“People have this really strong intuition to try to calm down in stressful situations,” says Brooks, a dark-haired and vivacious assistant professor at Harvard Business School who works from an office above the school’s library. “You hear it all the time. People either actively say, ‘Calm down,’ or they say, ‘Don’t be anxious.’ The hitch is that it seems quite difficult to find strategies to actually do that.”
The psychological term for the process Brooks’s work describes is “reappraisal,” and it describes how someone can reevaluate a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in a way that changes its emotional impact. It’s one of a group of strategies that are part of the process known as emotion regulation. James Gross, a Stanford psychologist who’s the preeminent authority on emotion regulation, describes a variety of tactics people can use to regulate their emotions. For instance, “situation selection” refers to one’s ability to avoid the circumstances that might lead to anger or sadness or anxiety. (If your child freaks out around clowns, for instance, you might avoid circuses.) “Situation modification” describes methods to alter the environment to reduce negative emotions. (When Carly Simon orders the houselights on at her shows, she’s using this strategy.) “Attentional deployment” refers to ways to make someone less aware of the circumstances that spark a negative emotion. (Distraction is one example.) Reappraisal is an example of a tactic that Gross calls “cognitive change,” in which you don’t actually change the surroundings that are causing negative emotions, but instead try to alter your understanding of the circumstances.
In a perfect world, it might be possible to reappraise one’s feelings of nervousness into an unaroused, nonchalant calm. Brooks suggests that in reality, that’s too great a leap. “The argument is that anxiety and excitement are actually very, very close, but that anxiety and calmness are too far apart,” she says. So instead of aiming for calm, the smarter strategy is to force yourself to make the more subtle, achievable mental shift from nervousness to excitement.
Compared with most areas of psychology, reappraisal is a relatively new field of study. But Brooks isn’t the only researcher doing experiments to try to better understand its power. University of Rochester professor Jeremy Jamieson has done a series of studies on reappraisal, many of them examining how students can use it while taking exams. For instance, in a 2010 study, Jamieson and colleagues looked at a group of students taking practice exams to prepare for the GRE, a standardized test for grad school admissions. Just before the exam, they read one group of test takers the following statement:
People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance . . . This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.
When they looked at the test results, the researchers found no difference in the verbal scores between people who read that statement and people who didn’t. However, on the math exam, people who’d read the reappraisal statement scored, on average, 55 points higher—a significant jump. When they followed up to see how the students fared on the actual GRE more than a month later, they found that despite the elapsed time, the students who’d read the reappraisal statement during the experiment scored 65 points higher in math, had worried less about feeling anxious, and still believed that anxiety would help their performance.
Jamieson and his colleagues concluded: “People’s appraisals of their internal states are flexible, [and] the manner in which internal states are interpreted can have profound effects on emotion, physiology, and behavior.”
For people who suffer from extreme nerves before a performance, the takeaway from the reappraisal research is clear: No matter what anyone tells you, don’t obsess over calming down. Instead, tell yourself the sweaty palms and racing heart are a positive sign, because they signify excitement. You’re lucky to be here and to have this opportunity to prove how good you are. Instead of Journey, try to channel the Pointer Sisters, and quietly hum to yourself: “I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it. . . . ”
4.
When I began reporting this book, I held a simplistic view of getting psyched, one that was overly focused on adrenaline and arousal. I thought that getting psyched was akin to flipping an on-off switch. For an energetic, aggressive activity, more adrenaline is obviously better, so psyching up consists of finding ways, such as the right kind of music, to flip the switch on, I thought. For other, quieter activities—a piano recital, an archery tournament, or a job interview—arousal will translate into jitteriness or distraction. So preparing to perform consists largely of trying to turn the adrenaline switch off.
The reality, according to research that stretches back more than a century, is far more nuanced. Much of it seems to affirm Alison Wood Brooks’s contention that striving to be calm isn’t necessarily a performer’s best bet.
In 1908, a pair of Harvard psychologists named Robert Yerkes and John Dodson were conducting a complicated set of learning experiments in which they administered electric shocks to a hyperactive species of mouse, and then observed how quickly the mice learned to navigate through a mazelike contraption. In general terms, they found that the mice learned more quickly when given a medium-sized shock, and performed poorly when the shock was either too low or too high. The experiments didn’t involve humans and weren’t designed to study the effects of what we now think of as performance anxiety, and more recent academics have challenged their conclusions. Nonetheless, the results came to be celebrated as the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which is still featured in basic psychology textbooks. The law describes the curvilinear relationship between anxiety (or stress) and performance. People perform best not when they’re totally calm, and not when they’re totally stressed, but somewhere in the middle.
