In one study of perfectionism in sports, athletes who scored high in “concern over mistakes” reported that images of their mistakes ruled their thoughts during competitions; the study implicated poor attention and increased stress levels. Another study looked at the high incidence of hip injuries in young dancers and gymnasts. It pointed to stress and perfectionism as causation and suggested “an overemphasis on ‘concern for mistakes”’ by teachers and coaches.6 Additional studies have found a direct link between perfectionism and injury—specifically focal dystonia—among classical musicians, who are expected to adhere strictly to the written score and never to make a mistake. Focal dystonia is a neurological condition that can affect the hands of pianists and string players, causing the fingers to curl—hence the nickname “pianist’s cramp.” A 2005 study in Germany predicted that one in every one hundred musicians will develop the condition, which also cramps the embouchures of wind and brass players. Almost all of them will be men who suffer from anxiety disorders and perfectionistic thinking.
Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, and Glenn Gould are among the best-known pianists who have been affected by focal dystonia, and it is now thought to be the problem that ended Robert Schumann’s concertizing aspirations. The Romantic composer was a legendary neurotic; as a young man, he blushed and stammered while reciting his poetry to friends, developed unrequited crushes on young men and women alike, and suffered a terror of rejection. He was a born pianist, but after his father died he agreed to enroll in law school to placate his pragmatic mother. There, instead of attending classes, he practiced the piano up to seven hours a day. Perhaps that’s where his physical setbacks began. He was twenty-one when the middle finger of his right hand, the digitus obscenus, went numb. He tried various self-help cures, including the use of a homemade chiroplast, a fiendish finger-stretching device popular with music students of the nineteenth century. In his diaries, Schumann referred to it as his cigar box. He rigged up a sling that was attached to the piano to hold his immobile finger aloft while allowing the other fingers to play away. These efforts did more damage than good, and soon he was turning to even more extreme remedies, such as electric shocks and animal baths. The latter involved slaughtering a live animal (a calf, pig, or lamb), into whose hot entrails Schumann would plunge his afflicted finger. It was a common cure of the age; the intestinal blood and feces were thought to have healing powers.
Throughout these self-ministrations, his future wife, the young Clara Wieck, was off touring Europe with her father (who also happened to be Schumann’s piano teacher). It was her first major concert tour, the one that would begin her ascent as the most famous pianist of the age. One can imagine the obsessive practicing that Schumann—in love with the virtuoso daughter of his teacher—entered into as he prepared for the Wiecks’ homecoming party. He was expected to perform his Papillons, a suite he’d composed in 1831, for the returning heroes, but by now his fingers—the problem appears to have spread—were almost paralyzed. So one can also imagine the relief Schumann might have allowed himself to feel. Now, at least, he had an excuse not to compete against Clara for piano primacy—a good thing, too, as he surely would have lost.
*
Nancy Shainberg Colier is a New York psychotherapist who has treated dozens of actors, dancers, singers, musicians, athletes, and writers for stage fright. In almost all cases, she found that their fear was driven by a self-inflicted demand for perfection. Colier defined perfectionism as “a gilded cage, a trap,” and it was one she knew intimately. For as much as she deplored it, she questioned whether she would ever have become a top-ranked equestrian, competing on the national horse show circuit for twenty-five years, if she hadn’t been a perfectionist. She grew up in a family of New York intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her father, David Shainberg, was a psychiatrist who with his friend and fellow seeker, the physicist David Bohm, traveled around the country making a series of films with the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. Her mother, Diane Shainberg, was a psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist nun whose writings helped pioneer the integration of Western psychological precepts and Eastern spiritual practices. Throughout the 1970s, the Shainbergs’ Manhattan brownstone was the setting for a series of spiritual “dialogue groups,” delving into the mysteries of the collective unconscious. The breakfast table was a place for dream interpretations, where children and adults were encouraged to remember and recount their nightly visions.
“There was a way that whatever you were doing belonged to the family,” recalled Colier. “You were expected to bring something to the table: ‘What have you got?’ That was the attitude. My parents were such big presences.
“So I found a place—horses—that could not have been more different from their world. The horses were an opportunity to be somebody growing up in this family. Riding and winning became an opportunity for self-definition. And it was something that could bypass the mind, which I think I was looking for. The trainers were almost military, which appealed to me. It was really hard, there were no excuses, there were edges. In my family, in psychology, there’s something soupy. There’s nothing soupy about horses; there’s a toughness that really appealed to me.”
Colier is a slender, agile woman whose physique is of someone half her age but whose weathered complexion reflects a lifetime spent outdoors. Throughout her twenties, while working as a writer and producer in Manhattan for Good Morning America and The Geraldo Rivera Show, she drove out to Long Island every day before dawn, arriving at the stables at four A.M. to put in eight solid jumps before reporting to her job back in the city. She thrived on the detail and precision of horsemanship—what it signified, for instance, when a horse shifts its weight a few pounds to the left as it canters to a jump. She worked with a trainer who could detect, as she rode past him at forty miles an hour, that her right thumb needed adjustment. If she would just tweak it by half a millimeter, no more, the horse would hold his head differently, his neck would relax, and she would take the jump more efficiently.
