The Bulletproof Musician

Do elite performers actually feel as confident as they look? In this conversation with Boston Symphony principal flutist Lorna McGhee, we explore what's really happening beneath a confident-looking performance, and why she's come to believe that confidence is something you do, not something you feel.

Lorna McGhee is principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and has previously served as principal flute in the Pittsburgh Symphony and co-principal flute of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London. She has performed as guest principal with orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and London Symphony Orchestra, and has appeared as a concerto soloist with ensembles across the U.S., UK, Canada, and Japan. An active chamber musician, she is a member of Trio Verlaine and has recorded several albums, including a Gramophone Editor's Choice selection with the group mobius. She has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of British Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon University, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. Scottish by birth, she studied with William Bennett in London and is a lifelong student of English literature and the Alexander Technique.

In this episode, we explore why confidence might be overrated as a performance goal, how one specific audition where her low notes wouldn't come out reshaped her approach to nerves, why she now works with her nervous system instead of trying to override it, what it means to treat courage as a choice rather than a feeling, and the small, deliberate rituals - from a mantra repeated before walking on stage to a notebook carried into her biggest audition - that help her get through high-stakes performances.

Get all the nerdy details in this month's interview:
Lorna Mcghee: Treating Confidence as Something You Do, Not Something You Feel

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

What if one of the most overlooked factors affecting memory consolidation, emotional regulation, practice efficiency, and performance consistency wasn’t a new practice strategy - but sleep?

Dr. Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse is a triple board-certified neurologist, sleep specialist, and epileptologist at the University of Pittsburgh, where her work focuses on cognitive performance, sleep, and neurological recovery under high-demand conditions. In addition to her clinical and academic work, she consults with high-performing populations including professional athletes, executives, pilots, and first responders, and has served as a neurology consultant to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In this episode, we explore why practice sometimes doesn’t “stick,” how sleep affects emotional reactivity and performance anxiety, why pianists improved 10-13% overnight without additional practice, how naps and “sleep banking” can help before auditions and performances, what musicians should know about jet lag and chronotypes, and the surprisingly small sleep habits that may have the biggest impact on performing at your true level.

Get all the nerdy details in this month's interview:
Joanna Fong-Isariyawongse: The Science of Sleep for Musicians

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

Have you ever had the experience of fixing something in the practice room…only to have it come back in performance?

Maybe it’s a passage where tension creeps back in. Or a section where your fingers revert to an old fingering. Or some aspect of your technique that you’ve worked hard to fix - until it shows up again at exactly the wrong moment.

Why does this happen?

In this month's episode, cognitive psychologist Paul Baxter explains why bad habits are so persistent, and shares a little-known research-based method that may help change stubborn habits more quickly - and permanently.

Get all the nerdy details in this month's interview:

Paul Baxter: Why Bad Habits Keep Coming Back (And a Faster Way to Change Them)

Additional Resources

The exact Old Way New Way protocol and examples across a wide range of performance domains can be found in Paul's book, Overcoming Performance Roadblocks

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

How should musicians actually practice to improve faster? In this conversation with researcher and trumpet professor Micah Killion, we explore what expert musicians do differently in the practice room and what research reveals about effective practice.

Micah Killion is Assistant Professor of Trumpet and Brass Coordinator at Montclair State University and former principal trumpet of the United States Air Force Band in Washington, D.C. A Yamaha Performing Artist with degrees from Juilliard, Teachers College–Columbia, and UT Austin, his research on expert practice and music learning has been presented at leading institutions including Juilliard, Eastman, and the Royal Academy of Music.

In this episode, Micah shares what he discovered after closely analyzing how elite performers actually practice - and why their approach looks very different from the way most musicians were taught. We explore the decision-making process behind effective practice, the surprising role of mistakes in learning, and a simple strategy that can help musicians practice more efficiently, musically, and consistently.

Get all the nerdy details right here:

Micah Killion: The One Thing Artist-Level Musicians Do Differently in the Practice Room

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

One of my teachers often used to say that no matter what you’re playing, when you’re on stage, the beginning of a piece is always the hardest part.

Not because the opening is more difficult technically, but because we’ve generally been sitting around for a little while, so we’re feeling kind of cold, a little disconnected from our instrument, and nervous and jittery.

And it often takes us a minute or two to get warmed up and really hit our stride. Which might not be the end of the world if you’re playing a 30-minute concerto. But if it’s an audition that only lasts a few minutes, this “warm-up” period can feel like a really long (and crappy) couple minutes.

Is there something we can do to be more accurate right from the start, and skip that “settling-in” period? (spoiler alert - yes, there is 😁).

Get all the nerdy details here:

How to Start a Performance with More Accuracy (Without the "Onstage Warm-Up")

Live mental skills class begins soon!

Learn research-based strategies for effective practice, managing nerves, getting into the zone, and performing more confidently with a month of live Zoom sessions, weekly homework, and feedback.

Registration ends January 25th.