Academic theory notwithstanding, the idea caught on because it makes a lot of sense. Playing quarterback in the Super Bowl and defending a doctoral thesis are entirely different kinds of performances, and it’s true that a football player may seek to intentionally elevate his arousal while the PhD aspirant may try to quell her nerves. But in each case, there are limits: Even the PhD student shouldn’t aim for total calm or complete relaxation, and the quarterback will make bad decisions if he’s too amped up. Some level of nervous energy is good. That optimal level will vary among different kinds of people and the task at hand. Getting psyched up isn’t really an on-off switch, but more of a volume knob; the ideal level of arousal falls somewhere on a continuum, and skilled performers twist the volume up or down depending on the context of their performance, in an attempt to find the sweet spot.
While the Yerkes-Dodson Law continues to hold some sway, the newer theory about how performers manage arousal and emotions comes from a Finnish sports psychologist named Yuri Hanin, who first devised it while working with Finnish and Russian divers, gymnasts, rowers, and swimmers in the 1970s. These athletes’ experience defied the Yerkes-Dodson model: Many performed well at extremely high stress levels, beyond what the curvilinear model might suggest. Hanin also recognized that stress or anxiety wasn’t the only emotion they were feeling. They also felt happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and a myriad of other emotions. So Hanin proposed a model called the Individualized Zones of Optimal Functioning, or IZOF. The model recognizes that athletes feel a variety of emotions before competing, and that the optimal level of emotions can vary dramatically from one athlete to another—and even for a single athlete, it might vary based on the context of a particular competition. Over the last thirty-five years, Hanin has used this model to try to help athletes retrospectively analyze what emotions they were feeling before good or bad performances, and then create a prescriptive model of how they want to feel before an event. The athlete then works, in the days, hours, and minutes before p
erforming, to raise or lower the emotions to put herself in the optimal zones.
Instead of an on-off switch or a volume knob, the IZOF model imagines something more like the mixing board in a recording studio, allowing a user to fine-tune different emotions in varying quantities to try to find an optimal blend.
The other technique that sports psychologists teach to try to help performers manage energy and arousal in the moments before a performance is called centering—the technique Noa Kageyama teaches his classes at Juilliard. The technique was devised by Robert Nideffer, who’d gone to Japan to study the martial art of aikido in the early 1960s and became fascinated by the calm and focused demeanor of the best aikido practitioners. He returned to the United States to earn a doctorate in psychology and became a prominent sports psychologist in the 1970s; in the process, he devised a way for athletes to calm themselves before a performance. Nideffer taught the process to a protégé named Don Greene, a West Point grad and former Green Beret who popularized the practice.
For his doctoral dissertation, Greene worked with the San Diego SWAT team. Before the SWAT team engaged in live-fire drills, Greene had half the shooters perform the centering exercise, and the other half do nothing. The centered shooters performed significantly better, clearing an alley more quickly and shooting more bad guys (and fewer good guys) than the control group. Greene later used the technique with Olympians, Wall Street traders, and disparate other professionals. He taught the 1999 class at Juilliard that changed Noa Kageyama’s career path.
Centering involves a seven-step process, which I’ll describe briefly. (The description that follows is drawn from Don Greene’s book Fight Your Fear and Win.) It sounds a lot like mindfulness or meditation, but there’s at least one key difference: Greene insists that with proper practice, someone can center himself in less than ten seconds.
Form your clear intention: Clear the jumble of thoughts by focusing on just a single aim, such as “I’m going to convince this buyer to sign a contract.” Don’t waffle, and keep the goal positive.
Pick a focal point: Aim your eyes at an unimportant distant point, toward which you’re later going to mentally fling excess energy, stress, and nervousness.
Breathe mindfully: Close your eyes, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, and fully expand your belly with each breath.
Release muscle tension: Progressively relax your muscles, starting at your head and moving down your body, checking one area per inhale.
Find your center: Think about a spot two inches below your navel and two inches below the surface of your belly. That’s your center. Focusing on this spot quiets your mind.
Repeat your process cue: This is a phrase that’s supposed to trigger a specific action that gets you toward your intention. For a golfer, it might be “smooth, good tempo”; for a negotiator, it might be “ask questions and be friendly.”
Direct your energy: Hurl excess energy at the focal point you identified in step 2.
I’ve read longer versions of centering, and it seems like a technique that’s difficult to learn from reading about it; like meditation, yoga, or a golf swing, it will be easier to learn if someone who really understands how to do it teaches it to you directly.
