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Barrier Busting
The Barrier Busting podcast offers insights, strategies, and inspiring stories that explore practical tips and powerful tools for unlocking our full potential.
Barrier Busting
Overcoming Performance Anxiety: Insights from Opera to Tennis
Ever wonder how elite performers tackle their stage fright? Join us as we chat with Dr. Jean-Ron Lafond, a distinguished opera performer and educator, who takes us on a journey from the beaches of Haiti to the opera stages and tennis courts, unraveling the mysteries of performance anxiety. Discover how Dr. Lafond's unique blend of vocal science and martial arts principles can help you overcome the mental blocks that hinder your performance, whether you’re a musician or an athlete. With valuable insights drawn from his personal experiences and professional expertise, Dr. Lafond offers strategies that promise to enhance your mental fortitude in high-pressure scenarios.
Hear the inspiring tale of a young man who transformed the challenge of a pronounced stutter into a flourishing operatic career. Moving from Haiti to New Jersey, he faced cultural shocks and communication barriers, yet found liberation in the world of music. Encouraged by compassionate teachers, his journey reveals how music can be a powerful vehicle for self-expression and overcoming personal obstacles, setting him on an unexpected path to success on stage. This story highlights the potential within each of us to turn our struggles into strengths.
Finally, we explore the striking similarities in performance anxiety experienced by tennis stars and singers, underscoring the need for a robust mental approach in both fields. From top tennis players like Daniel Medvedev to accomplished musicians, the psychological battles are universal. Uncover the mental techniques employed by athletes and how these can be adapted to help musicians. Through visualization, self-hypnosis, and grounding exercises, we offer listeners practical tips to silence self-doubt and improve their performance, whether on the court or on stage. Tune in, as next week we continue our conversation with Ron, diving deeper into these transformative approaches.
Are you feeling stuck, trapped by barriers holding you back from reaching your full potential? Well, let's bust through those barriers so that you can live your best life. Hi, I'm Matt Brooks, founder of Matt Brooks Coaching, and I'm passionate about helping people overcome barriers to achieve success. Join me for insights, strategies and inspiring stories as we explore practical tips and powerful tools to unlock your true potential. This is the Barrier Busting Podcast. Well, welcome back everybody.
Speaker 1:I am so excited today because I've got a special guest. He's someone I've known for decades and the last time I did a podcast, we did a couple shows together that were fascinating. So I know he's going to be fascinating today, and he's actually agreed to do two because we've got a lot to talk about. So he'll be on this week and next week. As you know, last week I was talking about performance anxiety, and I was talking about it from the perspective of how it can happen to anyone, not just people who actually get up on stage and perform. You know it can happen if you got to make a presentation at a meeting, it can happen if you got to give a toast at a wedding, et cetera, and so we talked about that last week and I gave some tips as to how to deal with it, discuss some treatment options if it's severe. But today my special guest is from the world of opera and he's here to shed light on how performance anxiety affects professional performers, in the hopes that learning about how professionals handle it will enlighten us as to how we should handle performance anxiety in any situation. He's also a lifelong tennis player, a very serious tennis player, so we'll be talking from the perspective of performance anxiety in tennis as well. You know we don't think of the professional performer as a person who struggles with performance anxiety, but it turns out that they do. A 2019 study in Frontiers of Psychology showed that 50 to 70 percent of professional musicians reported compromised performances due to anxiety, and other studies have shown, interestingly enough, that 20 to 34 percent of elite athletes experience performance anxiety as well. So how do they deal with that and get through it? We're going to talk to that today.
Speaker 1:My guest is Dr Jean-Ron Lafond, or, as those of us who know him well call him, ron. Dr Lafond has both a master's and doctorate from the University of Michigan and a bachelor's degree from the famous Westminster Choir College, having performed over 40 operatic roles as a baritone and given at least as many performances of oratorio solos. He has also presented over 400 recitals in his prestigious career. He's worked as a stage director and also is an experienced theater actor. Throughout his career as a performer, dr LaFond maintained a strong presence as a teacher and mentor. He's taught at the University of Florida, east Carolina University, the University of Delaware and Westminster Choir College. Currently, ron works as a freelance teacher, regularly presenting masterclasses and private study all over the world, and he's developed his own philosophy for teaching singers that incorporates principles from both vocal science and are you ready for this? Martial arts. Ron is fantastic. Ron, it is so great to see you. Welcome to my new show.
