When I sat down to write this blog about men’s mental health in the performing arts, I spent far too long searching for a clever angle, something new, or interesting to say. Yet, I kept circling back to the same familiar themes: low self-esteem, addiction, violence, and the ongoing uncertainty about what it even means to be a man today.

These issues are well-known, but they persist because they continue to shape the emotional landscape of many men, that I support.

This morning, on International Men’s Day, I heard Tim Stanley’s, “Thought for the Day” on the radio. He admitted he was “very suspicious” of the concept of even having such a day. He also pointed out that many men remain resistant to therapy and that the self-pitying man, can be almost as unattractive, as the muscle-bound man shouting at us on social media to drink protein shakes.

That line captured my attention, because it reflects two extremes that countless men feel caught between.

As a performance psychologist, my work is centred on understanding each person I meet as an individual. Gender does not define the relationship, humanity does. My aim, is to understand the unique mind in front of me, how it works, where it struggles and how to help that person perform at their best, while remaining grounded and healthy.

And it suddenly became obvious to me: perhaps the real tension many men feel lies in the polarisation itself. On one side, the “self-pitying man” who seeks help. On the other, the hyper-masculine figure selling strength, certainty and protein drinks.

In a world that amplifies these extremes, it’s easy to forget something simple and profoundly grounding:

You are a human being first.

Before performance.  Before masculinity.  Before expectation.  Before comparison.

Recognising this is a powerful starting point. Being human means having needs, vulnerabilities and limits. And understanding this allows men to approach themselves with self-compassion, rather than criticism.

Visibility Matters: Why Performers Opening Up Helps Everyone

Many leading performers, such as Lewis Capaldi, have begun openly sharing their mental health experiences with fans and the wider world. Their honesty is reshaping the conversation.

“Therapy has been such a massive part of my… last two years, a massive part of the reason that I’m able to be a musician again.”
— Lewis Capaldi (The Scotsman)

This openness is invaluable, not only for other performers, but for people in all walks of life. It allows audiences to vicariously experience the reality behind the curtain: the struggle, the seeking of help, the gradual rebuilding and ultimately the return to performing with renewed strength.

Celebrities who speak openly about their mental health journey, use their platform to reach millions. They can help the public understand that mental illness is common, treatable and nothing to be ashamed of. Importantly, they encourage those who are struggling to seek help, rather than suffer in silence.

Returning to Our Humanity

When performers and men more broadly feel torn between cultural caricatures of masculinity, returning to the simple truth of our shared humanity can be deeply grounding.

• Being human means needing support.
• It means learning to show yourself self-compassion.
• And it means recognising that asking for help is not an act of self-pity, but an act of courage.

Here are 3 tools you could do today to build your self compassion:

1. Approach yourself as you would a friend

During challenging times, pause and ask:

1. What supportive words would I say to my friend in this situation?
2. Would I use the same tone I’m using on myself right now?

This instantly shifts your inner dialogue from criticism to support, which reduces stress and improves focus.

2. Build a 30 second refocus plan after mistakes

Self-compassion is not only emotional, it’s also behavioural.  If you make a mistake rehearsing or performing, have a routine to help you get back into your performance.  A simple reset could include:

1. One deep, slow breath
2. Rolling and relaxing your shoulders
3. Saying a grounding phrase like ‘focus’ ‘calm’, or ‘ready’

This tiny habit trains your nervous system to recover faster and with more kindness.

3. It’s important to separate your self-worth from your performance.
   Your value as a person is not defined by how well you play, act, dance, or sing. Instead, anchor your self-worth in your values and in all the areas of your life, your relationships, your character, your efforts, and the way you show up as a human being, not just as a performer.

November being Men’s Mental Health Awareness month, perhaps the most meaningful starting is, remembering that you are allowed to be human.

