A performance psychologist whose work has helped countless musicians.
Project Jumpstart’s theme for October is “Finding Your Happy Place,” with the goal of helping students to become more mindful and to gain more confidence and security in their fields. With this in mind, we reached out to IU alumnus Noa Kageyama of The Bulletproof Musician, a performance psychologist whose writing on performance anxiety and mindful practicing has become an invaluable resource for musicians across the globe.
Born in Marysville, Ohio, performance psychologist Noa Kageyama is on the faculty at Juilliard and is the performance psychology coach for the New World Symphony. Kageyama has degrees from Oberlin (BA, psychology) and Juilliard (MM, violin performance) and studied with Stephen Clapp, Ronald Copes, Franco Gulli, Paul Kantor, Masao Kawasaki, Roland and Almita Vamos, and Donald Weilerstein before making the leap to psychology. He received his MS and PhD in counseling and counseling psychology from Indiana University.
Kageyama specializes in teaching performing artists how to utilize sport psychology principles to more consistently demonstrate their full abilities under pressure. He has conducted workshops at institutions including Northwestern University, New England Conservatory, Peabody, Eastman, and the U.S. Armed Forces School of Music. He has taught at programs such as the Starling-DeLay Symposium, the Perlman Music Program, and the National Orchestral Institute, and for organizations like the Music Teachers’ National Association and the National Association of Teachers of Singing.
Kageyama has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Musical America, Strings Magazine, Strad, and Lifehacker. He maintains a private coaching practice and writes a performance psychology blog, The Bulletproof Musician, which has more than 100,000 monthly readers.
THE INTERVIEW
PJ: You talk on your website about how a class led by a sport psychologist opened up your eyes to new ways of approaching performance anxiety and practicing. What made you decide to put down your violin and pursue performance psychology as a career?
NK: It was a few things that happened over the course of about a year. I took Don Greene’s performance psychology class in spring semester. Which was fortuitous timing, because I knew I would be participating in the Nielsen Competition that fall.
But despite having nothing else to do all summer, I couldn’t get myself to practice. So when competition day came, I went into the first round very much underprepared. Yet the mental skills I had learned helped me manage my nerves and stay focused, and I ended up making it to the second round. Of course, I was even less prepared for the second round – like, my Bach wasn’t quite memorized, and out of desperation, I kept my CD player on endless repeat all throughout the night as I slept, hoping that would somehow work it into my brain. Alas, I ended up having a small memory slip and a few other glitches, but once again, I was able to play far better than I should have.
A few months later, I was chatting with some friends I played in a quartet with after a gig, and our conversation turned to what we’d do if we won the lottery. Once we got past the obvious (“buy a Strad and Ferrari”), I was surprised that my friends’ plans all involved music. Because for me, it was a no brainer – I didn’t know what I’d do instead, but I did know that I would quit the violin. And I assumed that this would be the norm.
This lottery conversation, combined with my struggle to find the motivation to prepare for the competition, and my growing interest in performance psychology given how much of a difference it was making in my experiences on stage, all started to make me wonder if pursuing a career in performance psychology could be a way for me to begin exploring something that I found intriguing – without completely shutting the door on 20-some years of music training.
PJ: While you were here at IU completing your doctorate in psychology, were you able to participate in the Jacobs School of Music community?
NK: When I finished at Juilliard, I knew I wanted to get into psychology, but I had decided on this new path too late in the year to take the GRE’s and apply to any programs. So, I followed my then-girlfriend/now-wife to IU, where she was starting her masters in piano, and spent my first year in Bloomington doing a performer diploma. I studied with Franco Gulli for a semester, joined Stanley Ritchie’s baroque orchestra, played in a quartet and got coachings from Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, and more.
And even after I started in the counseling program, I stayed somewhat connected to the music school throughout my time at IU, because my wife was still in school. Like, I went to some of her studio class parties, continued to go to the music library to read the latest month’s Strad magazine, played tennis on occasion with one of the violin faculty, and would do my psych homework in the practice building across 3rd street (I think?) while I waited for my wife to finish rehearsing. Maybe not exactly what you had in mind with this question, but I did enjoy the experience of feeling like I was simultaneously part of two different worlds on campus.
