Playing Scared (19 page)

That was the positive aspect of what kept her going. There was also the negative perfectionist part that made her ruminate on every one of her mistakes, like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime. Had she closed her outside leg coming out of that last turn? Had she moved up to the jump too quickly? Had she lost her sense of presence? The errors would torment her. She would play them out for weeks after a less than perfect competition.

If her horse spooked at the rustle of a windswept candy wrapper, she could move on. Horses can be high-anxiety creatures, ever sensitive to their riders. In the equine world, it’s a given that a horse can feel, see, and hear your fear. Colier could always forgive the horse. It was when the error was of her own making that she couldn’t forgive. Equestrians are known to be “supreme perfectionists,” given to flaunting “that fierceness, that toughness,” expected of riders. “There’s a certain level of expectation we have of ourselves,” Colier said. “Perfectionism comes out of a great need to say something about who you are fundamentally. When we make mistakes, we’re not the person we need to be … But yes, I do think it makes you better. Yes, it does make you not accept mediocrity. So it is good for that … It makes you better, it makes you show up more. But the suffering that goes into that is extreme. What I put myself through, that level of self-attack, it’s very painful. There’s no
no
with perfectionists. You are not allowed any excuses. If you didn’t sleep the night before, if you’re sick—nothing applies to you.”

Colier never completely banished the perfectionist within, but she managed to find some compassion for her suffering and sadness. Now, when she works with Olympic hopefuls, she tells them with authority that being afraid to make mistakes actually creates mistakes. If you can’t try new things, you can’t get better. If you can’t get better, you can’t become great. An obsession with perfection stunts growth.

One of the most freeing statements I heard about perfectionism came from Gwendolyn Mok, a pianist who has performed on the BBC and in many of the world’s leading concert halls, both in recital and as a soloist with major orchestras, including London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. In 2002, she made an acclaimed recording of Ravel’s complete piano works.

In June 2013, I drove up to Berkeley to play for her. It was just a couple of months before my own concert, and I wanted her feedback on the way I was approaching Debussy’s
Reflets dans l’eau
. It had presented a challenge to my technical abilities, with its liquid surges and waterfalls of notes. I was just beginning to feel comfortable with the piece and hoped she might have some insight. “The worst thing that anyone can do in a concert is play accurately,” she said right away, surprising me. “It’s boring as all hell.” Mok wasn’t advocating sloppy playing; she was referring to the broader concept of mastery, an umbrella word that encompasses dynamics, phrasing, gesture, meaning. I was too intent on playing the right notes, she said. I was supposed to be “playing water,” but my hand gestures were too stiff. They needed to be more balletic, to mirror the reflectiveness and liquid flow of water. If perfection
was the goal, she said, a computer could be programmed to play the notes, rhythms, and dynamics of the piece.

She remembered a concert she had seen many years ago, given by two elderly musicians, the violinist Zoltán Székely and the cellist Gabor Magyar. They had made their names as young men with the legendary Hungarian String Quartet. The night Mok saw them, they performed a Brahms piano trio with a pianist, “and they couldn’t play as well as they used to. But every note, gesture, and phrase was loaded with meaning. They were so determined to communicate that you soon forgot that, intonation-wise, it wasn’t perfect, that they couldn’t do some of the technical stuff. By the end of that concert everyone was in tears. I’ll never forget it. To me, that was the beginning of my understanding that playing note-perfect was not the goal.”

I had lashed myself to the image of a note-perfect performance. That was still my goal when I drove out to Ron Thompson’s farmhouse in Montpelier, Vermont, one afternoon. Thompson was a serial careerist, an unprepossessing Renaissance man who began his professional life as a Juilliard-trained classical trumpet player when, in 1961, at age nineteen, he joined the National Symphony Orchestra. He later quit music to become an electrical engineer, then changed careers again when he was fifty, becoming an Adlerian psychologist. He knew all about the self-inflicted wounds of perfectionism; they ran like an extra chromosome through his family line. He grew up with a grandmother who was fluent in twelve languages and called the local radio station to correct the announcer if he mispronounced a word.

When he was a young trumpet player, Thompson’s method was to beat himself into perfection and then practice some more. Even after three seasons with the National Symphony, he still suffered stage fright. It turned his saliva into a dry, ropy substance that dulled the vibrations between lips and mouthpiece, distorting his embouchure. Like all trumpet players, he had his tricks: Biting into a jalapeño pepper or a lemon before a performance usually did the job. But there is no such thing as a quiet mistake on the trumpet. The performance schedule of the National Symphony was grueling—about two hundred concerts a season—and the pressure was unrelenting. Six hundred performances and he still had stage fright? He blamed his nerves on the audience. He hated “the goddamn audience.”

Ron Thompson
(Patricia Lyon-Surrey, Fine Art Photography)

Sometime later, during a performance with the Santa Barbara (California) Symphony, Thompson had a chance to look at the audience from a different angle. The orchestra was playing the Ralph Vaughan Williams Cello Concerto, which is scored without trumpets. Thompson wandered up to the balcony of the Old Mission Santa Barbara, where he looked down on the audience he so despised. What he saw was a sea of gray-haired patrons, half-asleep and snoring in their chairs. “This audience I was looking at bore
no
resemblance to the audience I was thinking of from my first trumpet chair. There was one older man, I’ll never forget him, who was taking care of his disabled son. And I asked myself, Who is the real audience? The real audience is within me.”

