain. We have our analyzer brain, we've got our decider brain, we've got our motor cortex part of the brain where all those fingerings and all the stuff that we learned to play the piano with, they're stored up here. We have our memory, what tells us how to direct all that. And then we have that fight or flight center of the brain. And they really do all work together. But what we want to be able to do is have the brain work together to support a great performance rather than to create interference that starts to get in the way of a great performance. Performance.

Yeah, totally. One of the most interesting things to me in this section of the book was when you mention how when the midbrain takes over, it actually cuts off access to the memory portion of the brain, right? Is that right? So, and this is why memory slips happen. You just, you actually can't access it.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's just not there. So there is an actual physiological reason for that. That's just very kind of cause and effect. So what's the single biggest piece of advice you would give to people struggling with anxiety?

First off, you can conquer anxiety. Secondly, if anxiety is conquering you, your world is going to get smaller. Your ability to engage, your willingness to go out there and do things, it gets smaller. And so again, when we face a fear, our world gets bigger. When we run from a fear, our world gets smaller. And so the biggest challenge is, is don't wait. Start working now. If you're running away from things or you're avoiding things, getting anxious about things, let's learn how to conquer that. Because if you don't, it becomes bigger than you. And suddenly, oh no, I can't go there, that's just too hard. Oh, I can't go there, that's too scary. And again, we're dealing with fears, not dangers. And so fears are part of our imagination, they're part of a fantasy we're creating, and they just get bigger and bigger. That monster gets uglier and meaner and scarier, and it's like, whoa, that's just gonna like— whoa, that's just too scary, I can't go there. But as that gets scarier in our fantasy, it's accompanied with more intense stronger physiological reactions that make it seem all the more real. And it is real. Anxiety is very real. It can be debilitating. It is so frustrating sometimes. But there really are so many tools and skills that are available to start to— okay, I can conquer this piece. I can move through this. I'm going to turn this into a fantasy and not a danger, and I'm going to deal with this fantasy, and I'm going to break out of this fear and move forward and through it. So it's really about our worlds get smaller or our world gets bigger. And it's all about how we manage our anxiety.

Yeah, I think I want to mention at this point that distinction between fear and danger is so critical. It reminded me of— I have a 5-year-old son right now who has difficulty sleeping at night. Because of these perceived dangers that don't exist, right? He's paralyzed by his fear, but he's 5, you know, and we're trying to help him deal with it, and hopefully he will eventually grow out of that. But as adults, we can be paralyzed by these same types of fears that will really hold us back as we go through life if we don't develop the tools to deal with them and work through it the way I hope that he will. So thank you so much, Dr. Skidmore. I'm going to turn the interview over to Clara now at this point.

Great, thank you so much, Dr. Skidmore and Eric. Yeah, it was great. You know, as a performer since I was 3 years old, and I always have this ongoing interest in psychology, you know, I was sort of a, what they would say, natural performer, but then, you know, at some point down the road I have developed some anxiety and I came out of it and now I teach my students. So for you, as you are a psychologist and a performer, performing, performance coach, and I know you're also a singer and you help writing your book, do you ever experience any anxiety yourself?

Absolutely. I have a midbrain. I have this amygdalates in my brain I actually have a question on my final exam. You can train the stress response out of you. True or false? The answer is false. Once that's been programmed, once that has been trained to react to certain things, you have to really, really work with that. You have to be aware of it. So yes, do I experience anxiety? Yes. But do I have tools and skills to manage it? Yes, I do. And so One of the things that I'm really, really tuned into is what happens when you want to run away. See, avoiding things can become our favorite, whether we know it or not, strategy to deal with anxiety.

Sure.

So yes, anxiety is a part of life, but what's more exciting than things, you know, what's more important is to recognize once there is that anxiety there, it's a first response. And I like to just talk about how our midbrain will give us a first response Now, if we're not in danger, this is a fantasy. This is not to be trusted. And, you know, we have to move through that or that anxiety gets bigger. And so, yeah, anxiety is part of life. It happens to all of us. And it's one of the most powerful things to be able to say, okay, I can break through this now. I can go do this. There was a point in time, for example, I live in Utah. I'm hiking around the mountains and my kids got a little too close to the edge of a cliff and I was very clear to push them, you know, get them away from that. We want to be safe. Well, about 10 years later, after we'd been trained, we bought equipment, we had rappelling gear, all of us were going over that edge. We were going over that cliff and we were calling it fun. But we had ropes and harnesses and that we knew what we were doing. We had the equipment. See, that's the big difference right there, is having the equipment that can help us turn something that was scary and dangerous, so we thought— now, cliff has an element of danger to it, something to be avoided— is just something that we can enjoy. And so, yeah, it's part of life.

Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much. It's really amazing sometimes when you teach younger students, you know, you teach them from the very beginning that, you know, fear is just part of life and they get used to it sometimes. But how do you help a student when you realize that, you know, if they have a lot of anxiety and it's coming from, you know, maybe pressure from their parents?

What would you do?

You know, this is where you as a teacher have a really amazing opportunity. Because you're helping your students work with the piano and work with what they're learning in a safe environment. You're creating a whole different level of safety. So really one of your first concerns is what you can do to create your piano studio is just the safest place to play with the piano, play with the piano, and to play with the learning of the piano. So that would really— the first suggestion I'd make is make that an intention. Make that just a general rule of your studio. This is a no bad zone and no shame zone and no horrible zone. This is a learning, playful, creative zone. Uh, secondly, um, you do have a chance to help your students recognize that some of the things we learn from our families may not always be the most accurate and correct things. And so again, you're giving them another example of how things can be. True. One thing you also have to recognize as a teacher is that your student is bringing with them a set of beliefs and experiences that really do come from their parents. And so every once in a while you might want to think about reminding them, hey, look, I'm not your mom, I'm not your dad. See, it's true. We're here to learn and play and figure this out and enjoy this. And right now your midbrain's activated and you're the piano teacher, you're not the family therapist. You get to say, let's just focus on calming down that midbrain right now.

Yep.

And let's get back to the piano and see if we can have some fun with this. I mean, the one thing I appreciate about piano teachers, musicians in general, is just how creative you have to be to to work with each student. I mean, you have to really connect with them. You have to be in their world. You have to do everything you know to do, and you do everything you know how to do. We're just talking about adding to your toolbox right now. And so just creating that safe environment is probably the most important thing you can do, as well as teach tools and skills that they can use in any place or setting. And then also you'll have a chance to work with the teacher— or work with the parents. That's one of my favorite things to do is to actually do workshops for parents to help them create a more productive perspective of their developing student and to make sure that they can create a safe place for that as well. And most parents do. They try really hard to do that. And they're so committed and so encouraging. And so, you know, just that sense of safety to learn, to grow, to play, to enjoy something. It's not dangerous, you know. So the recital didn't go the way you wanted it to. This is to learn from. This isn't to like get so bent out of shape. But sometimes we do that. And so you have to deal with that too.

That is true. Yeah, that's a great answer. Thank you so much. And Yeah, and sometimes I just think about, you know, these children, a lot of my students that start with me very young and they go through half of their life with me, you know, they go into high school or— and life sometimes gets a little stressful, as you know, you know, living in New York City, having many activities. Sometimes, you know, they are in sports and chess and all that. And, you know, there has been times I— most of them do quite well on stage, but once in a while a certain point, and that also happened to me, it just come from nowhere and the anxiety will start. What do you think the number one fear that people actually normally have and why do you think that's happening?

