Smith, the viola player, isn’t sure how well she’d have dealt with all the discombobulations if she hadn’t learned the techniques Kageyama had taught her. Before taking the performance enhancement class, she’d spent the final moments before an audition the way most musicians do: obsessing over the technical challenges of the piece she’d be playing, and frantically replaying the most difficult passages. (Very often, she’d also make repeated trips to the bathroom, as the nerves affected her bladder.) In retrospect, she says, replaying tricky passages is probably the least productive thing you can do right before a performance, because it makes you worry about screwing up, instead of visualizing a good performance. Smith finds it somewhat shocking that while music instructors spend so many hours helping musicians learn how to practice and perform, none of this instruction focuses on developing a smart and effective pre-performance routine.
By the midpoint of this semester, Smith had already incorporated Kageyama’s techniques and done a complete makeover of her preshow regimen. Now she doesn’t play her viola backstage. Instead, she closes her eyes, breathes, and does the centering exercise her professor taught her. “Once you get good at it, you can do it in about ten seconds,” she says. She repeats some simple affirmations, ones that focus not on success, but on doing her best. (An example: “I’m going to feel free to explore all the possibilities of what this music might hold.”) If you reread that statement closely, you may notice that she’s focusing on the opportunity to play this music, rather than the high stakes or the obligation; in this way, her affirmation is its own form of reappraisal.
Then she consciously tries to unplug from her verbal, rational left brain and plug into her creative and intuitive right brain. “I don’t want to have words in my mind. I want to think about what sounds I’m going to make,” she says.
It was challenging to do this in the audition room. “The judges kept saying, ‘Whenever you’re ready, whenever you’re ready,’” she recalls, and it was clear they were trying to disrupt her. But she still took a few seconds to herself, and she didn’t put her bow to her strings until she was ready. Afterward, she was pleased with her performance. “I did get really nervous. That radio [in the rehearsal space] really freaked me out,” she says. “But I was able to deliver what I wanted despite so many distractions,” she says.
She attributes that success to using her newfound tools. “I had my routine, and I prepared myself before playing,” she says. It’s the kind of coolheaded performance to which we all should aspire.
Chapter Two
WHY YOU NEED A PRE-PERFORMANCE RITUAL
CAN ROUTINE AND SUPERSTITION REALLY INCREASE SUCCESS?
For Stephen Colbert, perhaps the most important moment in the long hours leading up to his performance on his Comedy Central show (before he succeeded David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show) took place an hour before the curtain, when he’d shave and put on the Brooks Brothers suit chosen by his stylist. “Getting into the character for the show is a long process of fits and starts, because I’m not in character all day. I’m a writer and producer all day,” Colbert told Slate’s David Plotz in a 2014 podcast. Putting on the suit signified an important moment in that shift, and it was one of a series of steps in Colbert’s complicated regimen.
Some of Colbert’s preshow routines—like getting his hair and makeup done, and going to the bathroom—are logical things to do before appearing on television. Other behaviors, not so much. “We have a little bell in the bathroom, which I like ringing for complicated reasons. It’s like a hotel bell, DING! I go there and I go, ‘All right, have a good show,’” he says. Then Colbert would wait for his producer to say, “Squeeze out some sunshine,” as he did every night. Then Colbert touched hands—not a high five, just a touch—with every person working backstage, ending with the teleprompter operator. Then he would grab a box of a particular style of Bic pens, remove one, chew the top, and place the pen back in the box. (Bic no longer manufactures this style of pen, so Colbert’s staff used to search stationery stores around the world to buy up any leftover stock.) Then he would slap himself in the face, twice, hard. Then he stared at a particular spot on the theater wall, looked away, then stared at it again. Only then would Colbert take the stage.
Colbert’s backstage ritual is unusually elaborate, but nearly every performer does some set of steps to help them reduce anxiety, increase confidence, and get into the right mindset to perform. Midway through the 2002 documentary Comedian, there’s a scene of Jerry Seinfeld backstage, just before a show. Despite all his success, he’s visibly (and surprisingly) nervous. In an interview, I asked Seinfeld about his backstage routine.