Create your own audience, he urged me now. Take it with you wherever you play. Love yourself into excellence by cultivating an internal audience that’s loving. I had been sitting at his dining room table for hours, long finished with the Caesar salad that he and his wife, Maggie, had set down for me. They were vegans, and though he insisted that they loved to cheat, they didn’t cheat that afternoon. While I ate chicken, they nibbled on tofu. “Don’t get stuck on perfection,” he cautioned. “There is no such thing. In masterful performing, you understand the presence of error, and what you do first is learn from error and—right from the beginning—forgive the error.”

It took Thompson years to learn that lesson. As a professional musician, he had disclaimed any and all error; in his mind, there was no room for a mistake. When he became an engineer, however, he learned that while a product had to be manufactured for the greatest possible precision, it nevertheless
had to be designed for error or, as it is known in engineering, tolerance. In his work as an electrical engineer, he supervised and monitored the production of high-speed generator flywheels. The design tolerances were microscopic: 30 microns, or 30 millionths of a meter. “You design for errors. You always acknowledge for error, but you go for excellence. There’s no such thing as perfection—in all systems. In the real world, there’s always errors, always shortcomings.”

Thompson quoted his friend and mentor, Charlie Schlueter, the former principal trumpet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who chortled over having once missed a low C—the easiest note on the trumpet—in front of some five thousand people at the Tanglewood Music Festival. “I had to fight the urge to slap my knee and laugh out loud,” Schlueter told him. “It’s the funniest damn thing that ever happened to me.”

That
, said Thompson, is playfulness. “You absolutely forgive yourself for every error—because you absolutely know there’s going to be another. That frees a person to take a risk.” He paused. “How else can I help you?”

By now, the sun was setting over the Green Mountains. Thompson brought me into his living room, where three trumpets were sitting on their stands. He picked up the smallest of the three, a piccolo trumpet, and began playing from Johannes Prentzel’s Sonata no. 75 for trumpet, bassoon, and basso continuo. His cheeks reddened as he stood before me, playing the baroque cadenza, a whirl of spiraling melodies that shot past at flywheel speed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was breathtaking. Thompson wasn’t a perfectionist. He was an artist.

Martha Gutierrez, as I'll call her, is the kind of person who reads an e-mail five times before clicking the send button. A self-described perfectionist, she is not just good at everything she tries her hand at; she's the best. When she discovered that she wasn't able to speak in public, she could hardly believe it. It happened in her first semester of law school, when she was in the middle of presenting an argument against the death penalty. One minute, she was glancing down at a document, preparing to make her next cogent point. The next, she looked up, noticed six of her fellow students peering in through a glass door, and her throat clamped shut. She—a straight-A student and four-time class president, whose hand was always first in the air whenever a teacher asked a question—turned mute.

In the years that followed, she never knew when it would happen next. There were times she could deliver a wedding toast or make a presentation before a group of lobbyists, no problem. And then there were the times, just as frequent, that her voice shrank and vanished. In 2010, she was promoted in
her job as staff liaison to a trade association in Washington, D.C. But she didn't celebrate; she panicked. Her boss wanted her to shine, and there was no mistaking what he meant: bigger presentations, more important conferences, wider exposure. Her house of cards was shaking. Always the good student, she cast around for help and found the Stagefright Survival School in Alexandria, Virginia, which promised help for “
extreme
fear of public speaking.” Its cofounder, Burton Rubin, was, like Gutierrez, a lawyer who had built his career around the avoidance of public speaking.

Rubin's personal knowledge of stage fright began in grade school when, as the narrator of a school play, he became so immersed in the spectacle that he missed his cue and blew his lines. “I was having such a good time watching the play, I forgot I was supposed to be in it,” he said. In his eight-year-old mind, he had ruined the whole production, and though his classmates forgot all about it, he never did. Rubin spent the rest of his school years with his head down, hiding at the back of the classroom, praying that he would not be called on. Mostly, he succeeded. When he graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1969, few of his professors recognized his face or knew his name. Over the next twenty years, he tried psychotherapy, cognitive behavior therapy, hypnosis, biofeedback, and group therapy—all to ease his terror of public speaking. Nothing worked as well as avoidance, which is why, instead of practicing law, he went into legal publishing, a field in which he assumed he would never have to speak in public again.

Over the years, Rubin spent so much time in group therapy that he became one of the group's leader. It was an intensive
program for people with a variety of phobias, including fear of heights and enclosed spaces. The approach was based on the theory of contextual therapy: If a client was afraid of elevators, Rubin's job would be to ride up and down an elevator with him. If a person had a fear of bridges, Rubin would get in a car with him and drive across a mile-long span. But when it came to public speaking—
his
fear—there was nothing. In 1984, he found David Charney, a Washington-area psychiatrist with a specialty in anxiety disorders. With Charney's counseling, Rubin began to make headway. “It was a catalytic process of my being able to talk with him on a professional basis, with him being able to address it from the outside and me seeing it from the inside,” he said. “It made me able to manage my symptoms so I could function.” Charney taught him to quiet his internal fear-talk. “You can always engage in that thinking that will provoke the response. It's the self-conscious thought process. As soon as you become conscious of yourself, focus on yourself, you've put yourself in danger. We have to give people a way to prevent them from thinking about themselves.”

A few years later, Rubin and Charney founded the Stagefright Survival School—Charney lecturing on and dealing with medical issues, including the prescribing of beta-blockers and Xanax; Rubin leading classes of mostly lawyers, diplomats, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, physicians, and teachers. The meetings were sometimes reminiscent of a twelve-step program, and the overlap was perhaps more than coincidental. According to Rubin, “One tragedy in the early days was to see that before they reached us, some of our clients turned to alcohol as a way to self-medicate their performance anxiety.”