Nicki Kennedy Voicecast: Conversations around voice, stories, sound and identity

Facing Performance Anxiety With ACT

• Nicki Kennedy • Season 1 • Episode 5

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We explore how Acceptance and Commitment Coaching helps performers and leaders work with anxiety rather than fight it, building psychological flexibility through mindfulness, 'cognitive defusion', values and committed action. Clinical psychologist Dr Dave Juncos, shares research, metaphors and tools that reduce struggle and increase choice under pressure.

• Defining ACT and why acceptance beats control
• The core processes and skills
• Defusion techniques that unhook sticky thoughts
• Values‑led committed action on stage and at work
• Metaphors that make complex ideas usable
• Coaching versus therapy: boundaries and referrals
• Maladaptive perfectionism and the shame loop
• Self as context and identity beyond outcomes
• New research linking flexibility and higher grades
• Practical prep for non‑performers facing high stakes
• The choice point for daily toward moves
• Normalising anxiety across the arts

Drop us a line, be in touch, and until we meet again, I hope that your voice finds the space it needs to be really heard


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Speaker 1:

If you're somebody who suffers from performance anxiety, whether that's music performance anxiety as a performing musician or an actor, or whether you're somebody in the business world who has to stand and speak at meetings or at big events and conferences, then this is the episode for you. We're going to have a really good look at one particular model that is having very, very solid effects in helping people with performance anxiety. And it's known as the acceptance and commitment coaching model. It comes from a therapy intervention, and I'm going to be talking to a clinical psychologist now about the roots of this intervention and how it works. So tune in and enjoy. This is VoiceCast with Nikki Kennedy, exploring voice in every sense, the sound you make, the story you tell, and the presence you bring. I'm Nikki Kennedy, your host, a classical singer, vocal health and rehabilitation specialist, and an executive coach. And my work is about helping people transform, find new directions, get unstuck, and express themselves in ways that feel authentic and true. Together we'll look at how your voice and your presence can shape change in work, in life and in yourself. Today's guest is Dave Juncos joining us from Philadelphia. Dave is a clinical psychologist whose work is well known in the fields of acceptance and commitment therapy and psychological flexibility, and particularly as they relate to musicians with performance anxiety. And our paths first crossed when I trained with him in ACT, which is acceptance and commitment training, for performers. And his approach has honestly stayed with me ever since. He's the co-author of Act for Musicians, which is a guide for using acceptance and commitment training to enhance performance, overcome performance anxiety, and improve well-being. Since doing that training, I've used these tools not only with singers, but increasingly with actors and business people preparing for high-stakes moments, and actually with anybody seeking greater confidence, clarity, steadiness in moments that matter. And I use the work in my own life too. And I wanted to bring Dave into this conversation to share some of his insights. We'll be speaking today mainly through the lens of music performance anxiety. But if you're a business leader, educator, communicator of any kind, don't switch off because these principles are profoundly useful far beyond the stage. Welcome, Dave.

Speaker:

Thank you so much, Nicki, for having me. I'm super excited to be here.

Speaker 1:

I thought perhaps you could start by giving us an idea of what ACT is.

Speaker:

Sure. ACT is part of the third wave, the more recent mindfulness and acceptance-focused wave of behavioral therapies that have been popular in the last 15-20 years or so. So chances are if you've been in therapy in that time, you've probably received some mindfulness-focused therapy or acceptance-focused therapy. So ACT fits in with those. And it gets you to focus on a set of skills that teach you to mindfully accept your symptoms of distress, whether they're performance anxiety if you're a performing musician or fears of being an imposter if you're someone else who's performed at height stakes and struggle less with these symptoms essentially. And for that reason, it's different than its predecessor wave of therapies, the second wave, the cognitive wave of behavioral therapies that were super popular back in the 80s and 90s, where you're taught to identify symptoms of distress and do something to deliberately lower them. So if you have distorted thoughts, you want to recognize how they're distorted and replace them with more reality-based thoughts. If you've got symptoms of anxiety, you want to identify them as such and do whatever you can to lower physiological arousal symptoms, perhaps in the middle of a performance. So ACT teaches you you don't have to do that. In fact, you can just relate more neutrally to these symptoms through acceptance and willingness and saying yes to them occurring to you rather than saying no and trying to avoid them, while also doing what matters too. And that's where ACT is very much a values-focused intervention. It teaches you plenty of skills to identify and clarify what you value as a performer, as a human being, and then to will yourself to engage in that kind of behavior more and more often during your performances or during your life. So that way, if you happen to do that while nervous, you happen to be performing in a high-stakes performance, it's nerve-wracking. But if you're doing something valuable and meaningful at the same time, then that sort of flexibility is useful because it's still you're still getting to where you you need to go in that moment.

