High Performance Anxiety

Teaching elite performers to practice confidence

For many professional performers, including those at the top of their profession, a degree of anxiety is part of the job. For most, it gives them an edge. It shows they care about their performance and their ability to communicate emotional intensity through their performance. Their anxiety compels them to prepare, practice and play to a high standard.

For some, however, anxiety is a curse. Upcoming performances become something to dread or avoid. A once joyful and rewarding pursuit has become something to survive with thoughts of escape. Often, at the peak of their abilities, they find their inner thoughts swamped by doubt, their fine motor controls blurred by their anxiety-induced physiological response.

In a process that focuses on the true root of their anxiety, Steve breaks the myth that anxiety is something that inexplicably is happening to them and works to help them take back control. Based on established anxiety and phobia techniques, such as systematic desensitisation, his approach has been refined and extended over many years, using elements taken from CBT, NLP and even stage hypnosis and magic. His deceptively non-challenging approach is backed up by in-depth and anecdote-filled knowledge of the business of being a professional performer. Whilst this is a relatively niche area, the concepts and techniques are easily transferable to other forms of anxiety, including examinations, situational anxieties and phobias.

Steve Baxter is a Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapist who specialises in working with top-level stage performers. He is especially well known in classical music circles and has worked with clients from many of the UK's top orchestras and music colleges. Occasionally tempted out of his cosy therapy room, he has spoken at a variety of establishments and residential courses, most recently for the London Symphony Orchestra. Steve Baxter is also a director of the UK Hypnosis Council and an organiser of UKHC22