perform solos without getting nervous

Every year, my college has a concerto concert, in which several individual soloists are featured performing virtuosic works (concerto movements or arias) with the orchestra. This year, I was the finale. (I played Cécile Chaminade’s Concertino for Flute.) The concert was last night, and it was amazing. Of course, I was nervous as hell. My mother had driven for seven hours through a raging snowstorm to make it; my girlfriend’s mom had flown across the country to hear her; all my friends were there. By the time I finished, my hands were shaking so hard I could hardly disassemble my flute. But I did great. Not perfectly, of course, but I recovered from mistakes quickly and everyone said I did an amazing job. More relevantly, everyone said I look poised and confident and seemed genuinely surprised to learn that I had been freaking out. So I am marking this goal as done. I think of this as the culmination of my flute career, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll do anything like this again. But it’s deeply satisfying to know I have what it takes to pull something like this off.

I’ve played flute for ten years. I’ve performed in dozens of competitions and performed solos in front of hundreds of people at a time. But I still get nervous any time I have to do any kind of audition or performance exam. In high school, I did auditions and competitions all the time, and I got used to being under pressure. Now I only have to do auditions once a year and studio reviews once a semester, and the rarity of doing it makes it much harder. The fact that I know my music perfectly doesn’t help. I can’t play my flute when my hands are shaking and my lips are quivering.