Speaker 2:So glad to be here, Matt, to have a good chatting.
Speaker 1:I know, and he's coming to us from Spain, so Ron and I don't get a chance to talk often, so it's really great to see him. I want to start with a little something about you. You have been facing stressful situations since you were a kid right, and as an opera singer and teacher you've certainly been exposed to all sorts of performance anxiety. But I want to go back to your childhood a little bit, because it created a scenario that you have had to struggle with and overcome your whole life. That, I think, is really impressive. Having known you, you were born and raised for the first 11 years of your life in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, and you have told me it was a very, almost idyllic period. It was a wonderful upbringing at the time in Haiti, but you moved. Your family moves you from there. You were on a beach all the time, right, and your family moved you from that to New Jersey, to Newark, right. Was it Newark, newark?
Speaker 1:first yeah, Newark first. And what?
Speaker 2:And then eventually Elizabeth Orange.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but Newark from Haiti, I mean, that's a huge cultural shift and a huge shock, I know, and I know that it had a profound effect on you, and due to the stress or shall we say we really can call it PTSD from this move, you developed a stutter and yet you became an opera singer and when I first knew you, which was 30 some odd years ago, your stutter was very pronounced compared to now, but you became an opera singer and a theater actor and all that. I mean that's amazing. Let's start here and discuss how you overcame the stuttering, or at least figured out how to work with it, so that the inevitable performance anxiety that would come from your worry of that would go away, to allow you to be a professional performer. Talk about this, please.
Speaker 2:Great question. In fact it's because of this that I eventually became an opera singer. I never really thought of becoming an opera singer. It kind of was a fluid process because of my stuttering. I started to stutter pretty badly when I went to school in the States. That's where the extreme culture shock happened. The first day in class I got up, the teacher called on me and, as I used to do in my country, I stood up to speak and all the students started to laugh at me. It was just wild. So that was a shock. I had a wonderful teacher so she managed to get me through all of that. But from that day on the stutter was pretty extreme.
Speaker 2:And I remember specifically I was in my room in Elizabeth, new Jersey, because we moved from Newark to Elizabeth pretty soon after we had moved to Newark and I remember in my room I was singing. We listened to music at home a lot. Nobody was a professional musician but we listened to music and I was singing along with I can't remember what song, and it hit me that I don't stutter when I sing. And then I was watching. Yeah, then I was watching a program. I was watching Johnny Carson and he had watching a program. I was watching Johnny Carson and he had as a guest Mel Tillis, the country singer, who also stuttered horribly Really.
Speaker 2:Yeah, mel Tillis said that he doesn't stutter when he sings, so that became for me a way of expressing myself vocally, because I was scared to speak in class. I did not raise my hand and my teachers eventually said listen, ron stutters, so you guys have to be patient with him. So sometimes I had to read in class and that was an absolute nightmare, oh I bet. But again, good, solid teachers were helpful and that created an environment where my colleagues actually were very tolerant and very nice to me. I have to say, during this whole time no one in my class ever teased me about my stuttering because of these teachers. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that helped tremendously.
Speaker 1:See the power of teachers. I'm married to a teacher. I think they do not get enough respect. But think about this it's not her job to care about your stuttering, but she did right.
Speaker 2:She did, she did, and that made a big difference. So eventually I was given a scholarship to a small private school in New Jersey and when I arrived I was playing soccer and they were going to do school play. It's a very small school so everybody participated in everything sports, theater, music, everybody did everything. So the drama teacher asked me if I would audition for the play that year. It was a play called 40 Carats, that's a movie from the 1960s. And I said I stutter terribly so there's no way I'm going to audition for a straight play. But they knew I sang and I had done musical theater, uh, at my previous school, and so they really encouraged me to do this. So I said, fine, I'll do the audition. But you'll see, I started so badly you will not want me to do it. I auditioned and the teacher assigned me the lead. Oh my god, the lead, yeah, the lead, uh. But in order to do the lead I had to give up soccer and I was the scorer for the soccer team and I said, no, man, there's no way I'm going to give up soccer team. They depend on me, so I have to be there. He said okay, we'll figure out something. I'll talk to the coach.
