I had my exam concert last week and I wanted to let you know that the second session was particularly useful. I applied some of the aspects that we talked about, such as making eye contact with the audience and I did not focus so much on the technical aspects, but on the musical aspects and what I wanted to convey to the audience. I felt better about myself and generally I was happy with how I played.

I am very pleased with how I performed at the evaluation. I was able to express musical ideas and not just survive the situation. In the beginning I was shaky, but I knew it would pass so I didn't fixate on it. I think talking about tremors has relaxed my attitude towards it happening, which releases some of the physical tension. A positive cycle! It's still not completely out of the picture, the fear of uncontrollable shaking is still there, but I definitely feel like I'm going in the right direction. I found the positive feedback you and Simon gave me really encouraging. I also found the strategy of planning, what to think about while performing, very useful.

Overall, this course provided me with structure to frame my own process with performance anxiety. There was a lot of space to think and ask questions.

I am very grateful!

It is important for us young musicians to talk about and discuss how we feel before/during and after a performance. This is something that is not often addressed in the individual instrument lessons. But in order to make what we learn in our instrument classes work in performance at all, we should develop strategies to cope with the mental pressure and to curb (or perhaps rather accept) the bodily "changes" that occur in connection with a performance.

I think the course gave me tools to develop these strategies, but perhaps more importantly, it gave me perspective, I am not alone in having major problems before, during and after a performance. It has felt good to discuss this with my classmates.

During an individual session with Francisca Skoogh and Simon Granér, I got to discuss my thoughts on me playing my instrument, my performance on stage and how I look at my own performance while I'm playing but also afterwards. What I took with me from that "master class" was to challenge my habitual behaviors before a performance, to accept that I'm not that good at evaluating myself and understand how I can get better at evaluating "fairly".

I think that more discussions on the subject of "performance psychology" are needed at Malmö Academy of Music, at least it is something I want to continue to discuss and learn about.

I participated in the course because I had had bad experiences in audition situations. Many times in different audition situations or in master classes I became very nervous, my thoughts were very negative towards myself, my hands started to shake and it became almost impossible to continue playing. My biggest problem was my thoughts around my bad finger technique.

During the first year I learnt many important facts about performance anxiety that helped me understand why I became so nervous and why my thoughts affected my performance so much. It was important to understand, psychologically, why my shaky hands appeared and why I thought I was so bad at playing specific parts (self-efficacy). I also learnt that it is possible to train this skill, to become better at it, and there are many ways of getting there. Thank you for the course! This has been a very important step towards becoming a happier musician.