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“I’ve always approached things with hunger and just enough fear. Plenty of confidence, you know, but just enough fear to work extra hard.” Queen Latifah

This quote from Queen Latifah brilliantly highlights the essence of what is needed to prepare for your next audition.  It captures the hunger, the desire to do well and celebrates that fear is not something to be afraid of, but something you can use to help you work hard and channel it into delivering your best performance, when you need to.

Mindset Matters: Confidence Is a Skill

Your mindset can make, or break your audition. Staying composed under pressure and maintaining a healthy perspective is key. Confidence isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you build. Performance psychology teaches us that confidence stems from self-efficacy, your belief in your ability to succeed in specific situations.

Confidence is quiet. It’s not arrogance. It’s the calm inner belief that you’re prepared, capable, and worthy of the opportunity. When you walk into the audition room with that mindset, you don’t just perform, you perform at your best.

Shift Your Mindset: From Proving to Growing

Auditions often feel like pressure tests of whether you’re “good enough.” But adopting a growth mindset, one that embraces the fact that skills and talent can be developed through effort, can transform your approach and reduce anxiety.

Try These Growth Mindset Habits:

• Embrace challenges: See auditions as learning opportunities, not final judgments.
• Learn from mistakes: Treat errors as feedback, not failure.  Review and learn.
• Celebrate progress: Every small success builds mastery and confidence.
• Stay curious: Keep exploring new techniques, styles, and roles

Control What You Can — Let Go of the Rest

Uncertainty fuels anxiety. As soon as your audition is booked, gather all the practical details you need.  This allows you to focus on your preparation and not be distracted worrying about how things might be.

Prep Checklist:

• Time, date, and location — how long will travel take?
• Format — live, recorded, or self-tape?
• Will it be screened?
• Are there call backs, or multiple rounds?
• What materials do you need?
• What’s the technical setup?
• Who’s on the panel?
• Dress code?
• Food and drink needs?

Focus on what’s within your control, like your preparation, your mindset, your effort. Let go of what’s not, the panel’s opinions, other performers, and final outcomes.

Brainstorm Your Worries

Before your audition, take a moment to check in with yourself. What fears, or thoughts are running through your mind? Common ones include:

• “What if I mess up?”
• “What if I don’t get the role?”
• “Everyone else is better than me.”

Use cognitive restructuring to change these beliefs into more helpful ones, like “I am well prepared and I trust myself to perform at my best”, or “If this one doesn’t work out, another opportunity will come, I’m building momentum.”

Practice Under Pressure: Simulation Training

Rehearse under realistic conditions. If it’s a screened audition, practice with a screen.  It’s amazing how many performers forget to practise in front of a screen and feel overwhelmed in the audition.  Record yourself, or rehearse behind a curtain to simulate the experience.

Wear the clothes you’ll wear. Say what you’ll say to the panel. Record yourself, or perform for a trusted friend. The more familiar the setup, the less intimidating the real thing will feel.

Create Your Pre-Audition Mental Warm-Up

Before you walk into the room, take a few minutes to center yourself:

• Take a couple of deep breaths.
• Visualize a confident, focused performance.
• Repeat affirmations like “I am prepared” and “I bring something unique.”
• Connect to your love of performing and the joy of sharing it.

Make Practice Sessions Count

When you’re busy it is easy to just wing it, in practise sessions. Structure your practice like a training session.

Practice Tips:

• Plan what you want to focus on each session.
• Evaluate what went well, what needs work and points for next session.
• Keep sessions short — 30 to 60 minutes max.
• Warm up and cool down mentally and physically.
• Use a journal, or app to track progress and stay focused.

Channel Your Energy

Some performers find that light exercise, like a run or walk, a couple of hours before an audition helps regulate nerves. Try it in advance and see what works for you.

Post-Audition Reflection

After your audition, take time to review:

• What went well?
• What could be improved?
• What did you learn?  How can you be better prepared next time?

Bonus Tips:

• Record and review your practice sessions.
• Mistakes aren’t catastrophes. They’re information. Learn from them and move forward.
• Seek feedback from trusted friends, mentors, or coaches as you prepare.