Speaker 2:Well, I ended up with the second lead, which had even more lines than the lead, and she said don't worry, I will help you out. Well, long story short, um, she couldn't figure out how to help me out. We got about midway rehearsals. I was stuttering to have my lines it was getting embarrassing, people were feeling sorry for me walked in my music teacher, um, who was a choir teacher, and, uh, she said see me after your rehearsal. And I went and she said I think I can help you out. We're going to practice all of your lines singing. So if I had to say let's just say, if I had to say to be or not to be, that is a question, instead of just saying it that way, she would say to be or not to be, that is the question.
Speaker 1:So we figured out these wonderful musical lines Like with tone and pitch you're talking about With tone and pitch and legato.
Speaker 2:Shoot and sit, breathe, make sure every line is legato. So it's to be or not to be, that is the question. We created a line Interesting.
Speaker 1:For those that don't know legato I'm sure most people know, but legato is very smooth. Everything is connected Very smooth.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because everything is connected Right. So at the end of it, years later, I found out that singing and speaking operate on different parts of the brain. So if anybody has ever had a major stroke and lose their speech ability, there was a movie with Robert De Niro who had a stroke and couldn't speak and what is his name? A similar Hoffman ended up being this actor, voice teacher, who helped him find his voice through singing. So singing and speaking happened from different parts of the brain, and so what I actually ended up using to work out my stuttering was essentially accessing the singing part of my brain. When I speak, and as we are doing this right now, I'm using this technique right this minute. It may not sound it because I've become very adept at it, but I'm practically singing to you right now.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting because, like I said when I first met you, which is what 30 years ago? Maybe now um your.
Speaker 1:Your stutter was very pronounced and this was in you were you were in graduate school at michigan at the time and the last several times we've had chats I don't think you've stuttered at all and we've had long chats, because you and I don't talk often and when we do we get going and seasons go by. It feels like when we talk to each other, you know, and so you've really figured this out and I just I don't know. I want to congratulate you. It's really inspirational, it's. I know we talk a lot about overcoming challenges and barriers and I, as a life coach, work with people on this. This is the main event right, overcoming barriers. You found a creative way to live with it and work with it, and I think that's the very basic idea about overcoming any challenge in your life. So kudos to you, my friend Kudos to you. Can we shift to your work as a teacher now? Sure, my friend Kudos to you, can we shift to your work as a teacher now?
Speaker 1:You've worked with singers from all over the world and at all levels, including singers at the very highest echelons of the opera world, and you are also a very serious lifelong tennis player, as I've mentioned. You've also witnessed and studied the effects of performance anxiety in sports as well as in the performing arts. Let's talk about what you've witnessed and learned about performance anxiety First. How would you define performance anxiety, especially in the context of first opera, singing? Then we'll come back to tennis. So how do you define it in the context of opera singing?
Speaker 2:It is, for me, essentially a state of mind that you get into because of a history of things not happening the way you want them to happen. You have a feeling of you're not in control of what you're about to do, even though you've practiced, you've practiced, you've practiced, and so then you get to the moment when you have to do it and there's a sense of dread, there's a sense that I'm not going to do well here. It's not logical. You may have rehearsed a piece 100,000 times and it went well, but because of some times when it didn't, a history of things like that creates essentially a state of mind where you are convinced that you're not going to do that well, right, right. That ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, because what you think essentially is what ultimately is going to happen, right.