Speaker 1:

So it's a lot about actually coming to terms with and accepting the discomfort and living in discomfort, but bringing your attention back to them the thing that matters to you. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And you obviously are a clinical psychologist. You have been working in uh in wider arenas, but but what actually drew you into working with musicians and performers?

Speaker:

That's a good question that I get asked often. Uh I am one myself. I was bit by that bug at an early age. I am a songwriter, had performed solo, has been had performed as part of a band, doing my own music, doing friends' music, and just having a blast back in the day. It's been at least 20 years now since I performed live, I hate to say. But yeah, just grew up in a musical household, took piano lessons from an early age, took voice lessons, clarinet, guitar, the the whole nine yards here. Uh never studied it professionally though. I I don't know why. Um I I was always also interested in psychology too. So I kind of had those equal aims for my career. And I just happened to pick psychology, but I always wanted to keep one one foot in that world with musicians. And this is my my way of doing that, essentially. I I don't want to give up on music entirely as uh not a career, but just a big passion of mine here. So getting to work with musicians is a labor of love for me, keeps me connected.

Speaker 1:

And it's very valuable for those musicians. I know that a lot of uh musicians are benefiting from your research and from your work, myself included, actually, my own. I I use these skills, as I said, in my own life as well as for clients of mine. So going back to the the actual framework of ACT and how how it might relate to a musician perhaps who's going through difficulties with uh performance, as we all do at some point in a career if we're doing this professionally. My understanding of ACT is that there are really six core processes that you use to support that psychological flexibility that you need. Could you just give us a brief overview of how that works, what they are?

Speaker:

Sure, sure, sure. So you can split those six into two. Uh, the first half is the mindfulness and acceptance-based processes that teach you not so surprisingly to be more mindfully aware of your symptoms of distress and not struggle with them as much. So you have actual mindfulness exercises that are built into the ACT protocol. It's not as heavy into the meditation world as perhaps other interventions are, but you learn some framework, you know, to be more mindful and more aware of the present moment. There's a huge part of it, as you can imagine from the namesake here, acceptance and commitment therapy. You spend a lot of time accepting your thinking, accepting your thoughts, so you can relate neutrally to it rather than relating in like an adversarial or negative way towards your thinking, towards your thoughts, um, towards your emotions. And that ability is is key and it doesn't happen overnight. Uh so you know, forming a new relationship towards your symptoms of anxiety, for example, so you're more willing to do things with them present, as opposed to more avoidant of them or things that trigger them, it takes time. It takes um perhaps weeks, maybe even longer, to develop that kind of side of yourself that is willing to be anxious more and more often, right, in your personal life. So uh that that doesn't happen overnight. Whereas there are some skills that are the part of the mindfulness stuff that actually can happen more quickly and they're more language-based too. So these are the the diffusion skills that basically teach you to distance or decenter yourself from your thinking. So that way you're not so reactive to your thinking as well as to your your symptoms of distress, too. And you can have a ton of fun with that too. There, there's uh word repetition exercises, there's exercises where we ask folks, including singers, to sing their thoughts out loud, you know, just to relate to them differently, to hear them differently. So they're not so gripping on one's attention anymore and they kind of lose their literal sting on on you as well. So that's the first step.

Speaker 1:

But if you have questions, so that that's almost like giving your thoughts a character of their own and lightening them up.

