Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum What can I do to eliminate "Pupil/Master" fear?

When I play to myself, I am quite confident, but when I play to the teacher, I get all startled, played the wrong notes and go off rhythm. Also, I made an embarassing trip to a Steinway Artist's home for a lesson where I paid alotta money ($100) for his lesson by the hour and I kept on screwing up a simple piece. Long story short, I want to play to the instructor without feeling intimidated.

Is this something normal that will fade away in time or is it a problem that I cannot overcome?

There is nothing to be done about it. It gets better over time with lots of experiences of the same situation, you will learn to cope, but there is no cure. I still feel sick to my stomach playing for my teacher, and I've been playing for my teacher for 5 years.

It is absolutely normal. Heck .... you're human. But that being said, you should feel comfortable with your teacher. It's important that you "like" the teacher too. My first teacher was wonderfully warm and supportive and she had a sense of humor as well. And that made all the difference. When I reached advanced levels, then I had teachers who intimidated me, who fought with me and who I didn't feel close to. There a couple of epic battles But at that stage the music was the all important factor.

Just accept that you will be a little "on edge" when playing for your teacher, no matter what your level. Many concert pianists have terrible stage fright. But as you become more familiar with the music, then that familiarity becomes embedded in your fingers ... and you will find you can play nicely even when you stomach is tied in a huge knot.


But I have a confession to make here too. With a long list of credentials and over forty years teaching experience ... I get a little edgy sometimes playing for my STUDENTS. I just laugh it off, but I admit it's embarrassing. But nothing terrifies me more than setting up for a recording session. On my HappyPainoMuse site I am confounded by the fact that I find playing my OWN compositions accurately so frustrating. Invariably I slip up several times before it's a "wrap". Not only is the music my own composition, but the skill level is very simple since I write for students. I can't wiggle out of that one ...

Performance anxiety in front of your teacher is not uncommon. You need to practice to it and give yourself permission to make m£istakes.
Practice keep playing
Play for an audience
Record youself
Learn to start anyWhere in your pieces

That said there are random mistakes and there are juicy mistakes. The juicy ones tell you what is wrong. You may not be fixing the problems and they come out in front of your teacher.

See the perfect wrong note by william westney and practicopedia by philip johnston for practice tips

If it really is fear instead of anxiety, then this could be the wrong teacher for you.

I do not know your experience level but I think we all underestimate the time it takes to get a piece under our fingers. To really get it ingrained also means to have the piece so secure it can withstand the problems that go with playing in different surroundings and under scrutiny. By the time is gets sufficiently secure there is little need to be playing the piece at the lesson.

I go to every lesson safe in the knowledge that I will stuff up every piece I play. Perhaps there would be no point in paying for lessons if I got them all 100% right. My poor teacher has to decipher from what can be an absolute mess what is going well and what is going bad and somehow she manages that quite well. I look at the practice space of my teachers room as a safe place where I can be at my worst without judgement, including my own overly critical self.

I think that part of the problem is that we want to perform for our teachers, when the reality is that as we study a piece there is aling period of time when all we are doing is demonstrating the baby steps we have taken since the last lesson.

We play, not perform, for the teacher so that he or she can hear and see what is going on with our work. So that mistakes can be corrected, and what is going well can be repeated and improved. So that problem areas can be broken into manageable pieces.

When we realuze that we aren't meant to be "performing" things become much less stressful.

That being said, it took me about two years with my teacher to really come to terms with this idea!

tony890726, it is normal as everyone says, and there are also a couple of things you might be able to do about it. I caught on to this a decade ago when I was studying another instrument as an adult, and used to brainstorm ideas with a fellow student overseas.

Ok, the feeling is that we are performing for the teacher, and it has to sound good. My friend actually did worse when she had done a fantastic job at home and was so excited to show her teacher that it all fell apart. It was devastating at times. What changed this for both of us was a completely different mindset. We're NOT performing. We're working on a project with our teacher. The project is our skills.

Supposing you're apprenticing in carpentry. You bring in the table you've been working on, and together with the master carpenter you examine the table. This edge over here could be planed smoother. You're both looking at the table to see what needs to be done. If you imagine that your teacher and you, both of you, are looking at your work and what skills you'll be improving next, then it is no longer that the teacher is looking at you. He or she is not judging you or your work, but seeing how to help you with your skills.

