I have spent my career chasing peak performance. Every audition, every opening night, every masterclass — the expectation I bring to each one is the same: full commitment, maximum output, total presence. For a long time, this was not a goal, but a requirement. How else could I call myself a professional?
Recently, Barbara and I were having one of our catch-up chats, and she stopped me mid-thought (mid-rant?) and named something I hadn’t been able to articulate.
“What you’re describing,” she said, “is the difference between peak performance and sustained high performance. And they are not the same thing.”
She was watching me try to explain why I was exhausted — why running five simultaneous professional commitments felt so much heavier than the demands of a full performance schedule once had. The problem, she suggested, wasn’t the quantity of work. It was that I was bringing a peak performance standard to situations that didn’t require it and couldn’t sustain it.
Performing artists are wired for stop-and-run, she observed. We arrive, we ignite, we deliver, we leave. We are in a “show-must-go-on,” “sink-or-swim” mindset when we’re performing. We allow ourselves to rest only when the curtain comes down. That cycle — intense focus, high output, clean exit — is what we’ve trained for…but it becomes a hard rhythm to maintain if the curtain doesn’t come down often enough (and stay down long enough). It’s also, in Barbara’s words, “a very unhealthy thing to do on five stages at once.”
What the newer parts of my professional life require — teaching over semesters, building organizational relationships, developing a creative footprint in one place — is something different. Not less demanding, but differently demanding. Consistent presence. Reliable availability. The long game.
I’m finding now that learning how to maintain a sustained high performance groove not only keeps me sane as I juggle various responsibilities, but it also improves my satisfaction with singing. I sing better, and enjoy it more, when I’m not treating it like a 5-alarm-fire all the time.
A teacher once said to me “you are training for a marathon, not a sprint.” Now — finally! — after many years of running, I understand how right she was.
Image by Anna Mae from Pixabay
