Why do I get so nervous and lose confidence when I don’t have enough to show for what I’ve prepared?

My experience auditioning for my university’s orchestra club made me think about how stage fright and lack of confidence can affect you in important positions, and I realized that it took a lot of experience and hard work to overcome them.

 

The first club I decided to join after entering university was the music club, partly because I had heard about it before, and partly because I was involved in the same activities in high school. I joined the orchestra club as a cello player and started participating.
Shortly after joining the club, we had an audition. It was a simple event where I had to perform a piece that I had practiced in front of the seniors, but it was my first performance opportunity after joining the club, and I wanted to do well because I had been learning the cello for a long time. I had about a month or two to prepare, and after discussing it with my lesson teacher, I chose a piece that I expected to be able to complete by practicing hard during the given period. I decided to play Saint-Saëns’ Allegro appassionato, which is a fast-paced piece from the beginning.
I practiced hard before the audition, and I was able to play it much better than I thought I could. I didn’t think I would be able to show all my skills in front of so many people, but I felt that I would be able to give a satisfactory performance. Finally, the day of the concert arrived. There were two parts to the audition, and my turn was right at the beginning of the second part. One by one, my friends came on stage and started playing, and as I watched, I started to have all kinds of thoughts. As I watched them perform, I started to have all sorts of thoughts: they were showing off what they had prepared so well, and as I watched them make little mistakes, I thought they were really good, and I thought it was a shame that they made mistakes. But as my turn approached, I started to worry that I wouldn’t be able to do well, and I couldn’t calm my nerves and trepidation.
Backstage, those feelings were at their peak. When I got on stage, I was moving at such a fast pace that I could barely move my left hand to pluck the strings or my right hand to draw the bow. I didn’t even bring my first sheet of music, which I thought I had memorized, and my head didn’t help me once I got on stage. It wasn’t just that I was nervous and my hands were slow, or that I couldn’t hit the right notes. It was that I was hitting the wrong notes at the wrong time, and there were parts of the piece where I stopped and skipped.
When I finished, I felt a sense of disappointment. I felt like I hadn’t prepared enough, and I wondered why I was so nervous when I wasn’t like this when I was practicing. I know that everyone gets nervous when they go on stage, but I was so nervous compared to my friends that I thought to myself, “Why am I like this?” I didn’t have a lot of experience on stage, but my inability to overcome stage fright was always the same. Even though I practiced a lot, I felt unconfident and shy in front of people, and the thought of “doing well” only made me more nervous and made me make ridiculous mistakes. This happened frequently in the exam room. There were many times when I would ace the mock test, only to come back with ridiculous results in the real exam.
It was very frustrating to not be able to show my full self to others in the real world, but the reason I looked bad wasn’t just because of the unsatisfactory results. It was because there were a lot of fundamentally bad things about doing this over and over again. Things like lack of confidence in front of others, being intimidated, and not being able to control my mind in important situations. A person who lacks confidence is unable to fully demonstrate their abilities, not only in these important situations, but in most interactions with people. First impressions are a large part of how we make judgments about a person, and the first impression of someone who lacks confidence is often “quiet”. Lack of confidence can also be a major obstacle to finding opportunities for yourself, as it prevents you from taking the initiative when you are given the chance to make things happen.
Not being able to control yourself when you’re nervous is also a big weakness. I’ve often thought of myself as calm in these situations, but my fake calmness has always led to absurd results. In a personality interview for university admission, I solved a problem without reading the given fingerprint, and in a physics olympiad, I got experimental data and graphed something completely different. I tried to calm myself down, but it only made me more nervous. I realized that I was becoming more incompetent in the positions that I thought were important, and that I looked bad every time something important happened. Every time I made a mistake, I thought about how I could fix it. I’ve told myself to be more confident many times, but it hasn’t been easy, but I think I can change myself little by little by trying to do things when I have the chance, even if I don’t feel like it, and trying not to care so much about what others think of me.
I think the only way to overcome mind control is through hard work. The more you get used to being on stage, the more you become desensitized to the intimidation of being on stage. I think this is something that gets better with experience, and it’s helpful to have as many different experiences as possible. Being too nervous to perform well is a definite weakness, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing if you view stage fright as the result of excessive worry, not a lack of confidence or a failure of mind control. Anxiety about failure forces you to prepare thoroughly for everything. The reason I was able to come to Seoul National University despite my nervousness in the examination hall was because my pre-exam anxiety pushed me into perfect test preparation. You might argue that excessive worrying leads to psychological pressure and stress, even if the outcome is good. However, I think it’s something that will go away once the exam is over, and it’s a trade-off for what you get.
There are definitely some things that have improved as a result of this effort. For example, I gradually became more confident in small performances and presentations, and these experiences made me stronger. I also became less nervous before important events and found my own ways to overcome nervousness. I make a lot of mistakes whenever I have something important to do, but I like myself. Even if I don’t show others enough of myself, I’ve been able to put in the work to improve, and I’ve been able to achieve the same results as before. I don’t like the way I look when I make mistakes, but I know I can overcome them if I keep trying.
Finally, the biggest lesson I learned from this process was to not be afraid of failure. Failure has made me grow, and it has made me stronger. There will be many challenges and failures in the future, but I believe I will be a better person for it all. Success comes to those who get back up from failure, right?