By Michael Clement; Edited By Melissa Clement

The Night Before the Ravenscroft Competition

I woke up at four in the morning and immediately felt sick to my stomach. The hotel room was dark and quiet, but my mind was already racing. In a few hours, I would be sitting down at a concert grand piano to compete in the Ravenscroft International Jazz Piano Competition. And right then, at 4 AM, all I wanted to do was throw up.

If you’ve ever felt that way before a performance, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you’ve felt it more times than you can count—if it’s followed you from your very first childhood recital all the way through years of serious study—then you also know that being told to “just relax” or “trust your preparation” doesn’t do much to help.

I struggled with performance anxiety from the time I was a kid. It followed me through my entire bachelor’s degree in classical piano. Competitions, recitals, juries—it didn’t matter how well I knew the music. The nerves were always there, and sometimes they were debilitating. I don’t claim to have figured out a magic cure, but as someone who has been in the trenches with this for a long time, I’ve slowly found what actually helps, and what doesn’t.

"Just Be Prepared"—The Advice That's... Half Right

Why Preparation Matters, and Where It Falls Short

If you've ever dealt with stage fright and asked someone for advice, there's a very good chance the first thing they told you was: be prepared. Practice more. Know your material cold. And honestly? They're not wrong. Preparation matters enormously. Knowing your music deeply gives you something real to stand on when nerves start to shake the ground beneath you.

The second piece of advice you've probably heard: do more performance practice. Play for your friends. Record yourself. Run through the piece under simulated pressure. And again, this is genuinely useful. If you spend all your time practicing and none of it actually performing, it shouldn't be a surprise when standing in front of an audience feels terrifying.

But here's what both pieces of advice miss: preparation can become its own trap. At some point, it stops being about readiness and starts being about avoidance—an endless cycle of practice sessions and run-throughs chasing the whack-a-mole of mistakes that keep cropping up. And if you're doing your performance run-throughs with the same mindset you bring to the practice room, you're not really performing. You're still practicing. You play, you finish, you immediately catalogue what went wrong — that passage wasn't clean, that transition was rushed, that note was wrong, and then you go back and fix it. If you keep telling yourself you're not ready, you never will be, because the standard keeps moving. There is always something else to fix.

The Hidden Cost of Perfectionism

Part of what makes this cycle so hard to break is perfectionism. The plague of perfectionism runs especially deep in the music world, and it cuts particularly deep in classical training. Many of us—whether we now play jazz, pop, or anything else—grew up learning piano through the classical tradition. I certainly did. I internalized a standard that says every wrong note is a failure, every hesitation is a flaw, every performance is an audition. That mindset doesn't stay in the practice room. It follows you onto the stage into every performance you give, whether you realize it or not.

At some point, there has to be a shift from correcting mistakes to communicating meaning. If you wince at every wrong note, catalogue your mistakes right after you perform, or head straight back to the practice room to perform your hour of penance for your sins—you're missing the point. Music isn’t about how many right or wrong notes you play. It’s about how you communicate feeling and meaning through sound. Those are two very different goals, and all the preparation in the world won't bridge that gap if you never actually switch modes.

The Problem with the Recital Cycle

Why Classical Training Sets You Up for Stage Fright

There’s a model of learning music that most of us grew up inside without ever questioning it. You choose a piece. You spend a few months learning it. You perform it once. And then you never play it again. Because by then, you’ve already moved on to the next piece, the next sonata, the next challenge. From the time I began studying piano at age four, all the way through my degree recitals, this was the model. I was always reaching forward. I never went back.

Think about what that means for performance anxiety. You’re walking out on stage with music you’ve known for only a few months, trying to tell a story with it, often for the first and last time. That's a strange thing when you think about it. You wouldn't expect a novelist to write a book in three months, publish it once, and then never think about it again. But that's essentially what the recital cycle asks of musicians. No wonder it feels terrifying.