“I give myself homework when I have an audition. I give myself goals, and that’s how I check how I’m doing. It’s not about booking the job or not. It’s about what I learned as an actor about that character.” Lupita Nyong’o

Read more posts in this series: Performance Psychology articles by Dr Anna Waters

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“Before stepping on stage, I close my eyes and mentally perform every bar, hearing and feeling each nuance.” — Yo-Yo Ma

Thoughts, feelings and images run through our minds as we approach important events. Do you mentally run through an upcoming audition, or important performance? Do your images and thoughts help you create the performances you want to deliver? If not, then you could be overlooking one of the most powerful tools for success: mental imagery.

For performing artists, mental imagery (MI) consists of guiding your images in a constructive positive way to enhance your performance in practise and on stage. Backed by science, mental imagery (MI) is an excellent tool to prime the brain and body for optimal performance.

What is Mental Imagery and why is it important?

• It is often called visualisation or mental rehearsal
• It involves using all of your senses (see, feel, hear, taste, smell) to rehearse your performance in your mind
• MI is a skill which can be learned

Structured MI programmes are supported by science and proven by elite performers, to help refine technical skills, deepen emotional expression, and manage stage-related anxiety.

Mental imagery provides a valuable opportunity to prepare for and practise dealing with problems, challenges, or upcoming performances in your mind before you tackle them in real life. As conductor Gustavo Dudamel highlights, “I imagine the entire orchestra; then my part fits naturally into that picture.”

Scientific Support for Mental Imagery

Recent neuroimaging techniques have enabled researchers to examine the neural underpinnings of MI in the brain. MI has been found to use similar neural mechanisms used in perception and motor control, which is relevant for performing artists too.

In a review of the literature on the benefits of imagery use for peak performance in sport, Janjigian (2024) concluded that MI is a rigorously supported psychological tool for athletes across all skill levels to enhance performance. Janjigian (2024) found evidence to support psychological, physiological and neural mechanisms, underpinning it’s effectiveness.

An exploratory study by Gregg, Clark and Hall (2008) into musicians’ use of mental imagery found that, musicians reported employing imagery to limit distractions, recover from an error, maintain mental toughness, demonstrate confidence, and overcome mental and physical fatigue.

Furthermore, performance majors indicated using imagery significantly more frequently to see themselves overcoming a difficult situation than non-performance majors, while voice musicians employed imagery to see goal achievement more often than instrumental musicians.

Key Benefits of Mental Imagery for Performing Artists

Build Confidence – imagining yourself performing a piece you have been practising, will help give you a feeling of mastery, which in turn boosts your confidence.

Managing Performance Anxiety – Imagining yourself feeling calm, focused and confident on stage, can rewire your typical stress response. Repeated mental exposure to performance scenarios reduces fear and equips you with coping strategies, if you start to feel nervous.

Performance Preparation – Mentally rehearse how you would like to perform (e.g. calm and focused). Imagine the theatre, the audience and use all your senses to create a real-life experience.

Enhancing Expressivity – mentally rehearse expression and dynamics of piece to deepen interpretation. Use to plan and explore the expression and message of the piece you are playing.

Enhancing Technical Skills – MI allows you to rehearse and address tricky passages, before you physically perform them. Mentally imagining them, strengthens neural connections related to timing, coordination and accuracy.

Reinforcing Muscle Memory – kinaesthetic imagery, feeling the tension, release, and flow of your movements, is a brilliant way of boosting learning of new skills. It speeds up motor learning by replaying movement patterns in the brain.