Nancy Shainberg Colier in 2001 equestrian exhibition (Courtesy of Teresa Ramsay)
“You think about the hours,” Colier mused. “Ten thousand hours? That’s like the first month. When I see that number, I laugh.” She was referring to Outliers: The Story of Success, the popular book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he repeatedly cited the ten-thousand-hour rule. The key to mastering any discipline, he wrote, was putting in roughly ten thousand hours of practice. One of his main examples was a study by psychologists of young violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music. While all of them had begun playing at about five years of age, their practice times began to diverge after a few years, so that by age twenty, the elite performers each had averaged more than ten thousand hours of practice. The merely “good” violinists logged in at about eight thousand.
Elite performers don’t just work harder, however. They focus better. And at some point, they fall in love with practice to the extent that they don’t want to do anything else. That’s what happened to Colier. “It’s that no-matter-whatness, that you can’t imagine life any other way. There is no better feeling in the world than to take a horse around for eight perfect jumps, to have a horse rise up into you and lift up its knees and drop its head and climb up almost like a spider into you … It fills your body. It’s breathtaking, and when you finish that and everything gels, it’s the perfect storm. It can keep you fulfilled for months.”
That was the positive aspect of what kept her going. There was also the negative perfectionist part that made her ruminate on every one of her mistakes, like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime. Had she closed her outside leg coming out of that last turn? Had she moved up to the jump too quickly? Had she lost her sense of presence? The errors would torment her. She would play them out for weeks after a less than perfect competition.
If her horse spooked at the rustle of a windswept candy wrapper, she could move on. Horses can be high-anxiety creatures, ever sensitive to their riders. In the equine world, it’s a given that
a horse can feel, see, and hear your fear. Colier could always forgive the horse. It was when the error was of her own making that she couldn’t forgive. Equestrians are known to be “supreme perfectionists,” given to flaunting “that fierceness, that toughness,” expected of riders. “There’s a certain level of expectation we have of ourselves,” Colier said. “Perfectionism comes out of a great need to say something about who you are fundamentally. When we make mistakes, we’re not the person we need to be … But yes, I do think it makes you better. Yes, it does make you not accept mediocrity. So it is good for that … It makes you better, it makes you show up more. But the suffering that goes into that is extreme. What I put myself through, that level of self-attack, it’s very painful. There’s no no with perfectionists. You are not allowed any excuses. If you didn’t sleep the night before, if you’re sick—nothing applies to you.”
Colier never completely banished the perfectionist within, but she managed to find some compassion for her suffering and sadness. Now, when she works with Olympic hopefuls, she tells them with authority that being afraid to make mistakes actually creates mistakes. If you can’t try new things, you can’t get better. If you can’t get better, you can’t become great. An obsession with perfection stunts growth.
One of the most freeing statements I heard about perfectionism came from Gwendolyn Mok, a pianist who has performed on the BBC and in many of the world’s leading concert halls, both in recital and as a soloist with major orchestras, including London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. In 2002, she made an acclaimed recording of Ravel’s complete piano works.
In June 2013, I drove up to Berkeley to play for her. It was just a couple of months before my own concert, and I wanted her feedback on the way I was approaching Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau. It had presented a challenge to my technical abilities, with its liquid surges and waterfalls of notes. I was just beginning to feel comfortable with the piece and hoped she might have some insight. “The worst thing that anyone can do in a concert is play accurately,” she said right away, surprising me. “It’s boring as all hell.” Mok wasn’t advocating sloppy playing; she was referring to the broader concept of mastery, an umbrella word that encompasses dynamics, phrasing, gesture, meaning. I was too intent on playing the right notes, she said. I was supposed to be “playing water,” but my hand gestures were too stiff. They needed to be more balletic, to mirror the reflectiveness and liquid flow of water. If perfection was the goal, she said, a computer could be programmed to play the notes, rhythms, and dynamics of the piece.
She remembered a concert she had seen many years ago, given by two elderly musicians, the violinist Zoltán Székely and the cellist Gabor Magyar. They had made their names as young men with the legendary Hungarian String Quartet. The night Mok saw them, they performed a Brahms piano trio with a pianist, “and they couldn’t play as well as they used to. But every note, gesture, and phrase was loaded with meaning. They were so determined to communicate that you soon forgot that, intonation-wise, it wasn’t perfect, that they couldn’t do some of the technical stuff. By the end of that concert everyone was in tears. I’ll never forget it. To me, that was the beginning of my understanding that playing note-perfect was not the goal.”
I had lashed myself to the image of a note-perfect performance. That was still my goal when I drove out to Ron Thompson’s farmhouse in Montpelier, Vermont, one afternoon. Thompson was a serial careerist, an unprepossessing Renaissance man who began his professional life as a Juilliard-trained classical trumpet player when, in 1961, at age nineteen, he joined the National Symphony Orchestra. He later quit music to become an electrical engineer, then changed careers again when he was fifty, becoming an Adlerian psychologist. He knew all about the self-inflicted wounds of perfectionism; they ran like an extra chromosome through his family line. He grew up with a grandmother who was fluent in twelve languages and called the local radio station to correct the announcer if he mispronounced a word.