Speaker 1:I talked about this in my episode last week. You know, in terms of anxiety in general, Most anxiety is caused from fear of anxiety. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:It's not necessarily caused from actually some event. It's caused from fear of anxiety. You know what I mean. It's not necessarily caused from actually some event. It's caused from fear of anxiety and, like you said, typically from something that happened long ago. You know, like you, being humiliated in front of your class the first day of school in Newark, but that didn't keep you from performing. Somehow you found a way to get over that.
Speaker 2:Right, and you know, because I could have remembered that day as being terrified. But then I also remember that teacher who came to my rescue and that was a positive side of it, right? So there's always an out. You have to figure out what the out is, because we're going to get nervous. Pavarotti said if any singer tells you before a performance they're not nervous, nervous is normal. He said they're not nervous, nervous is normal. He said they're lying or they don't care. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yeah, I mean, he actually said this.
Speaker 1:You can find that well, I believe you, I believe you yeah, and I'm sorry I interrupted your train of thought there, but, um, I just really had to jump in on that, that point. But yeah, um, they're lying. So you're saying that basically, this is nervousness. Have you seen it? When it's more than nervousness, when it's more severe than that? Oh sure.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Nervousness is normal. We all get used to. Okay, I get the butterflies and I'm going to use the energy for my performance, or the energy can overwhelm you, and then that becomes panic, and then that becomes ptsd, that becomes essentially anxiety. Yeah, right, yeah. So I have seen situations of really good singers. Actually, a very good friend of mine that I taught for a period of time was making his met debut in carmen, his debut at the met. Is that what you're saying at the met?
Speaker 2:yeah, man he had a wonderful career in europe. Especially, and and because of that wonderful success, he was invited to the met and just had a horrific night. I was listening from berlin at the time, uh, like at two o'clock in the morning, uh, early in time, and I'm listening to him fall apart, oh my. And this is a role that the guy had sung several times with great success, which is why the Met invited him to do it. Yeah, yeah, because the Met doesn't invite anybody to do anything unless they secure that. You know that you're going to kick ass. Well, I could hear, piece by piece, him falling apart and it was just a wreck of a performance.
Speaker 1:Did they fire him after that or did he get another shot? I mean, how does that work? He has a great manager.
Speaker 2:So originally he had seven performances of this role and the Met wanted to let him go, but his management, which is pretty powerful, made them give him two performances instead of seven, so he ended up doing one more performance. I don't know how that went. Uh, those things happen yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have a bad night, but in this case it sounds like it was from anxiety right, it was because he had had a series of uh performances where things weren't going his way, and that was the last of them so kind of like a you know a in baseball, a batter who's in a slump a great batter but who's just not hitting for a couple months. Right, it's very similar to that Exactly, you get in a slump. Yeah, absolutely. It's exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1:How about from the tennis world, Because I know you're very passionate about this and you've had a lot of experience. How do you define performance anxiety in the tennis world and what have you?
Speaker 2:Very similar situation In the tennis world. It's a very similar situation because you have to imagine, a tennis player is a solo performer in general let's not talk about people who play doubles but a singles player is a singles performer Might as well be a soloist at the Met or if you're going to play a big match anywhere or play a small match. I played a small tournament just recently and had a bit of anxiety for that tournament. We'll get to that. But anxiety for tennis players is very similar because you're trying to do something that's very precise, as in any performance. Or you know, just like you said in your intro, if you're going to do uh, uh, you know a presentation at a wedding and you're going to give the toast at a wedding, you want it to go just right. You want to say the wrong thing and to prepare and and you can get nervous about that tennis players as well will play a first match of a tournament and they want to win it, and you can get nervous about that.
Speaker 2:Tennis players as well will play a first match of a tournament and they want to win it, and they can have doubts about how things go, because yesterday, during their practice, the forehand wasn't firing properly and that's the shot they rely on the most.