“You don’t have to get psyched up. The audience will take care of that,” Seinfeld told me. “You walk out in front of three thousand people who have paid seventy-five dollars or a hundred dollars, and they’re sitting there saying, ‘We want to laugh right now.’ You feel that when you walk out on the stage. But every comedian, like every athlete, has a little routine. My routine is to look at my notes until five minutes before the show. . . . When my tour producer says, ‘Five minutes,’ I put on the jacket, and when the jacket goes on, it’s like my body knows, ‘OK, now we’ve got to do our trick.’ And then I stand, and I like to just walk back and forth, and then, that’s it. That’s my little preshow routine. I never vary it, and it seems to just kind of signal everything. It just feels comfortable.”
Why does Seinfeld’s body respond when he dons his jacket? Why does Colbert feel like he’ll perform better if he chews a particular kind of Bic pen before taking the stage? Neither of them really knows why. In a way, it really doesn’t matter. These performers think their backstage rituals help them perform better. In the strange but virtuous circle that one quickly encounters in the research into ritual and superstition, thinking these things will help probably does help them do better, even if no one really understands why.
2.
There are no Venn diagrams in this chapter, but it may be helpful if you construct some in your mind as you think about three interrelated ideas: pre-performance routines, rituals, and superstitious behaviors.
All the things Seinfeld does—and many of the things Colbert does—before a show fit the definition of a pre-performance routine: a sequence of systematic, task-related thoughts and actions. Over the last thirty years, sports psychologists have conducted dozens of studies into what athletes do before they compete, and the studies generally show that people who use a well-conceived and consistent routine perform better than those who don’t.
Some of the studies on pre-performance routines are descriptive. A study of divers, for instance, used stopwatches to measure how long the divers spent on the board before they jumped, and it found divers who engaged in a longer sequence of activities before jumping tended to have better scores.
Some of the studies utilized interventions, in which athletes who didn’t use a pre-performance routine were taught to incorporate one, and their before-and-after results were compared against a control group. As in the descriptive studies, the interventions generally showed that athletes who learned to do the same thing every time played their sport better.
“The use of structured routines prior to performances [is] believed to be an extremely important behavioral technique to help performers attain high levels of achievement in sport,” writes Stewart Cotterill, a University of Winchester sports psychologist who conducted a metastudy of existing research on pre-performance routines in sports as varied as bowling, water polo, archery, rugby, and darts. The conventional wisdom is that pre-performance routines are particularly helpful for activities such as shooting a free throw (in basketball) or sinking a putt (in golf)—uncontested activities done without a defender’s interference, and that rely on mechanics and focus to successfully repeat a rote motion an athlete has practiced thousands of times.
The question is: Why do pre-performance routines help?
There’s no
clear answer. Cotterill cites theories and hypotheses raised by other researchers: that the routines help focus athletes’ attention, limit distractions, help to “trigger” movements they’ve practiced, and help them feel optimistic, energized, and in a confident mental state. These theories all make sense, but there’s no way to actually prove what mechanisms are at work. As Cotterill writes: “At a fundamental level it is still not clear what function routines fulfill, what they should consist of or the most effective way to teach them.”
Pre-performance routines can be helpful outside of sports, as well. The writer and surgeon Atul Gawande explores this in The Checklist Manifesto. Inspired by pilots who’ve learned to decrease accident rates by using written checklists of activities to be performed both preflight or later, during flight, if an emergency occurs, Gawande describes how he imported pre-performance checklists into his operating rooms. He also documents the improvement in outcomes that stem from systematically following the same set of steps before picking up a scalpel.
Whether you’re considering an Olympic sport or a complex surgery, the key words in the definition of a pre-performance routine are “task related.” Everything Gawande does prior to operating involves the procedure at hand; everything an Olympic diver does on the board prepares him for the physical task of diving.
