Hi. Thank you for having me.

Not great. On multiple levels, not just financially in terms of one's livelihood being affected and quite such a dramatic way, but also missing one's colleagues and friends and those of you who have played an instrument in the past, there are a lot of frustrations that come from having to practice every day and keep your skills up and so forth. But that all kind of gets forgotten and goes away as soon as you start playing with a friend or playing with a pianist or playing with a group of people in a trio or quartet or even a large ensemble. There's just something about being able to make music with other people that it just becomes much more than the individual parts. It just feels amazing. It's like being part of any team sport, I imagine. When everything's coming together and everyone's clicking and everyone's aligned and everyone's playing their roles, this whole thing is moving along in a really effective, beautiful way. There's something about that feeling that's hard to replace. I think even from that level, it has been difficult and frustrating for a lot of musicians to not be able to do the thing that they've been doing their whole lives.

It's one of those interesting things where it's a lot easier to see your path and to see what the story is looking backwards at it. When you look backwards at it, you see that there were little signs all along, perhaps that were leading you in this other direction that you never could have imagined or foreseen for yourself. My story is that I started playing the violin, like you said, when I was 2. When you're 2 years old, I don't think you have much of a life plan in mind or don't really know who it is that you are or who you're going to become or what your interests are really. You just do whatever is in front of you at that moment. That's how I started. I never really questioned the path. I just continued on that path and I just kept going and going. One thing leads to another, as they usually do. So, I found myself really kind of in the preparatory stages of being a musician from youth orchestra and sharing music to private theory lessons and teachers.

At one point I had four different teachers all at the same time in three different cities and two different states. Driving to Chicago from Central Ohio on the weekend and flying to New York on the weekend for pre-college at Juilliard. It just never seemed like something that I wouldn't do. Then I went to college, and the whole story of how I ended up with a psych degree in college is sort of a whole other tangent. But basically, it was maybe one first clue that I didn't fully identify what the life of a musician or what that would look like.

Then I went to Juilliard and this is really where I started to have to think about making a decision about my life in front of me. I saw that I couldn't stay in school forever at that point. It was the first time I was really immersed in the music world. One of the formative moments or decision points, I think, was I was in this quartet of friends, and we would just do gigs around town. One day we were eating after a gig that we had done and just joking about what we'd do if we won a lottery, because I think the lottery was high at the time and we'd contemplated getting tickets at the diner or the deli next door. Once we all got past the initial spending spree of Ferraris and Soho lofts for each of us, we still have money left over, obviously. So, we were talking about what we would do with that. For me, the answer was really obvious. I would quit playing. I didn't know what I would do, but I knew that I wouldn't continue to play the violin. The other three in the quartet, that was the furthest thing from their mind, they would all continue to be musicians, but just amplified in various ways, whether it's starting this organization, recording label, summer festivals or all these other projects that they had in mind.

That just surprised me because I thought that everybody would do what I did. Like, if you had the chance to not be a musician anymore, you would do something else. That was the first moment where I realized maybe I ought to make a more mindful choice about what it is that my life would look like in the coming years. I started thinking about it a little bit more and was talking to my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and she was always a big part of my life then, and it was helpful to hear from her that "But yeah, like maybe that's not a normal thing for a musician to be thinking. You certainly don't have to be a musician. No one ever said that you did." It sounds obvious maybe from the outside. But, you know, for someone who had spent two decades training pretty single mindedly and giving up lots of things and with the support of family and so forth, to do one very specific thing and then to not do that, that was not necessarily as easy a decision as it might in hindsight have seemed to be. Even though I say to people that it was actually a relatively easy or straightforward decision for me, it is still a process of starting to accept this new version of myself that I was maybe going to entertain becoming.

Long story short, after I finished up at Juilliard, I knew that being a musician just didn't resonate with me on some level, even though I loved it and I wouldn't change anything if I could go back and change anything, I would still do everything that I did. I'm so extremely grateful for all the opportunities and experiences I had doing that. On many levels, I obviously still love music and find it extremely meaningful. But there was something about the life of being a musician that didn't resonate with whoever I was starting to become or growing into. When I finished at Juilliard, I was excited to explore psychology, even though I didn't know what that would look like. I went to Indiana and started on the path to becoming a psychologist.

I think I had never really identified being a musician if I look back at it. If someone said, what do you do or asked me about myself, I don't think I have said that I was a violinist. I would always say something like, oh, I play the violin. There's that distance there. I never quite felt that I was a musician or a violinist. I just did this thing. I still don't exactly know who I am, I suppose. I'm still trying to figure it out. But this certainly does feel more to me for what it's worth. I feel like I'm more myself than I was when I was playing only the violin.