Speaker:

Yep, exactly. The best way I can frame that part is we hear scientists in the way they speak so objectively and neutrally about their object of study. A cardiovascular surgeon will describe a cardiovascular event, meaning, you know, some kind of heart attack or something like that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

A NASA scientist here in the States will talk about a landing event for, you know, a rover on the moon or something like that. Well, similarly, psychologists will describe mental events occurring in the mind rather than reality, but it's just stuff happening essentially. If you can relate to it very objectively like that, then it doesn't, it doesn't rule over you as much.

Speaker 1:

So you're putting a little bit of distance between yourself and your thoughts. And I think the thing that really struck me about Act and starting to work in this, which is something I I'm constantly using very um obviously, uh, is is just even recognizing thoughts that come into your mind, noticing that you're having the thought in the first place. We live very bound up. Yeah. We live so bound up with our thoughts, don't we? And it's really, it's really something when you just start to realize some of the stuff that you're saying to yourself that's coming into your head. Is there one of those areas that you think is the most transformative for performers, or is it all part of one thing that has to be dealt with?

Speaker:

I I would say the acceptance part is probably the most transformative, meaning that looking back on the work I've done with student musicians, just as an example, in one study that I done in particular 2015, good lord, it's been 10 years now, um, where uh I selected a group of nine, but there was only seven who finished the study. So we'll just say seven students who had performance anxiety, and they had it pretty bad too. I assessed them, their severity was pretty high, so they really needed the help there. And after learning willingness exercises, acceptance exercises, diffusion work, mindfulness work, about halfway through the treatment, so around session six or so, you'd hear it from them. They'd say things like, I'm looking forward to my performances now because it doesn't feel like so dreadful of a thing to do. In fact, I'm looking excited to feeling nervous and to having anxiety. And that sort of transformative relationship is predictable. It happens when you're learning acceptance and willingness skills through the ACT model, where you are no longer relating in an adversarial role with these experiences. They're just uncomfortable, but they're also kind of exciting because you get to practice what you've been learning all of a sudden. So that is truly a transformative relationship that is quite predictable in the ACT model. It tends to come through acceptance work.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing. And I think if we have listeners who are themselves struggling with performance anxiety, they may feel that that's an unlikely place to arrive. Oh, yeah, that feeling of looking forward to a performance if they're gripped with anxiety and fear. So that's a really reassuring thing to think that this way of working can bring that uh sense of almost looking forward to that little bit of discomfort around nerves.

Speaker:

And it's a hard sell, as you can imagine. At first, uh some people through through fusion, which is again, it's an unhelpful process when we get too reactive or too fused, you know, too hooked in. These are all synonyms with our thinking. It's easy to believe it, it's hard to believe otherwise, right? But if you're on on the outskirts of your thinking and just kind of noticing it and getting in the habit of noticing it, you might just see, okay, that thought just keeps popping up. The disbelief skeptical thought is there. Okay, I'm just gonna be with that thought. I'm gonna say yes to it and not try and get rid of it and just see what happens.

Speaker 1:

Live with it and and know that it it is just a thought ultimately, isn't it? We're gonna take a short break now. And having discussed that whole matter of thoughts and identifying them and noticing them and somehow decoupling from them a little bit, we have to think about where we are going to focus our attention. And even if we're going to learn to live with that little bit of anxiety, we're going to learn to accept it, we need to think about what we do want to turn our attention to. And here's where Dave explains to us something around our values-led committed action that can really help us turn this chip round. So, going on then from those that cognitive diffusion that you've described, that kind of living with the uh living with the discomfort, you talked earlier about values and um committed action. Tell us more about that.