At some point, I think in general, the number one fear is that somehow we're not going to be adequate enough, that we're not going to be good enough, we're not going to be competent enough, we're not going to be proficient enough, and sometimes that's tied to very specific consequences. Um, you know, as much as we'd like to say the performing arts is a beautiful thing and it's a great thing, and it is, it absolutely is, and we know that students who really benefit from the performing arts, um, the benefits are lifelong and they're, they're wonderful. But there have been unfortunate situations, whether from parents or peers or sometimes teachers, where those negative imprints are left. My daughter got a comment from a junior high choir teacher, and she, she sings great, but she still thinks she doesn't sing very well, you know. And so we have to be careful and Sometimes we just have to make apologies and just acknowledge that what we said was either the wrong thing or it was misinterpreted. But it really is about recognizing that we want to do things right and we want to be accepted in what we're doing and we want to be able to be competent, but we're also learning. Teacher really emphasizes another key point I like to talk about, is when we can create a perspective like in your studio that The world is about discovery. It's about mastery. It's about learning to create a positive way to relate to what's going on. Eric mentioned his 5-year-old. You know, you talk about the world of a 5-year-old, there's so much to discover. It's, you know, it's so obvious. And they're in the process of mastering all these things. And we want to create an environment and a context that says, let's learn and grow with this. Let's relate to this in a positive way. And so we have to create an environment too that when our students have negative experiences, and if they're going to pursue performing, they will have negative performing— performance experiences. We want to be able to teach them that we can relate to these difficult negative experiences in a discovery context, in a mastery context, in a positive forward-moving context. Context. Now our midbrain says this is all bad, run away, fight or flight, this is horrible and terrible. This is why those 5 stages can be so valuable because we can start to create a context that even through difficult experiences we can move forward through them. And again, that's one of the atmospheres and one of the contexts of your studio that you work to create, and I know that you do that, you want to create that for your students, and it really is a wonderful thing when it can, uh, support them with their challenges. And then you just have to clean it up. I mean, it's, it's like, you know, that negative performance, this is where the 5 stages can really come into play again. Because whether it's anxiety or anxiety to do poorly— okay, I messed this up, now I'm anxious, now I'm more anxious, I'm messing things up more— it can become a really just an avalanche of disaster kinds of things. But when you go back to the 5 stages, you can identify Was the breakdown caused by, you know, Stage 1, 2, or 3? For example, I had a student, um, talk about how she did her debriefing and she, she thought she was so ready for this recite or this audition and she didn't do very well. She said, let's go to Stage 1, and she explained her Stage 1. It was like, oh, rock solid, that's, that's great. Stage 2, man, she did everything I would have suggested that she do. She starts talking about Stage 3. And then she starts talking about being in front of the orchestra director's office, in front of 11 other violin players. And each one of them could go in, and as they went in, could hear what the other person was playing.

Yep.

Totally psyched herself out right there. She listened to 5 other people play, and she went into this, I'm not as good as they are. I'm not as good as they are. I'm not as good as they are. I'm not ready. What if this? What if this? And boy, it showed up. And we identified right there that she had a shift of attention focus. She didn't manage her attention focus or her anxiety, and she didn't know how to manage that difficult situation pre-performance. You know, in an ideal setting, if that were to occur again— and we talked about it— she'd had a friend sit there in line to let her know when her turn was. She'd be down the hall, around the corner, with, you know, listening to whatever she wanted to listen to, but she wouldn't be listening to other violin players playing the same piece that she was going to be playing. And so that became a learning experience, which is really one of the great hallmarks of an amazing teacher, is that whatever they experience, we want to capitalize on. We want to help them learn from this and use this to move forward. It's the difference between having an experience turn into a roadblock versus a stepping stone. And we want to create stepping stones, but there'll be things we will stumble on. We just want to be able to step over that and get past it rather than turn it into a roadblock.

That's amazing. Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, it actually brings back a lot of memory from childhood or, you know, early adolescence. And I had this vivid memory of my first onstage anxiety. You know, I just I guess, you know, when I was younger, I never thought of that. And I was, you know, not the most professionally trained in the beginning being in that environment in China, but then I just never got scared until I got into the conservatory when I was 12 or 13. I had this concert where all the pianists are lined up, you know, next to each other, and, you know, we're kind of keeping score for each other. And that was the very first time, you know, I really experience. Like, I have no idea where it came from. So that, and then my students, I try to do completely opposite. So most of them do very well. But I do have one student who went to the conservatory pre-college, and he decided to come back after a few years. And yeah, he said he misses Miss Clara.

It was cute.

But now he does have this anxiety that I almost see was parallel, and he's at the same age. So do you have any specific advice for pianists themselves, you know, who are trying to become professionals?

You know, the commitment to take on the professional track for anything really is an incredible commitment. And so it's not just about— if they're going to be professional, it's not just about their skills at the keyboard. They've got to have the mindset of a professional. They've got to be able to deal with the pressures of a professional. It's one thing to be a student where you've got a scholarship or you've got mom and dad paying for tuition or, you know, something like that. Then suddenly you have a house payment and you're going, oh, I've got to make some money and I need some more gigs, or I need some more whatever I need to do. I've got to get more students, I've got to do whatever. And so those are additional skills that they're going to need to develop. And so really, it's the skills of developing the mindset of the professional and the skill set of the professional, which means they learn how to manage their life, their finances, their relationships, how they, you know, their dog, so to speak. I mean, they learn how to manage everything in their life so it supports their profession, right? And really how we cope with stress, disappointment, breakdowns is one of the most important things because they're going to happen. I mean, disappointments will occur and we've got to be able to roll with those and look and make sure that we're using adaptive, healthy kinds of ways to deal with things versus maladaptive. And so, you know, the student you're talking about, you know, he needs a therapist, he needs a psychologist, he needs a coach. To address those professional skills and to help mentor him in that professional track.

