Transforming A Disaster Into A Music Conservatory Acceptance (ask me how I know)

Do you have a music audition coming up? Are you preparing for an upcoming audition? Nervous about your audition?

It was Monday, the 20th of February, and my Peabody Institute of Music audition was at 12.30 — and I was feeling pretty good.

I hadn’t stressed that much that morning or the night before and I was feeling confident. I got my oboe out, I warmed up and I stood outside that audition room and that’s when I heard her, the girl before me.

She was so much better than I was. Her tone, her sound, her intonation, her articulation, absolutely everything. All of a sudden I felt my that confidence that I was building up slipping away. My heartbeat got faster and I noticed all the little things in my music that could possibly go wrong, which made me feel even more stressed because I knew that I needed my confidence in order to do my very best.

Multi-tasking? There is a podcast episode all about this.

Today I am diving into 2 crucial things I did to take this disastrous situation and turn it into an amazing audition.

Number 1: I listened to her performance, but not in relation to my own

If I’m going to be totally honest, before I listened to her playing, I actually tried to not listen to her playing. I attempted to block it out, but that obviously didn’t work, so I gave up on trying not to listen to her and I did the absolute opposite: I completely listened to her. But now here’s the important thing I refused to compare her to me.

Did you get that? I refused to compare her to me.

So let me give you a few examples of what I mean:

When I was stressed and comparing my playing to hers, I was thinking things like ‘oh my gosh, her intonation is so good. I could never do that.’ or ‘oh my gosh, her articulation, the speed of her articulation, is so amazing. That is a big weakness of mine that I have been trying to build up’ or simply ‘she is so much better at it than me.’ Do you hear all that comparison?

Now let’s try that again but take out the comparison. At that point my thoughts were things like ‘oh my gosh, her articulation is so good, she must have worked so hard for that.’ or ‘oh wow, her intonation is amazing. That’s so inspiring.’ or ‘oh my gosh, that passage that she did was absolutely phenomenal.’

Do you see the difference? It was an absolute game changer.

Number 2: I genuinely complimented her after her audition

When I first heard the girl before me, I was feeling insecure and, to be honest, a little jealous.

And I thought to myself that a jealous and insecure person would not genuinely compliment the person that they are jealous of or insecure of. So I decided that that was exactly what I was going to do.

So when she left the audition room and I was walking into the room, there were about two seconds where our paths crossed and I turned to her with a huge smile and I complimented her playing.

And oh my gosh, the difference was monumental.

Because she smiled at me, which made me genuinely smile more, which made the judges smile when they saw me — which set the tone for the whole audition.

Those two simple steps completely changed that audition, and ended up in an acceptance.

If you are preparing for auditions, I wish you the best of luck. It can be a bit daunting, but I challenge you to find the fun in it — because it is there if you look for it.

All my best,

Eleanor