It’s not your memory – it’s your focus

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You don’t have a memory problem.

One of the greatest fears musicians carry onto the stage is not criticism, a bad review, or even a wrong note. It is the fear of forgetting. The fear of a memory slip can be so powerful that many musicians begin worrying about it weeks or even months before an important audition, competition, or recital.

I regularly hear performers describe it as their worst nightmare. Some have experienced it only once and still remember it years later. Others have built entire practice routines around preventing it from happening again.

What is interesting is that most musicians assume memory failure is the problem itself. They believe they simply need to memorise more thoroughly, repeat passages more often, or spend additional hours in the practice room. Yet after years of working with performers, I have become convinced that what musicians call a ’memory problem’ is often something entirely different. In many cases, memory is not the issue at all.

A conversation I have every examination season

Every year, particularly during examination and competition season, I find myself having the same conversation with students. A performer comes to me after an audition or exam and explains that they made several mistakes because their memory failed.

One recent conversation followed exactly this pattern. A student came to me after an important examination convinced that her memory had let her down. I asked whether she could play the programme from memory during lessons. Yes. Could she play it in the practice room? Yes. Had she been able to perform it successfully weeks before the exam? Again, yes. Had she played it successfully in front of other people before the performance? Yes.

The only place where the mistakes appeared was on stage. Yet the conclusion she had heard was that she needed to learn the music differently or improve her memorisation. I remember looking at her and thinking: where is the logic in that? If memory was working perfectly everywhere except under pressure, perhaps memory was never the problem.

What changed on stage was not the information available to her, but her ability to access it when stress entered the equation.

’Under pressure, we do not rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training’ — Archilochus

What really happens after a mistake

When a mistake occurs on stage, the note itself is rarely the biggest problem. What happens immediately afterwards is often far more damaging. A single error can trigger a cascade of thoughts that pull the performer away from the present moment. Instead of focusing on the next phrase, the musician begins analysing what just happened. Thoughts such as ’I shouldn’t have done that,’ ’everyone noticed,’ or ’what if it happens again?’ suddenly occupy the mind.

At the same time, the body responds with increased heart rate, shallow breathing, muscle tension, and heightened alertness. From a psychological perspective, this is a completely normal stress response. The brain interprets the mistake as a threat and immediately reallocates attention toward dealing with that threat. Unfortunately, while the brain is busy analysing the previous note, the performance continues moving forward. This is why one mistake can sometimes become five mistakes within a matter of seconds.

The best audition advice I ever heard

Several years ago, I heard an interview with a musician from one of the world’s leading orchestras discussing audition candidates. I expected him to talk about intonation, rhythm, sound quality, or technical preparation. Instead, he said something that completely changed the way I think about performance. ’When I listen to auditions, I wait for the first mistake,’ he said.

At first I was shocked. Surely the goal was to identify the most accurate player. But he continued by saying that everyone makes mistakes, including the very best musicians. What interested him was not the mistake itself but the reaction that followed. Could the performer recover immediately? Could they remain focused and continue communicating musically? Or would the mistake trigger panic and derail the rest of the performance?

Years later, I still believe this is one of the most important performance skills a musician can develop. The ability to recover quickly often matters more than the ability to avoid every mistake entirely.

Your brain often knows before you do

One of the most fascinating discoveries in performance psychology is that the brain frequently detects errors before we consciously become aware of them. Most musicians know the feeling. You are performing and suddenly a thought appears seemingly out of nowhere: ’I’m going to miss this shift,’ ’I’m going to crack this note,’ or ’I’m going to forget this passage.’ Seconds later, exactly that happens. It can feel almost supernatural, as though the brain predicted the future.

In reality, our nervous system is constantly monitoring performance and identifying small signs of instability. The problem is not that the brain notices potential mistakes. The problem is that performers often become attached to those thoughts. Instead of remaining focused on the music, attention shifts toward fear and prediction. Ironically, this makes the anticipated mistake more likely to occur. Learning to redirect attention before fear takes over is one of the most valuable skills mental training can develop.

’You cannot control the outcome. You can only control the process.’ — Bob Rotella

What research tells us about attention under pressure

For decades, researchers in sport psychology have studied what happens when highly skilled performers suddenly fail under pressure. Interestingly, the findings challenge one of the most common assumptions musicians make about performance. In many cases, performance breakdown is not caused by a lack of ability or preparation. Instead, it occurs because attention shifts away from the task and towards self-monitoring.

Psychologists sometimes refer to this as ’reinvestment’ – the tendency to consciously control movements and skills that normally operate automatically. A tennis player begins thinking about the mechanics of a serve. A golfer starts analysing the movement of the putter. A musician suddenly becomes aware of every finger movement, every shift, every bow change, or every breath. Skills that have been successfully automated through thousands of hours of practice are brought back into conscious control.

The result is often hesitation, tension, and a noticeable decline in performance quality. Research consistently demonstrates that elite performers excel not because they experience less pressure, but because they are better able to maintain task-focused attention when pressure increases. Their attention remains anchored in the present moment rather than becoming consumed by evaluation, judgement, or fear.

