Fix You
Not broken: Challenging unhelpful stories
This series draws on peer-reviewed research in music psychology and music education. References and further reading are listed at the foot of each post. Where findings from my own doctoral research are shared, this will be clearly indicated.
"I thought there was something wrong with me. Like everyone else was fine and I was the only one who felt like that."
This powerful and compelling quote is from a young musician in research on Music Performance Anxiety (MPA) conducted by Ioulia Papageorgi, Susan Hallam and Graham Welch.
This quote hit me right in the feelings! Have there been times when you or someone you cared about felt the same way? It's a confusing, isolating, lonely space to be in, and it sounds like an insurmountable challenge to solve. If there is something wrong with me, do I need to be fixed?
Let's talk about the stories we tell ourselves about music performance anxiety. Because the story matters enormously — not just academically, but in the daily, lived experience of every young singer who stands in the wings with a racing heart and a mind full of doubt.
The story we tell others shapes what they believe about themselves. It shapes how parents respond in the car on the way home. It shapes what teachers say — and don't say — in the lesson the following week. It can be scary to say the right thing. So sometimes we say nothing - and the young musicians in our lives continue their silent struggle on their own.
Some of the most common stories about MPA aren't serving young musicians well. Do any of these sound familiar to you?
Unhelpful and untrue: stories that destroy confidence
Once upon a time, someone, somewhere, thought they were being very helpful and shared some advice on a topic they didn’t really know much about, without giving their words much thought at all. They may have had good intentions, but the results can be devastating. Language is powerful. Words have meaning and real consequences; let’s consider how we can be the best possible custodians of the confidence of the young musicians we support by rewriting unhelpful stories.
Story number one: “Toughen up, get over it and keep going”:
❌ Performance anxiety stems from a lack of resilience and fortitude. The child who struggles before a concert simply needs more experience, more resilience, more willingness to push through. With enough performances under their belt, the anxiety will fade.
This last sentence of this story has some surface logic. Exposure to feared situations is, in many contexts, part of how anxiety eases over time — and graduated, well-supported performance experience genuinely does help most young singers grow in confidence. The problem isn't with the idea that experience matters. The problem is with the idea that experience alone, without thought to the conditions surrounding it, will do the work — and with the framing of anxiety as a character deficit to be toughened out of.
Margaret Osborne and Dianna Kenny's research on sensitising experiences is instructive here. In their 2008 study of adolescent musicians, they found that early performances marked by harsh feedback, public mistakes, or a felt absence of support could actually entrench anxiety rather than reduce it. The body and mind learn that performance is unsafe, and each subsequent stage becomes harder, not easier. Without the right conditions, more performances can lead to greater sensitisation rather than greater confidence.
This is why expecting a young singer to perform their way out of MPA without any other change is a little like expecting a child to learn to swim by being thrown into the deep end more often. It isn't water exposure that's the issue. It's how the exposure happens — whether there's a hand to hold, a shallow end to start from, a teacher who notices when the breath quickens.
The courage required to keep showing up to performance — and many anxious young musicians do keep showing up, quietly and persistently — deserves to be recognised for what it is. Not evidence of a problem to be overcome through grit. Evidence of genuine artistic commitment that deserves to be met with thoughtful conditions.
The second story is quietly damaging because it is so easily internalised by musicians:
❌ Performance anxiety stems from a lack of preparation and practice.
That short phrase is loaded with judgement, oversimplifies, and undervalues the musician's complex experience.
When a singer performs below their evident capability — when the voice that sang so freely in the lesson tightens and retreats on the stage — it is tempting to attribute this to inadequate preparation. We all know that practice and preparation make better (or betterer — a technical term I'm fond of 😉), and practice tips, techniques and encouragement that actually work are worthy of their own complete blog series! But when it comes to MPA, research shows that a well-prepared student can experience significant performance anxiety, and that a student experiencing MPA is not, by definition, underprepared. The gap between what a young musician can do in a lesson and what emerges in performance is not a preparation gap. It is an anxiety gap — and it requires a fundamentally different response.
The third story is more recent and, in some ways, more sophisticated — but it carries its own risks.
❌ Performance anxiety is a pathology → something is wrong with you → you need to be "fixed".
As awareness of mental health has grown, so has the tendency to frame significant performance anxiety as a pathology: a condition to be diagnosed, treated, and ideally eliminated. For the majority of musicians, MPA is not related to a diagnosable anxiety disorder — and we as teachers are in NO position to offer a diagnosis.
It helps if we can understand the difference between state and trait anxiety. Renowned psychologist Charles Spielberger's early work distinguished state from trait anxiety:
State anxiety is a temporary emotional reaction to a specific situation, while trait anxiety is a stable, long-lasting personality characteristic. Interestingly, the two can interact and reinforce each other over time.
Many musicians with MPA experience state anxiety as a contextual, situational experience shaped by the specific demands of the performance environment, the relationships within it, and the meaning the performer attaches to the event.
Researchers Andrea Herman and Eric Clarke have written a fantastic journal article that examines MPA through a different lens — arguing that music performance anxiety is better understood as a normal, adaptive response to the conditions of performance environments than as an individual disorder requiring clinical remedy. The implications are substantial. If MPA is a response to an environment, then the environment itself becomes part of the conversation.
The child is not broken. But the conditions around them and the support they receive deserve closer attention.
That conversation is where this series is heading. And the journey, I think, is worth taking together. I’d love to hear what unhelpful stories you were told, or perhaps tell yourself - and how they made you feel.
Together, we can rewrite the future. We are better together!
The title of this post comes from the song Fix You by Coldplay
Part of the Little Voices, Big Feelings series — an evidence-informed exploration of music performance anxiety in child singers, written for parents, teachers, and music educators. Published weekly.
References
Herman, A., & Clarke, E. (2023). Reconceptualising music performance anxiety as a functional response to educational environments. Psychology of Music, 51(3), 742–758. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356221131459
Kenny, D. T. (2011). The psychology of music performance anxiety. Oxford University Press.
Kenny, D. T., & Osborne, M. S. (2006). Music performance anxiety: New insights from young musicians. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2(2–3), 103–112.
Osborne, M. S., & Kenny, D. T. (2008). The role of sensitising experiences in music performance anxiety in adolescent musicians. Psychology of Music, 36(4), 447–462
Papageorgi, I., Hallam, S., & Welch, G. F. (2007). A conceptual framework for understanding musical performance anxiety. Research Studies in Music Education, 28(1), 83–107.
Spielberger, C. D. (1966). Anxiety and behavior. Academic Press.
Wilson, G. D., & Roland, D. (2002). Performance anxiety. In R. Parncutt & G. E. McPherson (Eds.), The science and psychology of music performance: Creative strategies for teaching and learning (pp. 47–61). Oxford University Press.