2. The actual goals. Playing a piece perfectly, or wonderfully, that's an anxiety producing goal and an impossible one. We realized that a teacher might be pushing "counting evenly" or "get a handle on G major having F#". If you play with great emotion, but you miss those F#'s ---- vs. if you get those F#'s because you have been focusing on them at home, but there is no great emotion --- most teachers want the second. A good teacher will give you clear goals to aim toward. That makes it simple. Too simple for us to grasp how simple it is, so we try to do the huge thing instead of the simple small thing. My friend said "Oh my, is that all?"

We found these two things to make quite a difference.

You might also be able to tell your teacher that you feel nervous about playing in front of him, of messing up etc. Most teachers are aware of it, and can help you with that problem. When we say "I play it better at home." then they think we're making excuses; but "I'm nervous playing in front of you." is honest and up front. (Teachers here, what do you think?)

Same city, same teacher rate.... I had the same issue, the first few lesson with my actual teacher I was intimidated and I did struggle making progress for a couple of months... I was just too much self conscious about my mistakes that all I was thinking during practice, was how to stop doing it. The "fear" goes away with time, don't worry too much about it, the good thing is that you can use it to find better practice strategies and learn how to be more accurate.

Since you mentioned Perfect Wrong Note by William Westney, I read that his book advocates against .

I have heard that philosophy discussed here often.

Tony, you have lots of company. Like most things when it comes to piano, it gets better with practice. It might not ever go away completely, but after awhile it becomes a familiar companion and you learn to work around it.


P.S. I'm assuming a good and supportive relationship with the teacher. If the teacher is critical, abusive, dismissive, or otherwise incompetent, well, you should be afraid.

I do think you need a change of teacher. You need a good looking one. Then, if you get your head chewed off after a mistake or three, it`ll put a smile on your face . .

Some relaxation tips might help. Ask for a minute to center yourself. Take a deep breath. Close your eyes. Adjust the bench. Lightly touch the keys. Hum or audiate the piece you are about to play, either that or a "safe" song or tune that brings you comfort.

A person can do all of this in maybe 10 or 15 seconds, quicker once a person gets a routine down. These simple suggestions will tend to reduce the tension level by half.

I completely agree with this. There have been more than a few times when I have told my teacher "give me a minute". Then I close my eyes and revisualize what I am doing, then take a deep breath, and then play. This has worked far better than trying to push through and getting all worked up.

Also something to remember - Teacher's like to see where you are having problems. That shows them what they need to work on with you. If you never made a mistake, they would not have anything to do!

Yes to Sand Tiger and SwissMS. I spent a year or so figuring out some of the things that would help with "performing" - as many have said, with a teacher it's not a "performance" - it's going for coaching. That being said, we'd still like to do our best.

In my reading the majority of the blogs on how to perform talked about praciticing It was a real eye-opener to me how "serious" (but not solemn) practicing could be. I've always performed on chutzpah, not talent, and that had gotten me a long way. Now that I wanted to get "better" the anxiety kicked in. so I spent that year learning how to practice better, and now some of the chutpah has come back Whew!

One of the things I did that might help you was to make 3x5 cards that went with me to gigs that helped me focus on the "music" and not the "performance". Things like "swing it!" or "easy, dance!" or "slow it down!" That last one might be most relevant. For me, the more nervous I am the more fast I play, and it can get out of hand - way beyond my technical ability. So - start it out *way* slow - ballad style for a march, for instance. It might be a surprise how march-like it will end up

Along with the breathing and closing your eyes, I always play a series of block chords in different positions when I first sit down, to feel the keys, to feel the familiarity that it is to be at a piano. Maybe just a short 5-finger run up and down the keys, hands together or hands separate, just something that says you're back at the keyboard, and it's piano time.

And I think that "back at the keyboard" routine when one sits down to "practice" is a help. Any routine that can get to be familiar and then be transferred to lessons or gigs - a habit that puts your mind in to music and piano. It's like fastening your seat belt when you get in the car, hanging your coat on a hook and turning on the computer when you get to work - it's a mental signal that sets up your piano time, and if it leads to practice/relaxed time often then it's more likely to lead to lesson/relaxed time, too. Our mental/emotional habits are powerful.

