Practical skills to unlock your potential
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About Mandy
Mandy Hollins
“As a Coach I incorporate performance psychology techniques with my professional and life experience as a musician and teacher. Integral to my approach is my training as a Results Coach and EFT practitioner”.
Performer
My career as a professional flautist has encompassed chamber music, recital and solo playing as well as orchestral positions. For 23 years...
Performance Coach
Working as a professional musician for many years, with extensive performing, teaching and mentoring experience has made me acutely aware...
What Clients Say
“Mandy is a wonderful flautist and performer with an enormous amount of high level professional experience. She is also a wonderful coach whose wide ranging skills, wisdom, knowledge and generosity has been of great and tangible benefit to me, in growing my own work as a performer and teacher. I would highly recommend her as a dedicated coach for performers in all modalities.”
Greg, Musician.
Understanding
The barriers to peak performance
Being able to perform at our best, especially when under pressure, is what musicians aspire to. When this doesn’t happen it’s an opportunity to learn about ourselves, our musical and personal preparation. There are some common barriers to peak performance and identifying your barriers is an essential part of part of the coaching process.
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Performance Anxiety
Performance anxiety affects most musicians, in varying degrees, at some point in their playing career. Physical, cognitive and behavioural symptoms can undermine your preparation and leave you feeling frustrated. Even less severe performance anxiety can ruin the enjoyment of playing to others.
Ineffective Practice Techniques
Do you find you can play well in the practice room but not predictably well in performances, either musically or technically? That unexpected passages fall apart in performance? Ineffective practice techniques and lack of goal setting in the practice room can contribute.
Mindset
Your thoughts and beliefs are powerful and can limit your possibilities and your personal vision of success. If you don’t see every challenge as an opportunity to grow and learn you will remain stuck, unable to embrace your potential to perform at your best and thrive.
Lack of Mental Preparation
Mental preparation is often the missing key to peak performance. Preparing only on your instrument will limit your ability to perform with assurance. Do you have effective techniques for using visualization, utilizing the mind-body connection and the power of your imagination?
Discover
Practical solutions
I offer a range of packages that aim to provide solutions to the most common challenges faced by today's classical musicians. By overcoming these challenges it is possible to more easily develop your career and achieve your performance goals.
Audition Preparation
A complete package that covers the entire audition process from what is holding you back to what the audition panel is listening for. Pair this with effective practice techniques and mindset training and you will be on your way to success.
Get yourself into the right headspace for success. The coaching package facilitates and supports you in clarifying your goals, creating a mindset for possibility and developing a structured action plan, ensuring that you move forward with a growth mindset.
Addressing Performance Anxiety
This package provides a holistic overview of what performance anxiety is and what might be causing you to experience it. We also cover practical management strategies and use EFT to de-activate previous negative performing experiences.
Performance Coaching
Empowering peak performance
Do you need a performance coach?
The value of coaching has long been acknowledged and used as a crucial component to foster the potential of elite athletes. Performers face many of these same challenges and have been missing out on the vital skills which coaching has to offer. As a Performance Coach I identify your strengths and discover any gaps in preparation, motivation, confidence or resilience which can sabotage your career. These areas are addressed by teaching a range of techniques that you can use to maximise your performing potential. Integral to coaching is identifying what’s important to you and developing a mindset which sees all setbacks as an opportunity to change your perspective so you can realise and expand your potential, both in your personal and professional life.
Teaches practice techniques for performing
Instills self-belief, confidence and self-compassion.
Develops effective audition preparation
Sustains motivation
Does your technique let you down or you can’t focus well enough to deliver a musically convincing performance? Discover how to practice more effectively and learn to make the mental switch necessary to move from the problem solving of the practice room to peak performance.
It is our inner qualities which help us thrive as we navigate the challenges we encounter. Stretching ourselves out of our comfort zone allows us to expand our potential. If you are your own worse critic or if you fear judgement and failure then adopting an attitude of kindness to yourself is the key.
Doing auditions is an inescapable part of being a musician and can be the most stressful performing you do. The outcome can affect your life. Being clear on what aspects of auditions you need to improve on and learning specific audition preparation skills will give you a sound basis for playing your best on the day.
What is it about being a musician that has meaning for you? What sustains, excites and motivates you? It’s not always easy to keep on practising… finding the right ‘niche’ for you and your talents and being clear about your direction requires determination and knowing your ‘WHY’.
Emotional Freedom Techniques - EFT
An evidence based mind-body approach
EFT is an evidenced-based, mind-body approach that rapidly reduces stress. It is a highly effective technique for your tool box to manage the challenges you meet in your life and career, both as a basic self help tool for stress management or with a practitioner for deeper issues.
Highly effective, lasting stress reduction
Develops self-belief for peak performance
Can be used as a self-help tool
Creates cognitive insights
We all experience stress and it can motivate and extend us in a positive way. Chronic stress however has physical and emotional impacts which can affect our health and careers. By sending a calming signal to the brain EFT quickly reduces the stress hormone cortisol.
EFT is an empowering and self affirming technique. By reducing stress and anxiety EFT creates the clarity for musicians to focus on achieving their personal goals on and off the stage.
EFT decreases doubt and transforms limiting beliefs that are holding you back.
I teach Basic EFT to clients as a self-help tool for them to use between sessions. It is a technique you can literally have at your finger tips for when you are experiencing an overwhelming sense of stress or anxiety. Basic EFT is an essential and easy to learn technique for your tool box.
EFT creates new neural connections and pathways which support a sense of personal integration and happiness. These new pathways generated from these cognitive shifts can aid in the transformation to being the performer you wish to be.
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