Yep, I got it. That's amazing. Yeah, and you know, the fact that last time when I saw this happening, he almost refused to perform on Zoom, but finally at last second when he was on, you know, on the screen, he was like, "I will just play," and he played perfectly, and we were like, there's nothing to worry about, you know. So it's very interesting. Thank you so much for all your wonderful answers, and I'm going to pass on the mic to Yukimi Song.

All right, so I have two questions, then that's it. Um, so first one is, just I said, uh, at the beginning of this show, I was dealing with a student who has an anxiety issue, performance anxiety issue, because he had a very difficult, poor performance according to him. So I really, I did not know how to deal with because I wish honestly I knew you when I was a teenager so that you could have helped me to deal with my own issues with my performance and anxiety, but which not wasn't, wasn't the case. You know, my piano teachers, all, most of them, like when I was young, they weren't that available for me. So they were just there to teach me how to play the piano, but in terms of— when it comes to performance, they weren't available. So my question is, how do you help a student dealing with a really disappointing performance?

Okay. First off, we've got to normalize it. We get to say, these are part of the game. This is what's going to happen. Football players get bruised. Like, that is part of the game. And so disappointing performances are really a performance that, OK, we get to learn from this. And that's really the difference right there. And this is where we look at the 5 stages again, because that 5th stage, okay, I don't care what the performance is. I don't care how disappointing, how bad, how horrible it was. When you really look at it and say, what was there that worked? There were some elements of it that worked. What didn't work? Okay. Now I like to specifically use the words work, didn't work, because we don't have the same emotional energy around those words as we do good or bad. What was good about your performance? What was perfect? What was right? What was wrong? What was bad? See, those are words that have a whole history of emotional energy behind them. But so the first thing is to start putting their performances into the 5 stages and saying, we have a process that you're a part of. We want to use this entire process to get you to move forward. And this disappointing performance is just simply part of this process. So what worked? What didn't? What are you gonna do next time? One of the most important pieces of debriefing a performance with a young performing artist like this is to find out what they made it mean about them. Yes, you forgot the entrance. Yes, you forgot that whole section. Yes, the fingerings got all twisted up and it sounded bad. Yes, Whatever yes happened. Okay, what does this mean? What did you make this mean? Our brain is truly a meaning-making machine. And so they've labeled this performance and they've labeled themselves in relationship to this performance. And so, okay, now I'm— I can't memorize well. Okay, now I don't do Chopin anymore. There's certain beliefs that they've created. And so it's really powerful to look at this and start to say, what are the beliefs? What are the labels? What are the words you're now using to describe yourself because this happened? I'm so stupid. I'm a failure. I'm just not a good musician. Those are powerful Powerful words. I was doing a workshop with the parents of students at a piano studio, and I simply asked a great question. I said, "How many of you in this room are singers?" And about 3/4 of the hands went up. "Okay, great. How many of you are non-singers?" Well, the other quarter just popped into the air like immediately, like, "I am a non-singer, proud of it." Like, no, I don't sing. Then I asked a question. I said, non-singers, let's explore this a little bit. How many of you have vocal cords? They all raised their hand. Surprise, OK? How many of you have sung Happy Birthday somewhere before? And they all but one raised their hand. And the whole room looked at this mom like, whoa, hold up. Wait a minute. You're a mom. You don't sing Happy Birthday. It's like, what is up with this? Like, the whole room was like, mm, like, what is going on here? And she looks and she goes, I mouth the words, okay, tell me the story. There's a story here. And what did she tell us? That she was a little girl at a birthday party. Her older brother was at the same birthday party. She was singing Happy Birthday with energy and enthusiasm and whatever she had, she was putting it into it. Well, he let her know after that experience that somehow she had the world's worst voice, she should never sing again. However he conveyed that message left that imprint in her brain. And now 30-plus years later, she doesn't sing ever, anywhere. Now in the context of this workshop, I would not let an opportunity like this pass. And at some point I said, "Would you like to sing happy birthday to all of us?" Well, this mom, you can imagine the dance her brain was doing. You know, midbrain saying, "No, run away, you don't sing, you don't sing, run away, run away." And it's like, "No, wait a minute." Well, she broke through that and she was able to sing. What a heroic, I mean, what an act of courage right here. She was able to sing a delightful, even on-pitch rendition of Happy Birthday. Well, what she really did was break through an old story that has been constraining her for years and years and years. So the real challenge with these negative performance experiences is to help your students rewrite them into a victory statement. What did you really learn from this? So your first response was, oh, I never want to do that again. But what if you could really analyze this and work with this? And I, I do this a lot in my individual coaching. I do this in the book. I talk about the story that we created about something, the words we're using, and to turn this into a victory statement. And it's really amazing to hear some victory statements that sound like I learned I could make mistakes and finish strong. See, that doesn't sound like a worst performance ever, does it? Right. I discovered the importance of having a backup read. I'll never perform without one again. You know, these are the kinds of things that you want to turn those disappointing performances into, is to actual victory statements, and get them thinking about the victory in the performance rather than did I hit every note and who did I disappoint.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Very helpful. So speaking of being helpful, so I want to be helpful to my students, and I've read your book from the beginning up to the end, and I try to use some of the information you gave us, including very practical practices in terms of breathing exercises to advices that I can give. I got a lot of information out of your book. However, there are a lot of things to kind of process as a teacher even just by reading it because I have been having a really old habitual thinking as a person, as a performer. So it's, you know, I have to kind of rewire myself in order for me to process and then give it to my students. So is there like a program for teacher, not just even the teachers, but I think parents also should be informed how to deal with their own children's performance anxiety. So is there a program for us, or webinar, or class?