Speaker:

Sure. So that is the second half that I was alluding to, the act model there. And this is really the fun part of the act model because you get to put your own signature stamp on the work and doing values work here. So it's just simply identifying what you value, identifying and you know, making concrete, making actionable things that you value. And I can give an example of that's too nebulous there. So if you're someone who values as a musician, you value expressing yourself emotionally. Being anxious is a great moment to express some kind of emotion there, typically anxiety. So if you can relate to that moment as not a dreadful thing, but yet a moment of potential expressivity, something that connects to you know who you want to be more and more as a singer, then it just transforms to a dreadful thing to a challenging thing, but also slightly exciting thing here, too. So uh the values work is key. And it's also key then to will yourself to make that commitment to want to do more and more behavior that's in line with your values um within your performances or within your within your job. So that way they become things to look forward to, they become things that are more personally relevant to you. And I'll I'll say it this way too. Um I'd like to use a lot of metaphor in my work. If you can imagine yourself as like computer software, right? And the way you are currently, let's just call that the 1.0 version of yourself. Let's say, you know, Dave 1.0, Nikki 1.0 can do certain things but can't do everything. And uh Nikki 1.0 can't can't sing while nervous. She just that's not part of her programming, right? This is where the values and committed action work on top of the mindfulness and acceptance work is very useful because that evolved version of you that can sing while nervous, even with your heart, you know, thumping out of its chest like that, is possible if you just train yourself to do such a thing there. So that 2.0 version of yourself is really like an evolved programming, you know, that you can install into your operating system there.

Speaker 1:

So that's a great cool way to talk about it, actually. I I love that. I use kind of software versions in a different way in my training, but I've never thought of it in this way, and I think that's really lovely. I'm gonna nick that if that's it.

Speaker 2:

Sure, of course.

Speaker 1:

I've already stolen many things from you. Uh, it's gonna be added to the list. So actually, uh something I wanted to ask you about. You talked about metaphor, and I think that that is one of the most powerful aspects of the work for me is working using metaphor, because I think that, as you said earlier, to describing things as events or as in in scientific language isn't always very helpful for people. And the use of metaphor has, in my practice anyway, been very helpful in the transformative moment. When you ask somebody who comes back to see you three weeks after a session and you say what landed, very often the first thing that comes out is a metaphor that either they or I have found in that session. So, why is metaphor so central to the work, do you think?

Speaker:

It's a good question. I believe it's because there's such a focus on verbal thinking within the ACT model and how we can get too hooked in with verbal thinking. So we want to just like remove ourselves from that mode more often when learning and when applying these interventions as ACT practitioners here. So if there's a way to teach that doesn't rely on language, because language is something you can excessively get fused to, right? Then we're certainly going to rely on that. So ACT is very open-minded with its use of metaphors too. Uh I've certainly added to the list of them. I've come up with a handful, and that's the cool thing about ACT is that they're not only pro-metaphor, but you know, they're very creative and welcoming of your own personal metaphor usage too. So if you feel that you understand the concept, you want to teach it through metaphor, I think it's gonna stick because it's not it's not something that you grasp linguistically as much.

Speaker 1:

So, do you have a metaphor that you return to again and again when you're working with musicians?

Speaker:

Absolutely. This might be hard to do without a camera, but I'll just describe what I'm doing here because it's a physical one. You've seen me make this goofy gesture right here. So, what I'm doing is is a good metaphor for physical flexibility, right? Rubbing the belly with the left hand, tapping the forehead with the right. This is a great metaphor for psychological flexibility too. And I use this time and time again. So I tell people, imagine with your left hand, you have your symptoms of anxiety and you're watching me rub the belly as such here. Bear with me. And let's say I cannot control when those symptoms happen or what they do. They just kind of come up and have a life of their own. But with my right hand, this becomes a symbol of my volitional energy over which I have control. And with that energy and power, would I rather do this? Which is me, you know, trying to stop the left hand from doing what it's doing, right? Trying to stop the anxiety, trying to stop the thinking from what it's doing, or through mindfulness, acceptance, and diffusion work, just simply let that stuff be while building in patterns of behavior that broaden your skill set, that broaden your values-based actions that are meaningful to you. And and as I'm saying these words, I'm tapping my forehead here and really focusing on what I'm doing. So if you can do these two things at once, feel anxious while engaging in behavior that's really personally meaningful and relevant, then you are a psychologically flexible person.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so if we have somebody who's wanting to sing and we treat the hand that's tapping the forehand as being the performance, then they are engaging with the performance and and just letting that discomfort be there while the other hand rubs the tummy. And as I think about that and I try to push away that other hand, of course I've stopped being engaged in the performance. And I think that's a really nice physical, embodied way of describing that process. So there are a couple of others which I have found really useful with people. One is um seeing the thoughts that arrive and watching them pass like leaves on a river. That one's really stayed with me, and I find that that ability to just notice something and almost watch it float past, allow it to move on without getting involved with it, is has been a really powerful uh metaphor for me.