Key To Effective Mental Imagery

To maximise your imagery training effectiveness focus on:

• Vividness and detail
• Controllability – being able to control and manipulate your images as you want to, a bit like editing a film in your mind
• Using all senses (see, feel, hear, smell, and taste) and emotions

Tips for getting Started

1. Practice makes perfect. Imagery is a skill that needs to be practiced to be effective.
2. Aim for quality practice. It is important to start with brief high quality mental imagery training sessions. Effective imagery is mentally tiring, so aim for quality images over short periods of time and increase your training times as you master the skill.
3. Identify your scenario to image. Pick a specific performance you want to image.
4. Add detail and make it as realistic as possible. Imagine the stage, the lights, the audience, the sound of the others performers around you, taking a sip of cool refreshing water.
5. Include all your senses. What can you see, hear, feel, smell, touch and taste? Feel your body moving as you would when you perform.
6. Imagine setbacks and mentally rehearse your response to them.
7. Make MI a habit. While brushing your teeth in the morning imagine a few bars of a current piece/a few lines of a play. Spend a couple of minutes before practice/rehearsal imagining any difficult passages you will be practicing. Whilst commuting home after a show, do a MI review of your performance.

Additional suggestions

• Keep a MI training journal – note what you imaged, rate how it went and what you learned.
• Use guided audio scripts, or even better, record your own to stay consistent.

Read more posts in this series: Performance Psychology articles by Dr Anna Waters

Step by step visualisation exercises: BAPAM: Visualisation Techniques for Performers

References

Gregg, M. J. and Clark, T. and Hall, C. R. (2008). Seeing the sound: an exploration of the use of mental imagery by classical musicians. Musicae Scientiae, 12 (2) pp. 231-247. ISSN 1029-8649 (print) 2045-4147 (online).

Holmes, P. S., & Collins, D. J. (2001). The PETTLEP approach to motor imagery: A functional equivalence model for sport psychologists. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 13(1), 60–83.

Janjigian, Kiersten. “Picture perfect: the science behind mental imagery for peak performance & best practices for mental imagery protocols in sport” Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity, vol. 19, no. s1, 2024, pp. 20230027. https://doi.org/10.1515/jirspa-2023-0027

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After nailing your audition and landing a fantastic role, do you ever get that sinking feeling?

That now you have to deliver?

Do you start to think that everyone else would be better at this role than you?  Why did they pick you?  You must have just been lucky this time and soon they will find out that you are not good enough.

Fast forward to the first day of rehearsals … You start to feel like you just don’t fit in, that you don’t deserve to be there in the room with all these other performers, who clearly know what they are doing.  Everyone around you seems to be better than you and confident.  As the first night approaches, you begin to worry about living up to expectations?

Do some, or all of these thoughts resonate with you? If so, they could be your imposter syndrome talking.

Imposter syndrome (IS) is really common, with research suggesting that about 80% of people (Bravata et al., 2020), experience feelings of Imposter Syndrome at some point in their life. It seems to be especially widespread amongst those performing on stage and is something performers are always coming to see me to work on.

What is Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter Syndrome is a pattern of behaviour, rather than a clinical condition and was first coined in the late 1970s.  It exists on a spectrum with some performers having very few experiences of it and others feeling almost crippled by it.  It is often characterised by doubting one’s abilities, downplaying achievements and worrying about being found out as a fraud.

It is most common in very ambitious, high achieving people and especially among those who are prone to perfectionism.  These traits are commonly found in those performing on stage, which could be why it is so prevalent in the world of performing arts.

Imposter syndrome as a double-edged sword

In my work as a performance psychologist, I have noticed that while preparing for a performance, many performers’ patterns of thinking and beliefs align with the patterns of thinking associated with Imposter Syndrome.

Let’s use an example to bring this to life. Imagine you get a call to say you have an audition/important performance in a week’s time.

Would any of these ring true for you around your preparation?

• Aiming for the perfect performance
• Obsessing over minor details
• Expecting consistently flawless performances
• Avoidance of trying new things for fear it won’t be perfect
• Not acknowledging and celebrating success, as always moving on to the next performance

Do any of these resonate with you?

If so, the same things that may be pushing you to be ambitious and successful, may leave you struggling with Imposter Syndrome.

This is because you are aiming for the impossible, leading you to feel like you never achieve what you are striving for.

The thing is, nothing is ever perfect. No one is able to deliver consistently flawless performances.