You know, there's a number of things that I'm offering right now that are really helpful in that area. I appreciate you asking that. Um, it starts with individual coaching. That's certainly available, and I've worked with individuals helping them getting into like scholarship and college auditions. I've worked people through that process. Um, I also do a weekly webinar called Conquer Anxiety Now. And this is something that I run through my clinical psychology practice, which is a great thing. It's, it's free to all people who want to join. That is every Thursday morning at 10 AM Mountain Standard Time. And I have a number of musicians who are on that, as well as other people with other different concerns. Um, and so you can contact me at jon@jonskidmore.com, and I can send you the link to that webinar and I can get more information out to you on that. Um, also as a parent, you bring up parenting, I've written a little workbook on parenting. I call it the 9-Point Parenting Tune-Up. If you're asking, I'll send a copy of that for free too, you know, just to get that out there. I love working with parents. Um, one of the things that I also do is, uh, do workshops with studios. I do workshops right now a lot online. And we're talking about putting together a workshop in October, and that'd be a great opportunity for parents and students and teachers to become more acquainted with what I'm doing. And in October, we're going to be doing an introductory workshop, and that'll just share more ideas, and it'll also be a gateway to other areas that would be— or other workshops, other programs that could be of assistance to you as a teacher and with your students. The date and time is October 11th at 4 o'clock PM, and this is going to be an introductory workshop to, um, Conquer Anxiety and the Five Stages of Peak Performance. It'll also be an intro to different programs that are more intensive in terms of training and developing how to actually practice and use these tools and skills in our lives, in our studios, in our performing.

Great. So how long is that— is going to be the webinar?

That's going to be a 90-minute webinar. Okay, there'll be time for some question and answer in that as well.

Thank you so much for this wonderful interview. We've learned a lot and we really appreciate you taking the time to spread spread the word of this wonderful, you know, 5 stages of peak performance. And yep, thank you so much, Dr. Skidmore.

You're welcome. I appreciate this opportunity. It's great to be talking with like-minded people who have a commitment to their students, who are wanting to help them excel and to move as far as they can with what they're doing. And especially to have that commitment to break away from those, those interfering factors that seem to get in the way that make it more difficult. And that's really what the 5 stages are all about. And so I really appreciate your commitment as teachers, and I'm sure your students appreciate that as well.

We want to thank Dr. Skidmore once again for joining our program today, and we want to thank our audience for watching or listening to our first episode.

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Join us again for another episode episode of That Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song with Yukimi Song—