How elite performers learn to recover

One of the biggest misconceptions in music education is the belief that elite performers succeed because they make fewer mistakes. In reality, the difference often lies in what happens after the mistake occurs. Athletes, pilots, surgeons, and military personnel all train recovery as a specific skill. They do not assume they will perform perfectly every time. Instead, they prepare for the inevitable moment when something goes wrong.

Olympic athletes rehearse their response to unexpected setbacks. Pilots spend countless hours in simulators practising emergency situations they hope never to encounter. Surgeons learn protocols designed to help them regain focus after complications arise. Yet musicians are rarely taught equivalent strategies. We spend thousands of hours preparing repertoire but very little time preparing our response to failure.

As a result, a single mistake can feel catastrophic because there is no recovery plan in place. The most successful performers I have worked with are not those who never make mistakes. They are the ones who know exactly what to do when a mistake appears. They have trained the ability to take a breath, redirect attention, accept what has happened, and immediately reconnect with the music. Recovery is not a personality trait or a talent. It is a trainable performance skill.

Why more repetition is not always the answer

When musicians experience memory problems on stage, they are often given the same advice: practise more and learn the music better. For beginners, this may sometimes be appropriate.

However, among advanced students and professional musicians, the situation is often far more complex. If a performer has already demonstrated the ability to play a work accurately from memory in lessons, rehearsals, and mock performances, additional repetition is unlikely to address the real problem. The issue is not storing information in the brain. The issue is accessing that information when pressure is at its highest. These are two completely different skills. Yet throughout musical education they are frequently treated as if they were identical.

As a result, musicians spend countless additional hours repeating passages that are already memorised while neglecting the psychological skills required to perform them under pressure.

’The opponent within one’s own head is more formidable than the one on the other side of the net’ — by Timothy Gallwey ’The Inner Game of Tennis’

What changed everything for me

For many years I asked myself the same question that countless musicians continue to ask today. How do professional soloists and orchestral musicians manage to prepare such enormous amounts of repertoire and perform it consistently from memory under pressure? From where I stood as a student, it seemed almost impossible. There were periods when I practised eight or even ten hours a day, yet I still felt I was nowhere near the level of security I saw in the performers I admired.

Like many musicians, I assumed the answer must be more repetition, more discipline, and more hours in the practice room. What surprised me was discovering that the opposite was often true. Mental training taught me that performance quality is not determined simply by the number of hours spent practising. What matters is what we practise, how we practise, and whether our practice reflects the demands of performance.

One of the most transformative discoveries for me was mental rehearsal. For the first time, I realised that my biggest challenge was not difficult passages or technical limitations. My biggest challenge was maintaining attention. I was not struggling because I had learned the music incorrectly. I was struggling because I had never been taught how to perform under pressure.

Once I began training attention, focus, recovery, and mental rehearsal, something remarkable happened. I started practising less, but performing better. For a musician who had spent an entire childhood believing that more hours automatically meant better results, this felt almost irrational. Yet it became one of the most important lessons of my career.

Perhaps the most surprising discovery was realising that I was not alone. For years I believed that my fear of making mistakes was a personal weakness. I assumed other musicians were somehow more confident, more resilient, or less affected by pressure than I was. Then I began talking openly with performers at every level of the profession. Again and again, I discovered the same fears hiding beneath the surface. Many were terrified of making mistakes. Many worried about memory slips. Many feared losing control in an important performance.

I remember one lesson with my cello professor when he asked me what passage in a concerto I feared most. I laughed and told him that there was no particular passage I was afraid of. His expression suggested that he found this answer almost impossible to believe.

Looking back, I think that conversation revealed something important: fear is not always attached to a specific passage. More often it is attached to the possibility of failure itself.

Attention, not memory

In my experience, many so-called memory failures are actually failures of attention. The music is already learnt. The performer already possesses the technical and musical knowledge necessary to play successfully. What changes on stage is not memory but focus. Attention becomes captured by self-criticism, audience reactions, fear of judgement, previous mistakes, or imagined future consequences. The performance is interrupted not because the information disappeared but because awareness was pulled away from the task at hand.

This distinction is important because it changes the solution entirely. If the problem is memory, the answer is more repetition. If the problem is attention, the answer is learning how to manage focus under pressure. These are very different approaches, and only one addresses the true source of the difficulty.

A different question

Perhaps the next time a performance goes badly, we should stop asking whether we memorised the music well enough. Instead, we should ask a different question: what happened to my attention when the pressure arrived? What thoughts appeared in the moments before the mistake? What physical reactions pulled me away from the music? What captured my focus and prevented me from staying present?

These questions often reveal far more than another hour spent repeating passages in a practice room. The musicians who consistently perform at their best are not necessarily the ones with the strongest memory. They are often the ones who have learned how to trust their preparation, recover from mistakes, and return their attention to the present moment.

In many cases, the music was never missing. It was there all along. The real challenge was learning how to access it when the pressure was highest. The music was already memorised. What failed was not memory. What failed was access.

Joanna Latała is a Polish-born cellist and researcher specialising in mental training for musicians. Based in Scandinavia, she has performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall and Berliner Philharmonie. In 2023, she founded the platform Achieve Performance Mindset, where she shares insights on performance psychology to help musicians build mental resilience.