Don't Give Up, Don't Look Down

And here's why:

“Don’t look down,” they said.

If you’re on a tightrope, if you’re climbing a rock face, they tell you “Don’t look down.” I always wanted to. I thought it would be cool to see how high up I was.

It’s very tempting to want to see the big picture while you’re in the middle of it. Unfortunately, you can’t really do that and attend to what you’re doing. Your full attention, of at least as much of it as you can manage, has to be on the present. There’s a saying:

“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

Did that ever confuse you? Probably because it’s backwards. The actual saying is:

“You can’t eat your cake and have it too.”

You can either have a cake, or you can eat a cake. In other words, you can be in a process, or you can have the big picture. You can’t have both at the same time.

(You can go back and forth from one to the other, and the art of doing that is a vital skill. That’s a whole ‘nother post. I’ll get to it later.)

Learning to attend to the details when you’re in the thick of a performance is the most necessary component of performing with anxiety. It’s difficult. I think there’s a spectrum of ways to do it.

At the far end are the people who tend to thrive on focusing on little details. They’re going to find attending to the minutiae of playing very natural. Their challenge is going to be knowing how to prioritize which details are important and which aren’t so they can give their best performance.

On the other side are people who tend to like to live in the big picture, where all the details become a jumble and focusing is hard. Paradoxically, they have the same challenge: Learning to fight the overwhelm by knowing how to prioritize which details are most important.

There’s a mindset that has to be in place before either type of player can learn this skill:

“Don’t give up.”

When you’re in the thick of it, trying to attend to every detail, not knowing which ones are important, and the clock is ticking and the people are watching and you just made three mistakes, the best thing you can do is HANG IN THERE. If you’re on a rock face, you can’t give up. You’d fall and die.

In a performance, it’s perfectly possible to give up and let the whole thing fall apart. No one dies. But it’s embarrassing, unprofessional, and could cost you your reputation, your livelihood and your confidence.

So you don’t give up. You get scared in the middle of a performance, freak out, and keep going. You don’t “look down,” don’t think about what people are thinking, what happens afterwards, any of that.

That comes later, when you assess how it went, lick your wounds, or maybe…just maybe…find out you did better than you thought.

In the meantime, when you’re up on that cliff face, your job is to find the next handhold, the next foothold, the next maneuver. When the big picture thoughts come in, you ignore them. When you want to look down or give up, you don’t!

Easier said than done. Of course. All of these things are learnable skills, and there’s a process to learning them. So if you’re always looking down, or if you’ve already given up, guess what?

These things are choices, and they’re negotiable.

Let’s get together and talk about them.