What if the greatest impediment to your success was in your own mind? Do you find yourself shying away from practice before an important concert or jury? Do you know someone who always seems to be sick before a big performance? If so, you might be witnessing a psychological behavior experts have termed "self-handicapping".
Self-handicapping occurs when someone strongly identifies with a certain task (for example making music/being a musician) but are uncertain about their abilities. Rather than have those abilities tested and found wanting (which would damage their sense of self-identity) often people will unknowingly create impediments that they can blame any future failure on. For example, there's a big audition coming up. You're pretty nervous about it. Instead of practicing, you get distracted and play video games instead. You just can't seem to focus on the audition. The day comes, the audition doesn't go well. Is it because you just weren't good enough? Maybe but who knows because you didn't put your best effort into preparing for it. Maybe if you had, you would have won. It's that uncertainty - not knowing if you are good enough and not knowing what the outcome of the test situation would have been if you had given it your best effort - that allows self-handicapping behavior to thrive. The problem is, by engaging in these behaviors you maximize the chance of bringing about the very failure that you fear.
Want to learn more? Check out my dissertation on the subject (the first known study to look specifically at the musician population) or you can contact me directly. I've presented this groundbreaking research at conferences and universities around the country and am happy to talk to you or your students about how they can stop getting in their own way.