When We Make The Moment Smaller Than It Is
There is something we do before a big performance that we almost never talk about. We make it smaller than it is.
We call it a gig. We say it's just a recital. We remind ourselves that we've done this a hundred times, that it's not a big deal, that we should be able to hold this alongside everything else on our plate. We minimize its weight before the weight has a chance to land.
And we do this with such efficiency that we sometimes don't even notice we've done it.
This is not laziness or carelessness. It is a very specific kind of preparation. The body has learned, somewhere along the way, that if we let ourselves feel how much this matters, we also have to feel how much it could hurt if it goes wrong. So we manage that exposure the only way we know how. We reduce the stakes in advance. We perform indifference to ourselves before the performance ever begins.
I used to do this with a line I had rehearsed so well it had the texture of wisdom. I would say to myself: Shawn, it's just pressing buttons. You do this every day. Whether it's in your studio in front of only you, or in front of people, it is still the same thing. You blow into the instrument and press buttons down.
It sounded like equanimity. It was not equanimity. It was preemptive erasure. I was reducing the event to its most mechanical description so that it could not carry the weight of what it actually meant to me. And it worked, in the way that all protective strategies work. It kept the fear at a manageable distance. It also kept everything else at a distance too.
The Impostor archetype lives here. Not in the flashy version people usually describe, the fraud waiting to be discovered, the credentials that feel hollow. It lives in this quieter move: the preemptive diminishment of our own experience. If we do not let ourselves feel that this matters, we do not have to feel fear. And if we do not feel fear, we cannot be ruined by it.
It is elegant, as protective strategies go. And it costs more than it saves.
The first cost is the preparation the moment actually requires.
A performance that matters to us calls for something different from us than a routine session in the practice room. The arc of preparation is longer. The care required is more specific. The time and space we need to give this event are not the same as any other week.
But when we have told ourselves this is ordinary, we do not carve that out. We do not protect the days before. We do not plan what comes after. We keep our schedule full and our obligations intact, because to clear space would be to admit this is worth clearing space for, and that admission carries risk.
This is where a particular kind of inner sabotage enters the picture. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It simply arranges the conditions so that if something goes wrong, there is a ready explanation that has nothing to do with our actual capacity. If we fail because we did not have enough time, enough rest, enough space, we did not fail because we were not enough. Being too busy is safer than facing the possibility that we gave it everything we had and it still did not go the way we needed it to go.
The busyness is not negligence. It is engineered protection. And it is the Impostor's most reliable tool.
The second cost is our capacity to receive what actually happens.
We have all been in that moment after a performance when something went genuinely well and we could not take it in. The applause arrives and something in us is already moving past it, cataloguing the errors, planning the next thing, declining the gift of what just occurred. This is not humility. It is the body completing the arc it started weeks before, when we decided this was not that big a deal.
The soma does not lie. If we told it this was ordinary, it will respond to the outcome as ordinary. What we protect ourselves from in advance, we also protect ourselves from receiving.
There is a different option, and it is harder than it sounds. It is to let the event be the size it actually is. To say: this is significant to me. This will ask something of me. I need to prepare not just technically but in the full arc of what this requires, before, during, and after. This means protecting time. It means telling the people around us what this week will need to look like. It means planning for what comes after the performance, not just the performance itself. None of this is self-indulgence. It is accurate self-knowledge applied to professional preparation.
The body does better work when it knows the truth about what it is being asked to do.
The question worth sitting with is this: what are we actually afraid will happen if we let ourselves feel how much this matters?
Because that question, held honestly, is usually where the real preparation begins.
If you recognize this pattern in yourself, in your students, in the rooms you walk into every week, The mBODYed Practice is where we take it further. Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique are taught in practice. Every week. In your own body, in real time. The first 20 to join the waitlist receive 50% off the first month.