Speaker 2:And so they go out there for no reason, even though they've been going for weeks with a perfect forehead, but just because they had that little problem the day before, they doubt themselves. And when you end your mind about how do I hit this forehead, instead of just hitting it because your body remembers you get in your own way, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and then you start to hit very badly and then the next match you have, you're in your head again and that continues. And then the next match you have, you're in your head again and that continues and it becomes anxiety, anxiety, anxiety. I just did this tournament where the first three matches I played lost my first singles match, lost my second singles match, lost my first mixed doubles match and then finally, my last mixed doubles match. I was like you know what I'm in my head let's just hit, end up winning it. So you have to find a way out of the funk, and tennis players in general talk about scar tissue and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Interestingly enough, years ago I was on the balcony of a hotel room that I was in in Florida and on the balcony next to me was this retired famous professional football player I'm not going to say his name or what team he was for and we're shooting the ball and we're having a nice chat from my balcony to his. It was very close and we're just having a nice chat and at one point I said to him because he had won a Super Bowl, and I said to him you know, can you explain to me what happens when you have this great team all season long who then goes to the Super Bowl and just collapses? It's just one of those blowouts. What in your mind?
Speaker 1:And I bring this up because his answer was so funny he said to me there's something about going to the show that makes the ass get tight Never forget him saying that but I think that's a good metaphor actually for the fact that they're in their head, actually for the fact that they're in their head, you know, for, for singers, I mean, if the let's talk about the tension that comes from anxiety, real briefly, I mean, the voice has to be relaxed to work well. For tennis players, the tension, I'm sure, tightens the muscles in the arms and the legs and slows you down. Um, if, if that's happening to you as a singer let's start there what can you do to make sure that those muscles that you need from your diaphragm and whatever else, your work, your larynx, whatever?
Speaker 2:the mechanics are. Don't get too tight to fail Exactly Now. There are two parts to this. There's a preventative side. If I know that I'm dealing with a singer who's had some issues, who's had some bad performances and has a bit of PTSD, we'll do a little bit of I guess you might refer to it as self-hypnosis. So what we do is you know, I'll go through it very quickly. I'd say, close your eyes.
Speaker 2:Imagine you go into an elevator, we go down 10 stories. Then you get down there, the door opens and that's the stage we're going to perform. So now we're going to program what is going to happen. You're going to walk out. This is what you're going to do. So we program the successful performance. Then this performance is over, we go back into the elevator, we go back up. It's basically programming the subconscious Through visualization Exactly, exactly Right. And then the singer has this programming. And I've experienced this. It was a teacher of mine that showed me this when I was having a terrible cold and thought that my performance would go badly. We programmed it. I went out and the performance went pretty much the way we programmed it. That was radical, so I never forgot that. Or who has some anxiety? Maybe they have a cold, maybe they feel a bit insecure. We'll go through that exercise and then normally things tend to go pretty well, unless there's something more extreme that we can't deal with.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, hold that thought, and I want to get to tennis in a second, but we're running long, so I just want to take a quick break to get my ad in, and then we will pick up where we left off with talking about tension with tennis players. Is that all right? So hang tight just for a minute.
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Speaker 1:Okay, back with Ron. Sorry for that interruption, but I've got to get that in. So let's pick this up where we left off. We were talking about how the how the stress can affect the mechanics of singing. Let's talk about how stress affects the mechanics of playing tennis. I mean, I imagine, the muscles I'm not a tennis player okay, connected, I'm going to go right because I told you that was one part that was preventative.
Speaker 2:That was this exercise that we do to program the performance. The other thing thing is what do you do in the moment when suddenly things are going haywire? What do you do there? The same thing we do in singing as in tennis. Go back to basics, right. So if your forehand is a problem, visualize what the movement is right. At what point do you hit the ball? How do you prepare? How do you step into it? How do you follow through? You know exactly what that move is, without any emotion, just go through it.
Speaker 2:If you watch a tennis match and you watch a tennis player just miss the forehand, you'll watch them make a movement with their hand of how they were supposed to do it. It's a reminder. So that's a reset. I've never noticed that. I'll look for that. Yeah, it happens a lot. They miss a shot and then you see them go through the motion softly just to remind themselves what they should have done as opposed to what they did. Okay, right.
