Dealing with Nerves During Performance

World-renowned horn player, educator, and fearless performance coach Jeff Nelsen has an obvious and contagious passion for dynamic engagements. Jeff's pig-farming, opera-singing parents provided him with a wide palate of career choices and a diverse background from which to tell his story. Jeff came to his fearless performance concepts honestly.

In this TEDxBoomington talk, Jeff Nelsen offers some great tools for dealing with nerves during performance. Everyone gets nervous when they perform. When you let that take over, it can prevent you from doing your best.

I try to help students cope with performance nerves during the lesson so that they have some tools to deal with it when it comes up in a real-life situation. I've found for younger students, the most important thing is that they know what will happen at their performance and they know exactly what to do. We practice announcing, bowing and what to do if they make a mistake. I also encourage them to perform for their families at home before they have a performance with a large crowd. As students gain performance experience, they tend to cope with nervousness better.