So, a "beginning piano now" routine that's used in practice and can be transferred to lessons (breathing, closing eyes, keys familiarity), reminder notes, slowing it down. And the more those help, the more they engender confidence, which also helps. Confidence in the routine, and the routine has helped make you ready to play.

Cathy

This became a terrible problem for me sometime late in my second year with my teacher. It was all the more confounding because I hadn't had the anxiety before then. Of course, it only got worse every lesson. I have a great relationship with my teacher, and it had nothing to do with his particular manner, which is very easygoing.

I came to a few realizations:

1.) It's normal. My teacher stressed that he experiences the same thing.
2.) My brain was preoccupied with the anxiety, making it impossible to focus on the notes.
3.) If I practiced a certain amount each day, I subconsciously had enough confidence to overcome the fear at my lesson. It wasn't even that I necessarily played better--it was just that I knew I'd done all I could do to prepare for the lesson, and that in itself was calming.

If the fear hits at all during the lesson these days, I take a deep breath before it starts spinning out of control. I remind myself that this is NOT a performance, and as noted above, if I were able to play flawlessly every time, I wouldn't be taking lessons in the first place.

Playing with anybody else in the room is always harder. You have to get over it! I always try to play if anybody comes to my apartment. That helps.

Your teacher will understand this. He or she will have been at that stage once as well. My teachers are both skilled yet they also, sometimes, mess up simple pieces probably because I am there with them.

Relax, play, enjoy. Unless you are planning on becoming a professional, what else matters?

That sounds exactly right. Not quite "self-confidence", but:

. . . "I've done what I can. The rest lies with God."

There was a golfer who said:

"Golf is largely a game of luck. But I've noticed that, if I practice more, my luck improves."

. Charles

Best way to get over that fear is to go rent "Whiplash", its out on DVD.

The advices people are offering here are really great. I just want to add one more thing.

First I want to differentiate between the “understandings of the experience” and the “emotional response to the experience” itself. So the emotional response is involuntary. You don’t chose to have it. And you can’t control it.

I was one of these persons who could rationalize all this things but failed trying to apply them to my own experience. I knew being anxious in from of my teacher was very common, and as everyone says, it gets better with practice. I did relaxation, I understood it wasn’t about me but about the music, and I wanted to honor and respect the music and not to become so self-conscious in such a debilitating degree every time I had to play in front of her. I used techniques to keep my critical self busy. And so on, but as time went on I didn’t overcome my fear.

So I become curious about why some people could overcome it better than others. And I found there is a big difference in the internal process.

There is a psychological rule which works quite accurately: what you resist persists. What you embrace dissolves.

Especially being an emotional response, you can’t affect it directly. So my suggestion is to allow completely the sensation, even if it’s very uncomfortable and debilitating. Because if you struggle with it I’m quite sure you are resisting it in some way, that means, you feel or you think there is something wrong and you shouldn’t feel these way playing in front of your teacher.

So a way to allow the experience could be to think as someone suggested "I've done what I can. The rest lies with God." But you could say these things and still resist the experience, so be aware about your internal response.
Another way of allowing it is to move forward the feeling. The will of moving forward makes the uncomfortable feeling smaller. But don’t try to control the fear indirectly by doing that, just accept it.
Moving forward could be to try to play if anybody comes to your apartment as someone said above.
Curiosity is another moving-forward feeling. You can make yourself curious about the experience of playing in from of your teacher.
Knowing you are not alone struggling with these feelings makes easier to allow them too.

It’s a long learning process but at the same time the change of mindset is instantaneous. I wish I had known that earlier. I’m glad if it could be useful for someone else.

I follow a simple process of telling myself...

Teachers know when students are making mistakes because of nerves.

Teachers know pupils play much better unwatched, without distraction, and they expect and compensate for this.

My teacher will notice the places I have improved, more than the places I flub due to nerves.

Play a half the speed I can comfortably play alone. Give my brain time to process the extra stimulii of being watched by an expert.... it diverts more of your attention that you probably expect.