PJ: When and how did the Bulletproof Musician project begin, and what are some things you did in the beginning to make sure your work could reach as many people as possible?
NK: I defended my dissertation in 2007, and had begun working in a group psychology practice in Columbus, OH. I was getting lots of great experience working with people who presented with depression, anxiety disorders, and so on – but not many opportunities to work with performing artists, or address the issue of performing optimally under pressure.
So in trying to figure out how to move into more of that type of work, I read marketing blogs like copyblogger.com and psychotactics.com, and personal blogs like penelopetrunk.com that explored the subject of how to build an online “business.”
Which was uncomfortable and felt very foreign, but I learned that when done right and ethically, marketing is less about selling, and more about teaching. Which resonated with me, and led me to entertain the idea of starting a blog. If for no other reason than to keep myself up-to-date on research, maybe turn all of the writing into a book someday, and justify buying a new computer, fast internet service, and spending a lot of time tinkering with web sites.
Anyhow, the first article was posted on July 8, 2009 (you can see all the articles I’ve written in chronological order at this semi-secret page, which reveals my initial inconsistency in writing, how bad some of the early posts were, and how it took a few years to develop a consistent style/format/tone – https://bulletproofmusician.com/archive/). For the first year, I just wrote and didn’t tell anybody about it. So nobody read the blog. I didn’t even have a place for people to sign up for the newsletter, or any sort of incentive for people to sign up, so traffic remained pretty low.
But eventually, I started visiting other related blogs, and leaving helpful comments or links to other articles that people might find helpful. Never to my own articles of course (that’s a big no-no), though I did leave my URL in the comment form, so that if you were curious about who it was that left the helpful comment, you could click on my name and visit my blog. (This is something Gary Vaynerchuk suggested in Crush It!, and felt like an organic, non-icky way to build an audience.)
Then in 2011, on Memorial Day, the “How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice” post (written almost two years earlier) was shared by someone on Facebook, and the article ended up going “viral,” where instead of having maybe a hundred visitors per day, over the next couple days I had tens of thousands of visitors per day. The article went from maybe a few dozen likes, to 85.8k likes as of today.
So mine is actually more of a “what not to do” story in terms of how to get your work noticed, as I certainly could have made it easier for people to share the articles on social media, started an email list sooner, provided an incentive to sign up for the newsletter earlier, been a little more public about the existence of the blog, etc., etc.
PJ: What is one of your favorite memories from your experience as a performance psychologist?
NK: You know, this is an interesting question. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of this before. And sure, there have been some fun moments – in terms of opportunities to collaborate with or work with people I never would have imagined getting to cross paths with.
But honestly – and I don’t know if this could be classified as a memory per se – what comes to mind when I think of this, is more a feeling of gratitude and good fortune that I get to spend my time living in this middle ground between music and psychology. Because music wasn’t totally “me,” and psychology wasn’t completely “me” either, but this mashup does feel like it’s me, if that makes sense.
PJ: What are some widespread myths about performance anxiety and practice that you have commonly encountered?
NK: I don’t know how common this one is, but it does concern me anytime I come across it. And that’s the notion that if someone gets nervous or anxious in an audition or performance, there’s something wrong with them. That they just don’t have what it takes.
For example, I was speaking at a university a few years ago, and after the session, a parent came up to me with her son, who was in the town’s youth orchestra. She was very well-intentioned, and wanted to be helpful to her son, but her question was basically “My son gets really nervous in auditions, and other students who don’t play as well as he does are getting seated in front of him. What’s wrong with him?” Again, those weren’t her words, but the implication was that there must be something wrong with him that he would get nervous, while the other kids didn’t appear to.
The reality, of course, is that nerves are normal, regardless of talent and success and years of experience, and that there wasn’t anything “wrong” with this young musician. He just hadn’t yet learned to manage nerves or perform more effectively under pressure. Because this is a skill, just like vibrato or smooth bow changes or consistent intonation, and not some fixed, unchangeable quality – even though yes, some folks may naturally feel more at home on stage than others.
