From my journey as an amateur musician to a music degree student, I found myself perpetually struggling with anxiety, both on and off stage. Without much discourse about it during my undergraduate studies, I found that my anxiety often undermined my musical intentions, which led me to be extremely unsatisfied with my playing. During the period of transition from undergraduate to postgraduate, I found some time for myself in the form of a preparatory year masters programme in the Royal Conservatoire of The Hague. That year gave me headspace to refocus and evaluate what I was aiming for after my masters studies. Out of all the issues I wanted to iron out, anxiety was at the top of the list.
In my first year of studies, I found myself taking modules, workshops and speaking to friends about my malady. Through this process, I found that they all eventually pointed towards the same overarching topic of mindfulness. When I started my master’s programme, I continued along the same trajectory and took up many more electives along the same topic, hoping to search for the cure for my affliction with anxiety. That was when I had my first breakthrough in my journey - I found that through focusing on my musical intentions while playing, my mind started to have less space for anxiety to manifest. When the time finally came for me to choose my research topic, the research questions that I was brainstorming started to angle towards the topic of preparation, focus and performance while having mindfulness as a guiding principle. It was only through more reading and exploration in which I encountered the term “attentional focus”, which I thought summarised really simply, yet elegantly what I wanted to angle my research towards.