Speaker:

I wish I could take credit for that one, but I uh I don't know who originated that one. That is a a central idea within mindfulness. Yeah, the idea of liaison is streaming.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean I suspect you can see you'll find it back in the Tao in uh Taoism or Buddhism very early. That's one of the things that's also really struck me as I've gone further into acceptance and commitment training and the way that I use it, because for people listening, of course, Dave is a clinical psychologist. I'm not a clinical psychologist. I'm using tools that come from a therapeutic model, but I'm using them in a training way. And it's really, I think, a fantastic thing that people like me, and you, if you are somebody who trains other people, that you can have access to tools that come from psychotherapy world, but in a really safe way. And I suppose actually that brings me on to a question around scope of practice and boundaries. How does that work for people like me who are using these? You know, we are we're treading tricky waters when you're looking at somebody's anxiety. I'm not qualified to approach somebody's anxiety as a clinical practitioner. So how do I manage that pathway?

Speaker:

Sure. It's an excellent question that comes up all the time in my work with training singing teachers to essentially replicate what I'm doing as a therapist here. So uh first and foremost, you need to realize you're not functioning as a psychotherapist. You're doing performance coaching-related interventions, you're using work from an evidence-based coaching model rather than an evidence-based psychotherapy model. ACT is it exists in both versions there. And when used non-clinic week, we call it ACT coaching or act training rather than act as a psychotherapy. And the thing that helps you stay within your lane, so to speak, is recognizing that there are things that fall within within your jurisdiction, uh, like performance-related anxiety, performance-related perfectionism. You as a singing teacher are going to witness that in your students time after time after time. So you're going to want to make some kind of intervention, but you need to be competent at what you're doing simultaneously. So before talking about competence, I'll just quickly share up that point that it's not psychotherapy. It's dealing with psychological issues, yes, uh, but also of a performance nature. So that's your lane here. And as long as you're competent to address just those areas, not things that fall outside of that, like depression or substance abuse or schizophrenia and stuff like that. That's not performance related. Those are, you know, harder problems that require a proper referral there.

Speaker 1:

And so at that point, we need to be signposting and referring on to somebody else. Absolutely. Yes.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

We're going to take another short break now, having talked about those ethical boundaries around this work for somebody like me, uh, or for you, if you are working with people who are struggling with performance anxiety. At what point we need to draw that line and refer on to another professional. But here in this next part, we're going to talk about perfectionism. I know perfectionism might seem like quite a good thing. It drives us to high standards and it makes us do our very, very best. But that, which is known as adaptive perfectionism, can tip over into something known as maladaptive perfectionism. And in maladaptive perfectionism, we hold ourselves to such high standards that we start to fear making mistakes, or we punish ourselves and feel shame when we haven't done well enough. And that kind of perfectionism can really hold us back in these high-stakes moments. You mentioned perfectionism, and I think that's a massive question for me. What I've noticed in the last five years since I've been using this work with with students and with clients of all kinds is that perfectionism seems to be one of the very frequent uh menaces in terms of anxiety around performance. Can you just tell us something about that?