Speaker 2:So tennis, like singing, is lightning fast. It uses the entire body and very often we focus. For example, singers focus on the vocal cords and tennis players focus on their arms a whole lot and how they hit the forehand, the backhand, their serves. But the problem is, all of that is based on their legs and very often tennis players don't think about their legs and very often just getting them to. There's another exercise that tennis players do a lot. When things are not going extremely well, they'll jump up and down and all that does is it mentally connects them to their body, Because very often when things start to go wrong, you start to think what am I doing wrong?
Speaker 2:Bad thought, because the movement. If you've been playing tennis for any period of time, the movement is already memorized, just like singing, it should be memorized. If it's not memorized, that could be a source of the problem whereby you have anxiety. But if you have already a good technique and things are going wrong, most likely you need to get out of the way. So what you need to think is simple stuff Keep your eyes on the ball the entire time. If you watch a slow motion of somebody hitting a great forehand, you'll watch them hit the ball, their arm finishes, but their eyes are still where the ball was. That's a very important part, because they need to keep their eyes on the ball until the hit is done.
Speaker 1:Well, two things out of what you just said that relate to the show I did last week. One is grounding. You're essentially saying feel where you are. And grounding is an exercise where you know you feel your feet touching the floor and you're focusing on that. The other is being absolutely present in the moment, which means, yes, you know, looking for something to see, feel, touch, hear. What do things sound like as to get out of your head, to get out of the way. Be present in the moment not easy to do, by the way.
Speaker 2:Sounds easy, but they're not easy to do no, it's not easy to do, and that's and that's the thing you need to. When I was doing martial arts a lot, I did Kung Fu and Tai Chi, and what was so great about Tai Chi, which I do daily even now, is that nothing is more important than the breath. The movement is based on your breathing, not the other way around. So things like that the movement is based on your breathing, not the other way around, right? So things like that. And singing is about breathing, and tennis, it's about breathing. The greatest player who's ever played the game, Novak Djokovic. They ask him how do you deal with the stressful moments? He said well, there are lots of things. You have to be in the moment, just like he. And he said, most importantly, conscious breathing, yeah, and you'll watch playing very difficult moments and you'll watch and breathe. Many players don't breathe well, I talked about.
Speaker 1:I talked about breathing exercises for right before the moment, like box breathing, which is something the navy seals do. But you're right, in the moment we still need to breathe. That's what we need to focus there too, Really great advice. Yeah, all right, so just really quick. Do you find in your experience with opera singers, performance anxiety is more pronounced in beginners or in experienced people?
Speaker 2:I can tell the truth, both for different reasons. Beginners often don't have a solid technique, but sometimes they have to get in front of their colleagues to sing or do a little recital in front of their parents and neighbors, and so on. They get really nervous because they want to do a good job. Same principle, but their problems often occur when they haven't mastered their technique yet, and so often they get in their heads. They're thinking like I'm going to sing this song. I dream of dreaming with a light brown hair. Instead they're thinking like I need to lift my soft palate, I need to breathe that way, and then everything becomes an exercise in tension and things don't go well, at that point and it's like quicksand, right.
Speaker 1:I remember that from the movie the Replacements. They talk like quicksand right. I remember that from the movie the Replacements they talk about quicksand Exactly, then you're lost there at that point.
Speaker 2:Same thing happens with professionals, for different reasons. Professionals often have the physical technique, otherwise they would not be at the highest level of the game, but they often get anxiety about things that are not clear to them Tennis players, for example. I remember I went to a coach and he said there are no secrets in tennis. Every coach will tell you the same thing, right, because we see what you're doing and we can all comment about what you need to do better. There's agreement there. There used to be a time when Weston Shirt somewhat agreed on stuff, but there's not much agreement in singing anymore. So there's a real problem because you don't see the instrument. Most everything is happening and such. You have to have a real knowledge of anatomy and acoustics and how these things work, but for the singer, they have to go by, feel, and you have to be very clear about what the sensations are. However, when it's time to perform, if the physical aspect of it is not already memorized, you start to think okay, I need to sing in the mask or I need to do this. It's too late at this point and if that's not happening correctly, that's a problem.