Similarly, parts of Stephen Colbert’s routine, such as donning makeup and a business suit, are related to the task of hosting a television show.
But what’s going on when Colbert rings the hotel bell, chews the pen cap, slaps his face, or stares at the special spot on the wall? They are not task related. They have no apparent connection with performing on TV.
These are more properly thought of as rituals, which are simply things done the same way every time. Note that all pre-performance routines can be called rituals, because they’re done the same way every time, but not all rituals can be called routines, since the latter include actions that aren’t task related. (Here’s where the Venn diagrams can be helpful.)
NBA star LeBron James has a long set of task-related pre-performance routines, including warm-up shots, getting taped, and icing his legs, but he also has an additional, complex set of pregame rituals that have evolved over the course of his career. In 2010 they included: forming the numbers 3-3-0 with his fingers after the National Anthem (that’s the area code for Akron, his hometown), giving a unique handshake or fist bump to each of his fourteen teammates, asking the referee to hand him the game ball so he can give it a light massage before tip-off, and throwing chalk dust into the air by the scorer’s table.
In baseball, perhaps the most ritualistic player of the modern era is Wade Boggs, who played third base (mostly for the Red Sox) in the 1980s and 1990s. He ate chicken before every game, took 117 ground balls during every infield practice, took batting practice at precisely 5:17 P.M. before evening games, and scratched the Hebrew letters spelling the word chai into the dirt as he approached home plate to bat—even though he’s not Jewish.
Sports rituals are so pervasive that even video games now allow gamers to create their own players who, in addition to having custom-designed physical attributes (including height, skin tone, and hairstyle), can also be assigned specific pregame rituals. On NBA 2K16, my sons’ favorite Xbox game, available pregame rituals include motions to hype up the crowd (such as chest pounding), making bowling or pitcher’s windup motions, or head butting the basket stanchion.
As with pre-performance routines, there’s no scientifically convincing explanation for the purpose served by rituals. People find them comforting or soothing. They’re thought to relieve anxiety, though it’s not clear why. Some believe they give people a sense of control or self-efficacy in an uncertain situation. “A solid routine fosters a well-worn groove for one’s mental energies and helps stave off the tyranny of moods,” writes Mason Currey, who collected lists of daily practices of great writers and thinkers for his book Daily Rituals.
The third type of pregame action is superstition, and the line between ritual and superstition is decidedly blurry. “A routine becomes superstitious when a particular action is given special, magical significance,” writes Connecticut College professor Stuart Vyse in Believing in Magic, his highly readable overview of research into superstition. Other definitions of superstition highlight the irrationality or lack of logic involved in superstitious behavior. None of the definitions, however, draw a bright line around what constitutes a superstition; much of the parsing seems to lie with intent and depth of belief. Specifically, someone practicing a superstition is more likely to harbor a deep, almost nonsensical belief that the action affects or determines the outcome of a game or event—and that if he fails to perform the superstitious behavior, his performance will suffer as a result. Boggs’s idiosyncratic behaviors, for instance, are clearly superstitious, as is neurosurgeon Mark McLaughlin’s preference for administering medications in dosages ending with 9s, instead of round numbers.
Superstitions aren’t limited to performers themselves. In 2013, Bud Light introduced a series of ads showing beer-drinking football fans watching games on TV while performing rituals—hand gestures, standing barefoot on one foot, twirling remotes, tapping team banners—set to the Stevie Wonder song “Very Superstitious.” The tagline: It’s only weird if it doesn’t work.
There are downsides to rituals and superstitions. When taken to an extreme, neurotic, or overly rigid adherence to ritualized behaviors can be a sign of a mental condition such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Lucky objects can be lost or stolen. Rituals and superstitions can also be preyed on by adversaries as a form of gamesmanship. For instance, opposing teams would sometimes alter their stadium clocks so that they skipped the precise time at which Boggs liked to perform superstitious acts.