Speaker:

There's a very good general definition of perfectionism by Brene Brown, who's uh an American shame researcher at University of Texas at Austin, I believe. You've probably heard of her. She's a rock star. Yep. She's done TED Talks, the whole nine yards, yes. She says perfectionism is like a 20-ton shield that we carry around, intending to, you know, protect us from vulnerable making moments here, but really it's a thing that's getting in our way. It's preventing us from taking flight. And that really speaks to the burdensomeness of having maladaptive forms of perfectionism. It's hard. It's hard to keep on managing your performances, your practice at this very high level where you have these expectations that are probably excessive and unrealistic to not make mistakes ever, you know, and to show up at a certain time every day and to check off all the boxes that you want to be checking off here. It's very noble, but it is burdensome to just have that kind of rigid goal setting with yourself there. That usually it's the case people fall short of these high standards for themselves here. And that's when they suffer shame and they kind of berate themselves endlessly here. So when we talk about perfectionism, we're usually talking about the the bad version of it, the maladaptive as opposed to more adaptive versions of it. And it's the maladaptive one that correlates with performance anxiety that predicts disorder, that maintains disorder, that predicts and maintains a host of things, not even disorder behavior, too.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so so just to really clarify, so we're not saying that perfectionism is a bad thing. There is just a maladaptive version of it, which is where it starts to starts to hold us up in life. It starts to be a problem and get in the way of us doing what we want to do because we can't measure up to our own standards. Is that is that it?

Speaker:

That that's part of it, and there's even more features that are associated to maladaptive perfectionism. Uh a biggie that is worth mentioning is identifying with how you do in your performances and and kind of relating your sense of self to the outcomes of your performances and saying things like, Well, if I fail this performance, I am a failure. I am a bad musician because this one particular performance went bad. So thus I am bad. Whereas with the more adaptive forms, you you don't think so kind of narrowly like that. You think of yourself as offering a musical service. And if it's not going well, then oh well, it's not me that's on the line. It's not a referendum on me. It's just my services are not needed here. They weren't so good that day, right?

Speaker 1:

That's I think that's hugely powerful. And I I think, I mean, there will be people listening who for whom that will really resonate. I know for me it does. Uh there was a I remember there was a moment in my career when I was, I'd I got off to quite a good start, actually. I mean, I was I you know I was being represented and I had um some excellent work, but I wasn't really very happy with an element of the way I was singing, and I was I was really struggling and and I wasn't I couldn't seem to kind of I couldn't get this technical thing right and I couldn't make it work. And I I remember being I was working on an international stage with some incredibly good people, but I kept thinking, well, this isn't gonna last because I'm just I can't fix this thing and I'm just sooner or later I'm gonna get found out. And I I got to a point where I I thought okay, it's probably time to to to step away from this as a career. And and that there was a moment in that thinking when I just couldn't I couldn't imagine who I would be without that as my definition, as my label. I don't know if that's playing into that in some way, but there was it it's not quite perfectionism, but it's um it is identifying myself as the product, as the sing, as the singer, as the singing person, and not being able to identify with myself as a human being outside of that. And it was a really difficult moment, but actually it was a really good, it w it turned out to be a really good moment. Um and it was a moment that ultimately lightened things off for me and and and sort of unblocked some um some gateways. But but is that the same kind of thing or is that really a very different thing?

Speaker:

No, it's related. It it is self-evaluative thinking, essentially, that's responsible for that sense of imposter, you know, syndrome or shame that we feel in these high-stakes moments. And and basically what I'm what I mean by that is if you think of your mind as a big sky, um, you have these moment to moment thoughts that are kind of like small clouds that, you know, kind of linger for a little bit but come and go eventually. The the heavier clouds that just kind of stay around forever, right? Those are similar to these beliefs or these stories that we have about ourselves, as I am a failure, I am a musician, even. Yeah, I am this and that, you know, these stories that we think are ourselves. Uh, but just like if you look it up at the sky, you see these large clouds eventually will pass and you recognize them as such. They're not the sky, they're the clouds, right? Just like you, you are not yourself stories, even though they might be popping up all the time and you've identified with them, but they are just things in your sky, in your mental sky, essentially. And if you see them as such, if you play the observer of them, then it's easier to be flexible in their presence and not get so bogged down with what your mind is telling you in these moments, right?

Speaker 1:

So in the act tools that we have, in those six kind of core processes, that is known as uh I think self as context, isn't it?