PJ: Many musicians struggle with the feeling that they are simply not cut out for performing because of performance anxiety and the amount of time it takes them to prepare for a performance. What advice would you give them?
NK: I think far more of our friends and colleagues experience these sorts of doubts and fears than we think, when we look around our studio or our orchestra and see outwardly confident-looking faces. And not just during our school years, but afterwards too, when we go out into the world and start gigging, auditioning, and building a career.
Three books come to mind with regards to addressing the specific kind of doubts that are related to nerves and one’s rate of skill development. The first book to read would be Carol Dweck’s Mindset which explores the research on “growth” and “fixed” mindsets, and essentially explains that with the right mindset, you’re much more capable of learning and growing than you might think.
The second and third have to do with learning how to learn the skills of performing better under pressure and practicing/learning more effectively. Specifically, Don Greene’s Performance Success and Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.
It can be incredibly empowering to discover that one can get better at learning and better at performing under pressure. Which can make practicing and performing more fun too (wait…fun? what?!).
PJ: Who or what have been some of the greatest influences in your life and career?
NK: Yikes, that could take a while. =) Obviously, all of my violin teachers and chamber music coaches, from early childhood through my final moments as a music student at IU, have been incredibly influential, and provided the foundation for everything that I do now. Because even decades later, I still find myself sharing examples with students and referencing things almost daily, that I learned from each of them at one point or another.
Likewise, I’m constantly drawing on ideas and concepts that I learned from the professors, advisors, and mentors I had in the School of Ed and HPER at IU, as well at The Ohio State University where I did my internship.
And of course, I may never have gone in this direction if it weren’t for Don Greene’s class at Juilliard all those years ago, and his subsequent encouragement and support.
As I’ve gotten older, I also see more clearly how my parents were influential in ways that I couldn’t have appreciated when I was younger. Like internalizing from my mom the mindset that there’s always a smarter way to do something, whether it’s opening a bag of chips or solving a math problem. And how my dad’s diligence, whether he was doing research on the best toothpaste to buy or working on a report late into the night, has influenced my own perception of what it means to be truly prepared.
And at the risk of being a little sappy, I have to say (even if my wife never reads this), that she has played a really pivotal role in many respects. We met in college when I was 19, and for whatever reason, she always seemed to believe in me. Even when I didn’t. It’s hard to overstate how influential it can be to have someone who knows you’re not perfect, but believes in you anyway – especially in those moments of doubt and uncertainty when you need it most. For instance, as much as it helped to get my parents’ blessing to put the violin down and pursue psychology, it was her looking me in the eye, and saying “it’s going to be ok” that enabled me to make that phone call in the first place, and take each subsequent step on the uncertain path forward that continues to this day. =)
PJ: Project Jumpstart’s theme for October is “Finding Your Happy Place.” What do you do when you feel stressed or overwhelmed to keep yourself calm and motivated?
NK: Well, I try to avoid letting things get to the point where excessive stress or overwhelm becomes kind of inevitable. Which is a combination of listening to my gut and not taking on more than I can handle, and making sure to prioritize the boring but essential things like sleep and exercise and the occasional cat video on YouTube.
This also probably sounds super dull, but I really do like hanging out with my wife and kids, and exploring the city. Usually with a food theme – like finding a new Neapolitan pizza place, or Cuban restaurant, or cheap but awesome dumpling food truck.
But it also helps that work doesn’t feel like work. A friend of mine has challenged me to get better at saying no to things. To only say yes to projects, that when I think about whether I want to do it, my internal feeling isn’t “hmm…” or “meh…” or “maybe?” but “hell, yes!” So far, that’s been a pretty useful decision rule!
- Visit The Bulletproof Musician website
- Subscribe to The Bulletproof Musician podcast on Apple Podcasts or PlayerFM
- Take Noa’s 3-minute Mental Skills Audit test
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