Why Practicing Isn’t Enough to Perform Under Pressure
I’ve practiced pieces until they felt effortless—until my fingers moved without thought and my bow knew exactly where to go. But the moment I stepped onstage, everything changed. My hand shook. My mind zoomed in on details I’d never thought about before. Suddenly I was trying to play instead of just playing.

For a long time, I thought this meant I wasn’t prepared enough. So I practiced more. And more. But the problem kept coming back, especially during auditions and performances that mattered most.

Eventually, I realized something unsettling: the issue wasn’t how much I practiced. It was how performance works.

Practice and Performance Are Not the Same Thing
In music education, we’re often taught that performance is simply the reward for good practice. If you repeat something enough, refine the mechanics, and eliminate mistakes, a solid performance should follow naturally.

But performance happens under completely different conditions.

Onstage, you can’t stop and fix things. You’re being evaluated. Your body is more alert. Your thoughts speed up. Your attention narrows. All of this changes how memory and motor control function. Skills that felt automatic in the practice room suddenly feel fragile.

When something goes wrong in this moment, it’s easy to assume the problem is confidence or nerves. But research in psychology suggests something more precise is happening: under pressure, we often interfere with our own skills.

The Paradox of Control
Highly trained performers are especially vulnerable to breakdowns under pressure. This seems counterintuitive—shouldn’t expertise protect us?

The problem is that expertise relies on automatic control. Over time, skills become procedural. We don’t think about every movement; we let the system run. But under evaluation, attention turns inward. We start monitoring what used to take care of itself.

Instead of trusting the process, we start controlling it.

That’s when performance fragments. Movements lose fluidity. Timing becomes inconsistent. The more we try to fix things in real time, the worse it gets. Effort increases, but control decreases.

This is why people often describe “choking” as feeling hyper-aware, not blank. You know too much in the wrong moment.

When Your Body Joins the Problem
For string players, this breakdown is often physical. Under stress, the body prepares for action. Heart rate increases. Muscles tense. Fine motor control becomes harder.

A shaking bow, for example, isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a predictable physiological response. Stress increases muscle excitability, which amplifies natural tremor. When we feel that tremor, we often tense up to fight it—gripping harder, stiffening joints. But this only makes the instability worse.

It becomes a loop: tension causes shaking, shaking causes more tension.

Trying to suppress arousal entirely doesn’t work either. Performance requires energy. The question isn’t how to eliminate stress, but how to keep it from hijacking control.

Memory Isn’t Just Repetition
Another quiet source of performance failure is memory.

What we often call “muscle memory” is usually just sequence memory—one note cues the next. This works well when nothing goes wrong. But if attention slips or a disruption occurs, the chain can break.

That’s why forgetting during performance feels so catastrophic. The information is still there, but there’s no clear way back in.

More reliable memory involves structure. Knowing where you are harmonically. Understanding phrase boundaries. Being able to start from multiple points in the piece. When memory is organized this way, performance becomes more resilient.

Practice, then, isn’t just about repeating. It’s about building access.

Rethinking the Grind
We love stories about grinding—about practicing endlessly until excellence appears. But research on expertise suggests something more nuanced. High-quality practice requires intense focus, feedback, and correction, and even experts can only sustain this for a few hours a day.

Past that point, practice quality drops. Errors get reinforced. Fatigue sets in. More time doesn’t always mean better learning.

This doesn’t mean effort doesn’t matter. It means that structure matters more than sheer volume—especially when preparing for performance.

A Different Way to Think About Performance
All of these ideas led me to think differently about preparation. Instead of asking, “How do I play this better?” I started asking, “How do I make sure I can access what I already know under pressure?”

That question led me to a simple framework I now use before performances: C.A.L.M.

Construct: Build memory that isn’t purely sequential. Practice starting from different places. Know the structure, not just the motions.
Anchor: Don’t fight arousal. Ground it. Use breathing, posture, and attention to keep activation from turning into tension.
Liberate: During performance, let go of mechanics. Focus on sound, intention, or musical direction—anything external that keeps automatic systems running.
Mask: Separate the performance from your identity. Think of it as stepping into a role. When the ego steps back, attention stabilizes.
None of these ideas replace technique. They only matter after technique is in place. But they address something technique alone can’t: the psychological reality of performing.

Why This Matters Beyond Music
Performance pressure isn’t unique to musicians. Athletes, speakers, test-takers—anyone who performs under evaluation faces similar challenges. We often respond by trying harder, thinking more, and controlling more.

But sometimes the best performances happen when we do the opposite.

Learning how to prepare for pressure—not just for practice—changes the way we approach mastery. It shifts the goal from perfection to reliability. From effort to access.

For me, this reframing didn’t eliminate nerves or mistakes. But it made performance feel less like a test of worth and more like a skill in itself—one that can be learned, trained, and understood.

And that understanding made all the difference.