Runners and Singers #2: Mental Fitness
It’s easy to think that racing is entirely physical: first the right foot, then the left foot; repeat. But nothing is further from the truth; confidence improves performance and lack of confidence impedes it. The body can do amazing things when the mind is sending it positive thoughts, and the reverse is alas true as well. Despite optimal training, a runner may have a great race one day and a terrible one another, the difference being the confidence level, and the voices in one’s head. The voice inside your head saying, “you’ve got this, keep on pushing,” will produce a vastly different result from the voice insisting that, “you’re not ready, the others are better than you, ” and suchlike.
Eliud Kipchoge, who shattered the world marathon record in Berlin 2018, running 2:01.39, stated that the key to breaking down athletic barriers is to keep your mind as sharp as your body: “If you want to break through, your mind should be able to control your body; your mind should be a part of your fitness.”
Runners World pre-London marathon interview, April 22, 2019
Eliud Kipchoge interview
Ojie Edoburun, a British sprinter, was interviewed after winning the 100m at the Paris Diamond League track meet on August 24, 2019:
“I burst into tears. I have had so many setbacks. I call it mental injuries. People might think: ‘What is a mental injury?’ Not just in athletics but in life, too. When you have experienced an embarrassment or failure it sticks with you. So I have to come back and face these demons every year. And every year I thought I was better prepared and I found out I wasn’t…. I always feel the only person that can beat me is myself and my brain….Hopefully this is the beginning of things to come.”
The turning point, said Edoburun, was starting to work with a psychologist earlier this year. “He has been helping me so much. There has been a bit of stigma about psychology, maybe connotations that it makes you weak. But I think it’s what makes you stronger over everybody else. Having control over your brain. I have worked on that a lot this year. The training is the easy part but the mental stuff has been the challenge.”
Edoburun shocks British rivals
Everything Kipchoge and Edoburun are saying applies to singers. A singer’s state of mind will have just as much influence on their performance as a runner’s. I’ve seen the effects of negative thoughts, fear, and lack of confidence on myself and on my students, on the stage and in the studio, on professional singers and amateurs.
Acknowledgement of mental or emotional distress continues, alas, to be a taboo for singers who fear, justifiably, that they will not be (re)hired if they admit to weaknesses in this area. Insiders in the opera world are very aware of which singers are prone to cancel engagements in spite of being physically healthy; such withdrawals from a production are usually put under the umbrella of “personal reasons,” unlike when the singer is suffering from a virus.
These are complex and thorny situations, where the interests of the singer and the opera company do not always align, particularly in the cases of high-profile singers. The company has contracted the singer to sing a certain role, involving a specific rehearsal and performance schedule, and is highlighting the presence of this singer in their marketing of the production. Getting “butts in seats” is no easy matter in the opera world, and many long-time opera buffs come to hear specific singers. When a singer withdraws shortly before, or during the rehearsal period, it creates enormous upheaval for the company.
At music conservatories, plenty of time and attention is devoted to the physical aspects of singing and performing. In addition to individual voice lessons, music departments provide singers with diction classes, stagecraft and scene work, interpretation coaching, and, increasingly, information on the business side of a career. But what about the mental and emotional stressors? These go with the territory of high-visibility performance and need to be addressed years before a singer arrives in the glaring spotlight of mainstage productions. Nevertheless, as far as I can ascertain, music programs devote zero time to identifying and dealing with mental and emotional health, in spite of the fact that promising careers may be derailed when a singer is unable to resolve this stress.*
And the stress never ends: first it’s about “will I get there” and then, if the singer is successful, it becomes “can I stay there” as each new audition, performance, or role must live up to the promise of the one before. In a nutshell, there’s no There there. Some singers, athletes, actors (fill in the blank) are mentally more resilient than others, of course, but there’s no correlation between the amount of talent and the level of internal stress.
On June 15, 2019, I introduced and facilitated a Roundtable breakout session for the annual OperaAmerica Conference. I divided the session—titled Performer Development Forum: Caring for the Physical and Emotional Well-being of Artists—into three parts, and allotted the most time to the final section, which I called, The Elephant in the Room: Emotional and Mental Health. (Here are the slides I created for the session: OperaAmerica Conference 2019)
The session was very well attended by administrators from many sides of the classical singing world—undergraduate, graduate, and Young Artist Programs; agents, opera company administrators—and produced a lively and thoughtful discussion of how to better serve the needs of singers. There does seem to be a growing awareness of the importance of the mind-body connection. Hopefully, the attendees are continuing the discussion in their respective workplaces and the long-standing taboo of discussing mental and emotional needs will begin to fade.
In my next post, I’ll discuss how neurological research into the links between physical symptoms and mental/emotional stressors is starting to be accepted by mainstream scientists and medical professionals.
*If anyone reading this is aware of programs—whether undergraduate, graduate, or YAP—that do systematically address the mental and emotional aspects of singing, please add a comment.