Confidence

Confidence is built through demonstrating that we can perform, or master something. If you never feel like you are performing successfully because you are constantly striving for perfection, you will not be truly  building your underlying confidence. Your confidence will fluctuate depending on how you feel that day.

Many high-profile performers have opened up about their experiences of Imposter Syndrome including Olivia Coleman, Lupita Nyong’o, David Tennant, Ellie Goulding, Antonio Pappano and Vilde Frang.

Tom Hanks, highlighted how it feels perfectly:

No matter what we’ve done, there comes a point where you think, “How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?”

As we can see, many hugely successful performers still feel worthless despite their success.

For me, it is important to think about how to harness the positive aspects of imposter patterns of thinking and behaviour. To manage them more effectively and so, be able to deliver your best performance.

At the same time, it is imperative as a performer that you build value in yourself, building your self-esteem and your confidence so that even when a performance isn’t perfect, you know that you are where you should be.

Here are a few suggestions you can try to combat Imposter Syndrome:

1. Recognise Imposter Syndrome is happening – and choose to do something about it.

2. Develop a sense of feeling valuable now – just as you are.  This instantly gives you power.

3. Be proud of yourself when you do your best, even if you made a mistake.

4. Reach out to others – making a connection can help manage feelings of isolation.

5. Notice if you are engaging in safety behaviours – Safety behaviours are used consciously, or unconsciously, as we attempt to prevent fears from coming true and to feel more comfortable in situations we are anxious about.  Some common safety behaviours and how to deal with them are:

• Over practice – acknowledge it when it happens and take time to rationally plan your practice and preparation.  Challenge any beliefs around needing to practice more than others.
• Procrastination – notice if you are procrastinating  and explore your motivations for not starting. Do you fear it will not be perfect because you do not know how to practice effectively? Or because the practice will be hard work? Or is it something else entirely?  Be ready to manage the usual distracting thoughts that are likely to pop into your head, before you start to practice. Make things easy on yourself. Have a really easy first step and just get started.

6. Part of the Imposter Syndrome model (Clance & O’Toole, 1988) suggests following a performance, performers can be quick to discount positive feedback. These suggestions can help:

• Celebrate your success. Write it down and make it visible.
• Do a post-performance review after each performance. Note down a couple of things you were happy with, a couple that didn’t go so well and your key learning point to take into your next performance.  Then draw a line under the it and move on, taking confidence from what went well.

7. Accept trust and support from those who truly care about you.

Read more posts in this series: Performance Psychology articles by Dr Anna Waters

References

Bravata, D. M., Watts, S. A., Keefer, A. L., Madhusudhan, D. K., Taylor, K. T., Clark, D. M., Nelson, R. S.,  Cokley, K. O., & Hagg, H. K. (2020). Prevalence, predictors, and treatment of impostor syndrome: A systematic review. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 35(4), 1252–1275

Clance, P. R. and O’Toole, M. A. (1988). The imposter phenomenon: An internal barrier to empowerment and achievement. In E. D. Rothblum and E. Cole (Eds.), Treating Women’s Fear of Failure. New York: Haworth Press.

Dr Anna Waters

With over 20 years expertise supporting the performance and mental health of performing artists and athletes,  has been fortunate to work with prominent classical musicians, opera singers, ballet dancers, recording artists, stand-up comedians and actors. She has enjoyed working with national music conservatories, ballet companies and television companies.

Anna loves drawing on her experience of both the performing arts and sporting worlds to help facilitate her work with her clients. She believes that there are many similarities between both arenas, with performers being talented and ambitious people, whose lives are spent working towards big events. Where each day is filled with training, practice, and preparation for the next big event, where they are required to consistently deliver their best performance under the scrutiny of the world.

With a strong academic background, including a PhD in applied sport psychology, Anna spent seven years working alongside Professor Steve Peters sharing The Chimp Model ideologies. This combined with her sport psychology backgrounds forms foundations to her work.

Anna is a Chartered member and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and is registered as a practitioner with Ģ��tv (BAPAM).

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