On the surface, centering appears analogous to “calming down.” If that’s true, it may seem to be in opposition to Alison Wood Brooks’s finding that trying to “calm down” can hurt performance. There’s an explanation for that divergence, however. Centering is a systematic way to try to calm down, one that forces the user to go through specific steps that also occupy the mind, distracting a performer from whatever nervousness she might be feeling. Brooks’s subjects see their performance deteriorate when they try to be calm without having real tools to accomplish that; Don Greene’s centering practitioners know exactly how to turn down the dials in their body, which makes a difference.
Based on a written description, centering doesn’t sound like a life-changing technique, but I’ve met people who say it’s absolutely changed the way they spend the final moments before a performance. Greene writes: “The whole idea behind finding your center is to feel rooted, grounded, stabilized—and in control of your energy.”
5.
In the penultimate week of Professor Kageyama’s “Performance Enhancement for Musicians” class at Juilliard, he prepares his students for the mock audition that will take place during the final class. This evaluation, according to the syllabus, will account for 50 percent of their final grade.
Kageyama shows students the third-floor rehearsal space where they can relax and do some last-minute practice before they enter the audition room. In the audition room itself, he shows them the screen that separates the musician from the judges, giving the performer a sense of anonymity. Screened auditions are the norm in many music auditions; research shows that screens help judges make their evaluations based solely on the music, limiting the potential for bias due to gender, ethnicity, or other visible attributes. He tells the students they will be evaluated by a three-judge panel consisting of Juilliard faculty members and outside musicians from the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera, or the New York Philharmonic. Then he has each student play his or her audition piece in front of the class.
One week later, when the students show up for the mock audition, the process doesn’t go as smoothly as Kageyama had promised. In fact, nearly everything he’s told them to expect turns out to be a lie.
Instead of being called upstairs to perform in a precise order, the students are called up randomly and without warning. Kageyama instructs them to take the stairs, not the elevator, and the musicians carrying large instruments arrive in the rehearsal room slightly winded and sweaty.
In fact, calling the space a rehearsal room is slightly misleading. When Caeli Smith, a viola player, arrived to rehearse, she heard loud, creepy, staticky voices that seemed to emanate from the walls. “I felt like I was in a haunted house,” she says. “It was totally not the thing you want to hear before you perform. It was totally not conducive to trying to be quiet and focused.” (The noise came from a badly tuned AM radio, which Kageyama had turned to a Spanish-language broadcast of a baseball game, set at high volume, and hidden behind furniture.) By the time Smith was called into the audition room, she recalls, “I was feeling very clammy, not warmed up, and very nervous.”
When the musicians entered the audition space, they saw there was no screen. The judges sat at a table in full view, a gigantic difference from what the students had been led to expect. In every case, the judges welcomed the students by mispronouncing their names, or calling them by the wrong names, creating initial confusion. One of the judges noisily munched from a bag of crunchy plantain chips. Another unwrapped candy. Before the musicians had finished getting set up, one judge spoke up: “You can start anytime you like.” Slight pause. “You can begin now.” Slight pause. “We’re ready.” In other words, hurry up.
Some students experienced more miscues when they began playing. The pianists noticed that certain keys played strangely. (Kageyama had secretly loaded ping-pong balls inside the piano.) One judge’s cell phone went off periodically, and in some instances he took the call. The overall atmosphere, Smith recalls, was extremely unprofessional and distracting.
Of course, that’s exactly the point.
This “adversity audition” is the traditional culmination of the Juilliard course. It tests whether the techniques the students have learned help them cope not only in a traditional audition, but even in a worst-case scenario. Sometimes Kageyama asks a judge to drink from a whiskey bottle (filled with iced tea) and appear inebriated. Sometimes he sets up an oscillating fan to blow the musicians’ sheet music around while they play. “The judges are instructed to be disrespectful, ornery, rude, and difficult,” Kageyama says. By most accounts, they play this role very well.
While the judges do assess the musicians’ playing, they’re also payi
ng close attention to how well the students cope with the circumstances. Do they let the judges’ pressure interfere with their routine before they begin? Do they appear frazzled, distracted, frustrated, or angry? The audition doesn’t really count for half the semester’s grade, but the judges do crown a winner—one based not just on musicality. Says Kageyama: “We try to pick the one person who seemed to handle everything the best.”
This semester’s winner is Tomer Gewirtzman, an Israeli-born pianist. When he sat down to play, he realized that Kageyama had outfitted the piano with a chair that sloped forward toward the keyboard, a form of seating that makes it difficult to play well. Even as the judges ordered him to start playing, Gewirtzman stopped, scanned the room, pulled aside the sloped chair, and retrieved a better chair from the other side of the room. “He impressed them, because he took the time—he wasn’t rushed at all, and he didn’t seem flustered when the ping-pong balls started making noises,” Kageyama recalls.
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