Archived under: Inspiration & The Big Picture | Stress & anxiety
The “Head Edge” for Performances
Performance exams (juries) start later this week at ASU. To get you in the mood, the following passage from The Mind Gym by Gary Mack is an important reminder of the balance between practice and visualization.
The power of visualization and mental rehearsal has been demonstrated in dozens of research studies. If you take twenty athletes of equal ability and give ten mental training they will outperform the ten who received no mental training every time. This is what we call the head edge.
One interesting study involved college basketball players. For three months, one group shot free throws for one hour each day. Another group spent an hour each day thinking about shooting free throws. The third group shot baskets thirty minutes a day and spent thirty minutes visualizing the ball going through the hoop from the foul line. Which group, at the end of the study, do you think improved its free-throw shooting the most? The third group did. The imagery had as much impact on accuracy as shooting baskets.
Practice! But also take time, especially right toward the end of your preparation, to visualize the situation of your performance exam, to clearly visualize the details of it and it going well for you based on your preparation for it. It can give you the “head edge,” especially in the somewhat less familiar situation of playing solo literature for a jury.
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