Speaker 2:Another aspect of singing, for example, is memorizing words. Some people have it very easy and other people have a very hard time with it. Some singers get panicky because they think they're going to forget their lines and so, even though they sing really well, they're afraid that their memory is going to fail them. Others have a problem with not being sure if their melody and the harmony of the accompaniment whether it's an orchestra or piano, if they're clear about that or not, so they're afraid they might get off. They might get off key because they don't, because they're not sure about but the harmony, sometimes they don't know that that's a problem they don't even know. Okay, they get into a performance and they go off and they don't know why that is. And so there are so many aspects of this that are conscious and very often not conscious.
Speaker 1:And that's the worst. Let's shift this to tennis playing, because you and I were talking and you used a term that apparently tennis players use that I never knew about. Tell us what scar tissue means in tennis, the term scar tissue?
Speaker 2:Scar tissue is a memory of a bad experience, right? Let's say that. Funny enough. I just watched one of the most incredible tennis matches of the year so far, or maybe of the last five years. I've seen A major tennis player, number five in the world, daniel Medvedev, was playing against a young American who was only playing his second match in a Grand Slam. This thing went to five sets, almost five hours long. Both guys are just tired. They put everything out there. Both of them played magnificently, but this young man has a special mentality. During the entire match you look at his face there was never a concern. He was just in the moment doing his thing. That's what's special about him, and everybody's commenting on this.
Speaker 2:Daniel Medvedev, who has won a Grand Slam, who has won a bunch of tournaments, one of the best players in the world, has lost a few in long five sets in the past two or three years. It's what happened today. They get in a final set. Tiebreaker, 10-point tiebreaker. Medvedev is ahead. Kidd catches up. Next thing. You know the kid won and I'm sitting there thinking, oh, I'm about to have this discussion with Matt. The match just ended. Just right now, from Australia, medvedev is having a major issue with scar tissue right now, of memories of matches that were so close, especially long, grueling matches when it's just giving everything you've got and the other person gets ahead of him, and even the analysis things that we were pretty sure Daniel had this match in hand but he lost it, and I'm and I'm very sure that it's got to show.
Speaker 1:You know, there's that book, the Inner Game of Tennis, tennis and I've read it um, which talks a lot about these things. And I I there is a I know because I have several people in my life who are in in the performing arts. I know that there was a book written based on that for musicians. But the truth is I was talking to a few other people, I bet you'll agree sports people seem to the ones that are really successful seem to train psychologically from an early age, not just the physical stuff, but they train psychologically to create that steel mind, the ability to do that. Musicians don't, it seems. And so I have a friend in the performing arts who said to me you know, the truth about classical music is it's an entire industry fueled by insecurity.
Speaker 1:That's what he said and that's an incredible comment, and I tend to agree with the way things are right now yeah, yeah, and so you know, I imagine it's just so much harder for professional musicians and and I don't know what they do in the acting world, but I imagine it's the same. They harder for professional musicians and, and I don't know what they do in the acting world, but I imagine it's the same they're not training that on psychological approaches as much as they're training on the skills. So they the you know, performance anxiety, I'm sure is is rampant, um for them. So all right. Well, this is a great place for us to to stop today's show, because we're I don't want to run too long. I promise my listeners I keep it to 30 minutes. Sometimes I go to 40. We're at 35. That's fine. But the good news is we're going to continue this conversation next week with Ron. So hang tight, be with us next week. We're going to finish next week. Ron, thank you for today and thank you for coming next week Pleasure.
Speaker 1:Absolutely All right If you've enjoyed today's show. Thanks for listening. By the way, if you've enjoyed today's show, please like or subscribe this podcast so you can be notified the next time I drop a show and in particular, when for next week, when the next show with Ron comes out. If you have any ideas for topics you would like me to cover, please feel free to email me. It's Matt at Mattbrookscoachingcom. I'd love to hear from you and see what ideas you have and if I can make it happen, I will. So that's all for today. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate you listening. Thanks again to Ron LaFond, who'll be back next week. Be well, and I'll catch you next time on the Barrier Busting Podcast. Thank you.