👉 Join Performance Psych Essentials - Cohort 26 (February 1 - March 1)

References

Perry, I. S., and Katz, Y. J. (2015). Pre-performance routines, accuracy in athletic performance and self-control. Athens J. Sports 2, 137–152. doi: 10.30958/ajspo.2-3-1

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

In some years it feels easier to begin the new year with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Other years, it can be difficult to get going and build up those new habits that we’d love to develop.

Whichever kind of year this is shaping up to be for you, I have a few things planned these next few weeks to help make it a productive one.

Today, I have a couple studies to share that look at a popular technique for getting started when your motivation isn’t quite there.

Then, Coworking Week begins Monday, where we’ll have five days of drop-in coworking calls to clear distractions, get unstuck, and check things off your list (join here).

And the week after that, I’ll be opening the doors for the Winter Psych Essentials class, where through a month of group classes and gentle peer accountability, you’ll learn how to accelerate your progress, and perform more confidently in 2026 with research-based techniques and exercises from performance science that you can apply to your daily practice (details here).

But for now, let's take a look at a strategy that could make it easier to start (and finish) tasks, whether that be practicing, studying, or doing the laundry:

When You Can’t Get Yourself to Start Practicing, Try This

References

Ara, Z., Rahim, I. B., Zhou, P., Yu, L., Esmaeili, B., Yu, L., & Hong, S. R. (2025). You are not alone: Designing body doubling for ADHD in virtual reality. arXiv (Cornell University). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2509.12153

Eagle, T., Baltaxe-Admony, L. B., & Ringland, K. E. (2024). “It Was Something I Naturally Found Worked and Heard About Later”: An Investigation of Body Doubling with Neurodivergent Participants. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 17(3), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689648

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

We all get stuck on problem passages from time to time. And it can be very natural to simply throw more repetitions at it, in hopes that this will eventually unlock something.

But in doing so, we end up accumulating more and more incorrect repetitions and reinforcing mistakes. So what’s the alternative?

A new study took a rare, close-up, repetition by repetition look at how artist-level musicians practice difficult passages. And it identified some key similarities in how they approach problems and keep making progress - without reinforcing mistakes.

The result is a concrete practice framework that any musician can use to guide their practice. You might even argue that this is THE core process that underlies effective skill learning.

Get all the nerdy details here:

The Central Strategy Expert Musicians Use to Practice Difficult Passages

References

Killion, M. F., & Duke, R. A. (2025). The central strategy of music practice: A blow-by-blow account. Journal of Expertise, 8(2–3), 85–128.

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

The voice in our head can be an asset at times - but also kind of a jerk at the worst possible moments. And like that one person in the “quiet car” of the train that doesn’t seem to understand the rules, it never seems to be quiet when we need it to.

A 2014 study identified a self-talk strategy that led to improved performances, and less post-performance shame and rumination.

And it doesn’t require us to shush the inner critic entirely (whew, because that’s really difficult!). It’s just a small, simple - yet quirky - tweak that anyone can do.

Get all the nerdy details here:

How a Small Change in Self-Talk Could Improve Performance Under Pressure

References

Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

A few months ago, when a sportswriter published an article in The New York Times about an unusual and “revolutionary” practice method that NBA star Victor Wembanyama and other elite athletes and teams (like the World Series-winning LA Dodgers) were utilizing, I started getting emails from musicians, asking if this method, known as the “constraints-led approach,” might apply to practicing music too.

So what is the constraints-led approach? And is it relevant to musicians?

Spoiler alert - yes, it totally is. 😁

And if you’ve ever been frustrated by how you can play exactly the way you want in the practice room, but find that things start to break down when you’re surrounded by other musicians, or playing in a new hall, or on a different piano, this can not only help you be more comfortable in performance, but have way more fun in your daily practice too.

Get all the nerdy details right here:

A Learning Method That Outperformed Traditional Practice

More joy in the practice room and on stage in 2026?

Get the Beyond Practicing 2-for-1 offer (ends on December 14, 2025 at 11:59pm)

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses

A friend recently asked if it's true that becoming a virtuoso performer requires being a perfectionist.

Well, spoiler alert, it's not a simple yes or no answer. And there are a lot of fascinating nuances to explore. 

One of which involves performance anxiety, and the question of whether perfectionism increases or decreases nerves.

Get all the nerdy details and find out how much perfectionism might work best:

How Much Perfectionism Do You Really Need to Succeed?

References

Racine, P., Laflamme, S. V., Gaudreau, P., & Langlois, F. (2025). Please don’t stop the music! A new look at the performance anxiety of musicians with the model of excellencism and perfectionism. Psychology of Music. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356241300538

☃️ Holiday 2-for-1 Offer

Get the Beyond Practicing course, with bonus account and two additional bonuses for you and a buddy (ends December 7, 2025):

👉 Get the 2-for-1 offer + bonuses

More from The Bulletproof Musician

• Get the free weekly newsletter, for more nerdy details and bonus subscriber-only content.
• Pressure Proof: A free 7-day performance practice crash course that will help you shrink the gap between the practice room and the stage.
• Learning Lab: A continuing education community where musicians and learners are putting research into practice.
• Live and self-paced courses