Performance Anxiety Strategies: A Musician's Guide to Managing Stage Fright

I highly recommend this book for all musicians - students, amateurs, and professionals alike. As a musician who has always struggled with Music Performance Anxiety (MPA), I have received many helpful tips and suggestions throughout the years. But this book goes beyond the usual coaching and provides the potential causes for MPA, putting it in context and helping to reframe one's thoughts and emotions. The authors are clearly passionate and extremely knowledgeable of this subject, and describe many valuable strategies for managing MPA. They, along with their colleagues, provide empathetic stories and case studies to help better understand and successfully cope with this condition. More importantly, they also reinforce the reason as to why one becomes a musician in the first place. This book is a definite "must have", and I applaud and thank the authors for sharing their insights.

Music performance anxiety is an ailment that seems to affect many musicians. As I have watched students struggle with MPA, I have often wished that I could take away the damaging effects of negative thought patterns and the resultant physical manifestations of such thoughts. I very much appreciate this book because the authors explored possible causes of MPA and shared a wealth of information related to managing MPA. I found the chapter "Especially for Teachers: Preventing Music Performance Anxiety" particularly helpful as it highlighted how to proactively help students move beyond the limiting influence of MPA.

This book helped me understand why and how performers experience anxiety on many different levels. In fact, many of the resources were helpful to other facets of life beyond performance. I ended up using some of the principles that I learned from this book to help me develop an app that helps students combat performance anxiety.

All you will need to know to help with stage fright!