“I had kind of a breakthrough. I started to feel like I was enjoying playing that piece and could imagine performing it successfully. But then last night I didn’t do any preparation at all before the concert… and it was awful.”

A professional cellist shared this with me during a recent session.

For several months she had been working on a piece that had a habit of tightening everything up. Her shoulders would creep up, her bow arm would stiffen, and the sound would turn thin and effortful right at the moments the music needed to open and sing.

We had been working with a simple mental preparation process before she played. Over time, something began to shift. The piece started to feel lighter under her fingers. Her bow moved more freely. The sound opened up, and instead of bracing for the thought spots, she actually began to enjoy them.

For the first time, she could imagine performing the piece and trusting that her body would cooperate.

Then came the performance.

She was excited, and because things had been going so well, she decided to skip the preparation and just dive in.

Within seconds, the old pattern rushed back. Her shoulders tightened, her hands felt clumsy, and the music that had been flowing so easily in practice suddenly felt forced and uncomfortable again.

But instead of getting discouraged, she immediately saw what had happened.

“I got the right sensation, and then I focused on that,” she said. “And as soon as I focused on the sensation, it wasn’t happening anymore. Because I wasn’t focusing on the source of my creativity anymore – I was focusing on the effect.”

That realization made this experience incredibly valuable.

She saw clearly that her real breakthrough wasn’t the pleasant feeling of ease or the beautiful sound that had appeared over the last weeks. Those were simply the results.

The real change had come from the process she had been using beforehand, the way she was thinking and preparing before she played.

The moment she stopped doing that process and tried to recreate the good feelings and technique directly, she started overthinking and everything collapsed.

In other words, she had briefly treated the breakthrough as a destination… when in reality it was the natural result of a reliable way of working.

The process ITSELF is the breakthrough.

Have you ever had a moment like this in your playing, where something worked beautifully one day and then seemed to disappear the next?

If you have performance anxiety, how do you think this might relate to your experience, and can you start seeing things from a different perspective now?

I'd love to hear about your experience!