Speaker:

It's that's the the observer self in particular. Yeah, playing the observer of your internal experiences rather than getting too caught up with them or too identified with them. If you can do that, you'll be a flexible version of yourself for sure.

Speaker 1:

And I'm really interested also, there's another word that keeps cropping up, and that's shame. So can you just tell us a bit more about what what is this? Why does shame play such a big part in this conversation?

Speaker:

It it is the sense that I am bad, and you can differentiate it from guilt. Guilt is I've done bad, whereas shame is I am the bad thing, right? And when we get so caught up with our self-stories and we're um, you know, even identified with them, if we have a lot of shame-based thinking or kind of excessively self-critical thinking, then there's so much room for that with musicians who have performance anxiety to get caught up with uh their their fault-based thinking. They're they're saying, I am at fault here, I am bad because I had performance anxiety, or because I didn't hit that high note, or I didn't um do what my teacher wanted me to do, and shame on me, essentially. So you see so much overlap between perfectionism, shame, performance anxiety, etc. here. Uh so it's very difficult to tease these things apart, which is why we often just interchangeably start eventually talking about shame or eventually start talking about perfectionism.

Speaker 1:

They turn up some somewhere along the line.

Speaker:

Yeah, yeah, they're all part of the same experience.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. It's really fascinating area, I think. I know that you've done some research. And are you publishing something quite soon? Is there anything around that that you wanted to share?

Speaker:

Uh yes, thank you for that question. Um I have a study coming out that's been under peer review for quite some time. So, you know, fingers crossed that it gets through the finish line here. It is about a questionnaire that measures psychological flexibility with both student and professional musicians. And it's really just a continuation or an adaptation of other existing questionnaires that do just that more clinically. But this is applied in a performance and practice context here with musicians. And something the audience might want to know, in particular musicians, we use this questionnaire to predict which students would get higher grades on a recently adjudicated music exam versus which students would get a lower grade. And I'm happy to report that if you compare this tool to other existing tools for measuring flexibility, those, i.e., that are more clinical. So for example, If you go see a psychologist, they give you just a typical emotional checklist. I'm talking about those types of questionnaires. Our new questionnaire was better at predicting and separating students who reported getting A's on a juried exam versus those who didn't get A's on a juried exam. Better than the other existing questionnaires. So for those students who report higher flexibility, there may very well be a relationship between them getting better grades on a performance-based music exam. And the cool thing about this is that this was actually replicated with another sample. I don't know if I told you that, but uh one of my colleagues made me aware that there's a master's student in Romania who has since translated this questionnaire into Romanian, gave it to another sample of music students there, and found it also did the same with them. It could statistically differentiate those who got A's from those who reported getting lower grades on an actual exam. Exam they just had the month prior, two months prior. So that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1:

That's really cool. And listeners, that is science happening right before our very eyes and ears. That is very exciting. So that actually. This is a a tool that is measuring or predicting psychological flexibility and it's managing very effectively to determine, according to psychological flexibility, who is going to do better in an exam situation. That's exactly it's really ultimately demonstrating that this is an effective tool for managing performance anxiety. And as I said, I use this in different ways and in different at different levels of depth with clients in all kinds of different areas. So we may we may have people listening who are from the business world and who have to stand up and perform. And one of the things I really notice about working in the business world rather than with my professional voice users and uh and singers is that people in the business community who have to stand up and sing in uh sing, they don't sing, they speak. When they have to speak or present, they might have to sing, they might have to sing um but they when they have to present in these high-stakes moments, they often approach it with very little in the way of a vocabulary to identify what's happening in their body, to identify any of the kind of you know, seasoned actors and singers, we have rituals, we have things we do before we go on stage, which evolve over an entire career. And that often does involve actually moments of stilling the mind, calming the mind. It involves checking in with your nervous system, calming down your nervous system, all of those things. And I do find that people in other communities who don't come from those performing backgrounds don't necessarily have that vocabulary. So a lot of my work with those people is just introducing them to the simple forms of, for example, just moments of mindfulness, even just doing things more slowly and noticing more in the world around them on the day of a performance, just simple, simple things like that.

