The Inner Game of Tennis (or Trombone, or Trumpet, or Guitar, or Sitar . . . Whatever) #reading #music #musiceducation

I highly recommend that any musician read W. Timothy Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis. While it is a book on the game of tennis, it deals with the mental hurdles of any sport/art and how to overcome performance anxiety. To apply it to your specific sport/instrument, you merely substitute your instrument every time the word tennis is written. Sure, you have to be a little more creative than that at times, but you quickly get the hang of adapting the book as you go. With possibly oversimplifying the process, the main gist is that as a player, you must slowly program yourself to do something right a few times visually and aurally and then trust the body to make the right adjustments in order to (to learn how to) realise this action in real time. There should be no judgement; just observation. Let the body learn on its own, as you know what to do. Trust yourself. You always hear people say that they perform much better in rehearsal (practice) than they do in performance. This is because there is more pressure and one tends to get in his/her own way during a gig. With less obstruction (mental and physical), the body can do what it was programmed to do. The other great thing about this book is that it is concise and you can polish it off in short order and feel good that you accomplished something. :) So good ahead, pick it up and do some good for yourself.