At the same time, there’s a reasonable body of evidence that doing a routinized set of pre-performance activities—ritualized, superstitious, or not—really can help someone perform better. So as you think about what rituals belong in your own warm-up routine, keep in mind the profound wisdom of Bud Light: It’s only weird if it doesn’t work.
3.
When Lauren Block was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany, she had a pair of white Nike sneakers with a red swoosh. She began wearing them on days she took exams, and she received good grades. They became her lucky exam shoes.
Block’s roommate was the same size, and as they got to know each other, they began wearing each other’s clothes. When the roommate saw how Block’s Nikes seemed to help her earn better grades, she asked permission to wear the lucky exam sneakers, which Block granted. “She did really well on that first exam, so a superstition was born, and she began wearing them to all her exams,” Block recalls.
Among college students, exam superstitions are common. In a study, 62 percent reported using a lucky pen or wearing a particular piece of jewelry or clothing to exams; 36 percent touched a lucky object before taking the test; 54 percent tried to sit in the same seat for tests; and 38 percent listened to a particular song just before the test. When I was in college, I had a silver Cross pen that I only used for exams. It had been a gift from a high school teacher, and I recall feeling slightly calmer and more confident when I opened a blue book and let that special pen begin its work.
The origin story of Block’s lucky Nikes provides a window into how most superstitions form. Academics use the term “contiguous events,” and it describes how humans, upon experiencing a positive event, have a tendency to look at what else was happening at the same time. When they find it, they often see mysterious connections between the unrelated action or object and the positive outcome. They observe correlation but believe there’s causation.
The most famous experiment in contiguity as a driver of superstition took place at Harvard in 1948. B. F. Skinner, a psychologist, placed hungry pigeons in a cage outfitted with an automatic feeding device, which delivered pellets of food every fifteen seconds. Dur
ing the interval between the feedings, the birds tended to wander around in patterns or move their heads in distinctive ways. Skinner noticed that whatever movement or action the birds were doing at the precise moment the food appeared seemed to take on a special significance to them, and they acted it out repeatedly. “Soon the birds were dancing around the chamber as if their movements caused the operation of the feeder,” writes Stuart Vyse. The same phenomenon works with the pen you used or the sneakers you wore on the day you crushed that algebra exam: Logically speaking, the pen or the shoes had nothing to do with the positive outcome, but the contiguity makes you believe it did, so suddenly you have a lucky pen or lucky sneakers.
Broadly speaking, superstitions tend to break down into two types: those involving actions (like the birds’ head movements), and those involving objects (like sneakers or pens). There is at least some evidence that each type can help boost performance.
In a 2010 study, three researchers from the University of Cologne performed a number of experiments to see how activating superstitions could affect the way subjects performed in tests of motor skills. In one, for instance, fifty-one female students were asked to play a game involving tilting a board so that thirty-six loose balls would each find a place in thirty-six holes in the board. Just before they began, the researcher told some of the girls: “I press the thumbs for you,” a German phrase that’s roughly equivalent to “I’m crossing my fingers for you.” The fingers-crossed group performed the task much faster than the control group.
Lucky objects can help increase performance, too. Lauren Block, the lucky Nike owner, is now a professor at the City University of New York, and with a colleague, she conducted a series of lab experiments that explored how people performed on various tests when they prepared using study guides that had previously been used by other students. In the experiments, Block listed the earlier exam takers’ scores or GPAs, so that the people using the study guide would observe whether the previous user had done well or poorly. This study specifically looked at the influence of “positive contagion,” in which a person’s essence is thought to rub off on a physical object they’ve touched. The results: People using a guidebook previously used by a high performer tended to do better than others. The researchers wrote: “This is the first paper to show that specific abilities can transfer through contagion and impact actual performance by changing performance expectations and confidence.” They point out that smart managers could utilize this finding as a performance aid at work, by distributing objects (such as pens or computers) previously used by people who are considered unusually smart or creative.
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