Speaker:

I'm holding back a car for now, so I hope.

Speaker 1:

Yes, are you not gonna say anything? That's fine.

Speaker:

But um, yes. What you're saying is is is wonderful. Um I I suppose maybe I should just have a quick Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Speaker 1:

We'll take a break. We're coming to the end of the podcast now, and I just want to thank Dave because he turned up to do this podcast with raging flu or some such thing, and uh managed to get through it with very, very little interruption with coughs and splutters and so on, and has given us such a lot of wisdom and information. So just huge thanks. But let's finish off now with Dave's final reflections. So, Dave, is there one idea that you hope listeners will carry into their own practice, you know, whether they're singers uh or leaders or just you know people navigating their way through a difficult world?

Speaker:

Sure, the the idea behind the Act Model and related models is to be flexible and and to not push away from these moments of distress, but rather to make space for them internally. That's how I mean moments of distress, you know, internal thoughts, feelings, so on and so on and so forth here. Uh a useful metaphor, again, is what's called the choice point in ACT, which is kind of like a compass essentially that you can hold in your hand. And it could lead you towards the better version of yourself that you want to be, that is informed by your values and behaviors influenced by your values too, or you can move away from that person uh and and just be stuck in this kind of endless loop of trying to you know fix the feeling and get rid of the thoughts and so on and so forth here. So if you can think with that in mind and help yourself to sort your behaviors even throughout the day, is this an example of me moving towards or moving away? And the idea quite simply is to be moving towards uh things that bring value, things that bring meaning as a performer or as a professional so that way your well-being goes up and your your that 2.0 version of yourself is starting to concretize and actually take form.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so you're just bringing your awareness during the day to whether you're moving towards your valued action or whether you're moving away from it. I I'd like to end with just one final question, really, which is quite a difficult one. But what do you think the arts world still gets wrong about anxiety?

Speaker:

That's an excellent question. I would say it it shouldn't be the source of shame. It it shouldn't be the elephant in the room, the thing that we're trying to, you know, just label as uh a you thing, and you know, don't don't bring that towards me. It is excessively common. And in fact, it's very difficult to predict prevalence of performance anxiety within students and professionals because not just of the shame variable, but because it's it's too high. It's too high of a prevalence to really even be fully accurate on. Um so uh recognizing that you're not alone and to essentially come out of the closet, so to speak, and and bond with other folks who who are likely going through the same experience that you're going through, and to use that as a link to form a connection with other performers and other professionals rather than uh view this as you know a reason to be hiding yourself away from the world and to be feeling shame here. That's what the performance world needs to get get on board with it. It's not something in in sports psychology, it's rampantly discussed. Yeah, anxiety, sure, you know, it's not not that big of a deal. We'll we'll help you through it here. So we should take a pagia as our book.

Speaker 1:

Yes, we are you know, we're talking about that both in the physical realms of vocal health and you know, as a as a voice specialist, we have this thing that people hide vocal injury because there's a bit of stigma around it. People judge you will they uh whereas an athlete who's pulled a muscle or had a tendon problem, it is what it is. And and I think that so what you're saying is we just need to be sharing and be open about these things, and the more open the more people are, the more normalized it will become, knowing that there are these ways that we can approach performance anxiety and actually learn to live effectively with it and therefore it will be decreasing in some way. It will it's its grip on you is what decreases.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Dave, it's been fantastic to talk to you. Thank you for joining me on VoiceCast.

Speaker:

My pleasure, my pleasure.

Speaker 1:

And it's lovely to see you because of course I can see you in the camera, so that's great.

Speaker:

Thank you so much, Nikki. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, I look forward to hearing the final product here and continuing the conversation too.

Speaker 1:

Thank you very much. You've been listening to VoiceCast with Nikki Kennedy. For me, voice has always been more than just sound. It's presence, connection, music, transformation. I hope this episode has offered something to carry with you into your own conversations and your own story. So drop us a line, be in touch, and until we meet again, I hope that your voice finds the space it needs to be really heard.