When he was a young trumpet player, Thompson’s method was to beat himself into perfection and then practice some more. Even after three seasons with the National Symphony, he still suffered stage fright. It turned his saliva into a dry, ropy substance that dulled the vibrations between lips and mouthpiece, distorting his embouchure. Like all trumpet players, he had his tricks: Biting into a jalapeño pepper or a lemon before a performance usually did the job. But there is no such thing as a quiet mistake on the trumpet. The performance schedule of the National Symphony was grueling—about two hundred concerts a season—and the pressure was unrelenting. Six hundred performances and he still had stage fright? He blamed his nerves on the audience. He hated “the goddamn audience.”
Ron Thompson (Patricia Lyon-Surrey, Fine Art Photography)
Sometime later, during a performance with the Santa Barbara (California) Symphony, Thompson had a chance to look at the audience from a different angle. The orchestra was playing the Ralph Vaughan Williams Cello Concerto, which is scored without trumpets. Thompson wandered up to the balcony of the Old Mission Santa Barbara, where he looked down on the audience he so despised. What he saw was a sea of gray-haired patrons, half-asleep and snoring in their chairs. “This audience I was looking at bore no resemblance to the audience I was thinking of from my first trumpet chair. There was one older man, I’ll never forget him, who was taking care of his disabled son. And I asked myself, Who is the real audience? The real audience is within me.”
Create your own audience, he urged me now. Take it with you wherever you play. Love yourself into excellence by cultivating an internal audience that’s loving. I had been sitting at his dining room table for hours, long finished with the Caesar salad that he and his wife, Maggie, had set down for me. They were vegans, and though he insisted that they loved to cheat, they didn’t cheat that afternoon. While I ate chicken, they nibbled on tofu. “Don’t get stuck on perfection,” he cautioned. “There is no such thing. In masterful performing, you understand the presence of error, and what you do first is learn from error and—right from the beginning—forgive the error.”
It took Thompson years to learn that lesson. As a professional musician, he had disclaimed any and all error; in his mind, there was no room for a mistake. When he became an engineer, however, he learned that while a product had to be manufactured for the greatest possible precision, it nevertheless had to be designed for error or, as it is known in engineering, tolerance. In his work as an electrical engineer, he supervised and monitored the production of high-speed generator flywheels. The design tolerances were microscopic: 30 microns, or 30 millionths of a meter. “You design for errors. You always acknowledge for error, but you go for excellence. There’s no such thing as perfection—in all systems. In the real world, there’s always errors, always shortcomings.”
Thompson quoted his friend and mentor, Charlie Schlueter, the former principal trumpet with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who chortled over having once missed a low C—the easiest note on the trumpet—in front of some five thousand people at the Tanglewood Music Festival. “I had to fight the urge to slap my knee and laugh out loud,” Schlueter told him. “It’s the funniest damn thing that ever happened to me.”
That, said Thompson, is playfulness. “You absolutely forgive yourself for every error—because you absolutely know there’s going to be another. That frees a person to take a risk.” He paused. “How else can I help you?”
By now, the sun was setting over the Green Mountains. Thompson brought me into his living room, where three trumpets were sitting on their stands. He picked up the smallest of the three, a piccolo trumpet, and began playing from Johannes Prentzel’s Sonata no. 75 for trumpet, bassoon, and basso continuo. His cheeks reddened as he stood before me, playing the baroque cadenza, a whirl of spiraling melodies that shot past at flywheel speed. It wasn’t perfect, but it was breathtaking. Thompson wasn’t a perfectionist. He was an artist.
Chapter 10
UM … UM …
Martha Gutierrez, as I’ll call her, is
the kind of person who reads an e-mail five times before clicking the send button. A self-described perfectionist, she is not just good at everything she tries her hand at; she’s the best. When she discovered that she wasn’t able to speak in public, she could hardly believe it. It happened in her first semester of law school, when she was in the middle of presenting an argument against the death penalty. One minute, she was glancing down at a document, preparing to make her next cogent point. The next, she looked up, noticed six of her fellow students peering in through a glass door, and her throat clamped shut. She—a straight-A student and four-time class president, whose hand was always first in the air whenever a teacher asked a question—turned mute.
In the years that followed, she never knew when it would happen next. There were times she could deliver a wedding toast or make a presentation before a group of lobbyists, no problem. And then there were the times, just as frequent, that her voice shrank and vanished. In 2010, she was promoted in her job as staff liaison to a trade association in Washington, D.C. But she didn’t celebrate; she panicked. Her boss wanted her to shine, and there was no mistaking what he meant: bigger presentations, more important conferences, wider exposure. Her house of cards was shaking. Always the good student, she cast around for help and found the Stagefright Survival School in Alexandria, Virginia, which promised help for “extreme fear of public speaking.” Its cofounder, Burton Rubin, was, like Gutierrez, a lawyer who had built his career around the avoidance of public speaking.
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