The early years

I am no stranger to performance pressure myself. As a champion diver at West Point, and later in Paratrooper training and Ranger School, I experienced how stress can either enhance physical performance or undermine it, sharpen mental acuity or blunt it, intensify concentration or destroy it. My training in the military helped me understand that fear is a reflex that can be managed, and that no situation is so dire that you cannot summon the courage to overcome it. Mental toughness, more than strength and speed, led to my being selected for the Army’s elite – the Green Berets. My interest in the effect of stress on athletic performance prompted me to pursue a doctorate in sport psychology. I chose to do my dissertation on the stress response in police SWAT officers-specifically how a certain martial arts technique called Centering might help improve the officers’ performance in life-and-death situations. Working with the San Diego SWAT team, I was able to show that officers who used Centering to improve concentration prior to a live-ammunition confrontation performed significantly better than their peers.

A new career

That research led me to work with the U.S. Olympic Diving Team, the World Championship Swimming Team, Grand Prix race car drivers, the Vail Ski Team, and professional and amateur golfers. On the golf course one summer in Vail, I met Ed Castilano, Principal Bassist with the Syracuse Symphony, who needed help with his putting. I gave him the psychological inventory I’d developed for athletes, worked on his concentration skills, and within a few days he was putting much better. A light bulb went off for him: Couldn’t musicians benefit from this training? At his invitation, I visited the Syracuse Symphony – and a whole new career opened up. I moved to New York City and began sitting in on music, voice, and dance lessons to refine my profiling tool for performing artists.

The first artists who took my Artist’s Performance Survey and applied my Centering technique went on to win auditions for the Houston Symphony and the Chicago Lyric Opera; a transcription of their taped training sessions culminated in my first book, Audition Success. After several more clients went on to win prestigious positions with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Syracuse Symphony, I was invited to teach at The Juilliard School. Word of my master classes reached Michael Tilson Thomas, Artistic Director of the New World Symphony, and I found myself commuting to Miami Beach to teach performance enhancement strategies to his talented Fellows.

Performance Success, my second book, was an outgrowth of my lecture series from Juilliard and the New World Symphony, capturing verbatim my sessions with these musicians. Articles in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal about my work with performers brought publishers’ attention that culminated in my third book, Fight Your Fear and Win.

Now in San Diego, California, I continue to coach performing artists, teach master classes, and lecture.