How the Real Music World Actually Works

The real music world doesn’t work this way at all. When an artist releases an album or starts a new project, that music becomes a permanent part of themselves. They've probably performed that 10-20 times in front of a live audience before they record it. Then they may perform it hundreds more times over the course of their career. Each performance deepens. Interpretation changes over time. The artist grows into the music and the music grows with the artist.

Think of Alicia de Larrocha, the Spanish pianist widely considered one of the greatest interpreters of her era. Over her decades-long career, she developed a particularly deep relationship with Iberia—a sprawling, technically demanding suite by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz that many consider one of the most difficult works in the piano repertoire. She recorded it multiple times across her career, returning to it again and again as she grew as a musician. By the time she made her most celebrated recordings, she had likely performed those pieces fifty, a hundred times or more. What you hear in those recordings is the depth of someone who has lived inside that music long enough to truly inhabit it.

Lowering the Bar in the Best Possible Way

When I hold my very first performance of a piece to the standard of a seasoned artist’s hundredth, I’m setting myself up for a very particular kind of suffering. Give yourself permission to lower the bar—not to play carelessly, but to understand that you are at the beginning of a relationship with this music, not the end of it. Your first performance isn't supposed to be your best one. It's just supposed to be the beginning.

The Advice That Changed Everything

What My Mentor Steve Harlos Taught Me

My mentor Steve Harlos at the University of North Texas said something to me once that cut through years of performance anxiety more cleanly than any technique or preparation method ever had. He said, in the kindest way possible:

“You’re being selfish. Stop focusing on yourself, and start focusing on the audience you're playing for. The more you focus on yourself, the worse the anxiety will get. The more you focus on the music and the audience, the more it will go away.”

Granted, I would have preferred that the advice didn’t come while I was backstage about to perform, but still it is advice I keep with me to this day.

Every symptom of performance anxiety—the racing heart, the shaking hands, the mental spiral—is fundamentally self-directed. It’s about how you look, how you sound, whether you’re good enough, whether people are judging you. It is, at its core, a form of turning inward at the exact moment when your job is to share beauty and meaning with others.

Redirect Your Focus

The morning of the Ravenscroft competition was different, though. Not because the nerves were gone. They weren’t. But something in how I had prepared and how I was thinking about what I was about to do had shifted. And that shift turned out to matter more than anything else I had ever tried.

In the months leading up to that competition, I hadn’t been chasing perfection. I hadn’t been trying to build the most technically impressive arrangements or outplay the other competitors. I had gone deep into the stories I wanted to tell. Every piece I prepared was built around a feeling, a moment, a conversation I wanted to have with whoever was in that room listening. The practice wasn’t about impressing judges. It was about having something genuine to say.

By the time I sat down at the piano, the noise in my head had quieted. I stopped thinking about the other competitors. I stopped thinking about whether I would make mistakes or whether my playing would measure up. I thought about the stories I was telling. I thought about the people in the room—everyone but the judges. And then I played.

After two rounds of performances, the awards ceremony came, and… I won.

I share that not because the outcome is the point, but because that morning crystallized something I had been slowly learning for years—something most conventional advice about stage fright never quite gets to. What follows is my honest point of view: what has helped, what hasn’t, and why I think the difference matters more than most people realize.

Getting Out of Your Own Way

The antidote isn’t more confidence. It isn’t more practice or eliminating the nerves altogether. (I was still sick to my stomach at 4 AM the morning of the Ravenscroft competition.) The antidote is redirection. It’s making a choice, long before you step on stage, to care more about what you’re giving than about how you’re being received. To care more about the music than about yourself.

That’s what shifted on that competition morning. I was still nervous, but I made a conscious decision not to think about myself. I wasn’t even really thinking about the notes. I was thinking about the stories I wanted to tell and the actual real-life people I was playing it for.

Stage fright isn’t something you conquer once and leave behind. It’s the practice of choosing, again and again, to get out of your own way and offer something real to the people who showed up to listen. That’s a philosophy that’s worth returning to every time you sit down at the piano.

→ If any of this resonated and you want to go deeper at the piano—that's exactly what I do. Visit FreedomAtThePiano.com.