Yes, the short answer is this is not a thing. When I finished at Juilliard, at least I knew what a musician's work life would look like, presumably. You teach or you have a university position or you play in an orchestra or an ensemble, it was a little bit clear what that would look like. This, I wasn't quite sure, but I just figured I could stay in school for at least another 4-6 plus years longer and maybe I'll figure it out by then. I just sort of tried to delay the inevitable, figuring out what my professional life would look like. Even when I finished, it wasn't very clear to me. What was useful for me and invaluable was, having a model or a mentor. Dr. Don Greene is the name of the performance coach who worked with Olympic athletes for many years and continues to work with world-class athletes and musicians. He was teaching this performance psychology class at Juilliard when I got there. I saw him doing something along the lines of what I thought would be pretty interesting to be able to do, to bounce around from different organizations and work with athletes, musicians, clients and business folks and be a consultant on both individual and organizational levels.

I didn't know that that was a thing that one could do. But it was around the time early 2000s, late 90s, where that was starting to become something that more people were doing. I just kind of took it on faith that, "OK, this fellow is doing this, I'm just going to cross my fingers, go down this path and hope that maybe that's possible for me as well." If I didn't have that model of someone that I knew doing this, it would have been a little harder for me to give myself permission to explore that path. But certainly, yes. It's not something that was common back then. I think it's certainly becoming much more common nowadays for this to be a sort of thing that people do. It was invaluable to have a model.

I don't remember who said this, but there's a classic Yogi Bear quote, something about how, half of baseball is 90 percent mental or something like that. I don't know if I'm understanding the question correctly, to be honest, but I think we tend to at least as musicians, when I was growing up, I was obsessed with that part of it and didn't really realize that there was a huge mental aspect of the music making process as well. Not just the performance part of things, but resilience and perseverance and building confidence. There's a whole aspect of it that if we want to go beyond the practice room and actually be able to demonstrate our craft in front of an audience, that's where the mental side of things comes into play. I largely neglected that just because it's easy to get obsessive and single mindedly focus just on the technology part of the craft and completely forget about having to perform that and bring that art out into the world at some point.

There's an Olympic diving coach named Jeff Huber who often told his athletes that he had two goals for them. One goal was to help them learn how to dive better. The other goal was to help them learn how to dive better in competition. There's obvious overlap between those two goals. But they're unique challenges that require different methods of preparation to excel in each of those areas. For me, that was pretty transformative, understanding that difference between the fact that there are ways of practicing that maximize skill development and then there are ways of practicing that are essential for the ability to demonstrate those skills, especially under pressure when you only have one opportunity to play something or to perform a skill.

There are certainly a number of elements to that second challenge, whether it's building confidence and becoming more resilient and being able to manage nerves and so forth. But increasingly, over time, the single skill that I think seems to be so essential for the ability to get into the zone and get into that state of flow that we've hopefully all experienced in some form or another in some area of our lives, is focus. The ability to know exactly what is most helpful to think about at any given point in time and to be able to stay completely immersed and engaged with just that thing or those things in the moment for as long as we need to.

That has been fun for me to explore with musicians, because I think a lot of times for musicians, they've all had the experience of being in a state of flow and being in the zone. But it's often not clear to us how we got there and what we're doing when we're in that sort of state. It's usually because once we realize we're totally in the zone, once we realize we're in the zone, like we get shoved out of the zone, and then it's hard to know how to get back there. So being able to identify what to stay focused on when you're in that moment is one of the key skills for cultivating more consistent performances under pressure.

Yeah, that's a really good question. We could probably explore for quite a long time. I'm reminded of a conversation I had with an NBA coach, a basketball coach. He was talking about how there are a lot of players in the league who are just incredibly talented and amazingly gifted athletes. They're able to play at that level, even though they are not like these basketball nerds, they are not incredibly engaged and want to do every possible thing they can to improve, they just happen to be so naturally athletically gifted that they can do pretty well in that league. Then there are a good number of athletes who are these basketball junkies. The coach called like they just eat, sleep, breathe basketball. They may not necessarily be the best players on their team, but they love it. So, they maximize the potential and they become great professionals. They stay in the league for many years, oftentimes.

Then there are who he called professionals, people who certainly love basketball enough to do their job, but they don't necessarily go above and beyond to maximize their absolute potential. That, I think, is reflected even in the music world. There are certainly musicians who are constantly trying to improve all the time. Then there are musicians who are doing well enough but aren't necessarily wanting to eat, sleep and breathe music. That's actually OK. I think it's fine for musicians to love and like what they do, but not necessarily have to be in it 24/7. Then there are some who maybe never made the decision of, "Do I really want to be a musician or not?" And they just have found themselves in this place.

I think the really magical ones are the ones who eat, sleep and breathe music or basketball, whatever we're talking about and also have that natural ability or gifts. All these things come together in folks like Michael Jordan and LeBron James. They happen to have the drive, the talent, the gift and ability and everything comes together in a single package. For me, that's one of the things that I realized and frustrated me early on, that I might have enough or some amount of talent and natural ability, but the desire to immerse myself in music and do all the things that I knew that I really ought to do if I wanted to get better, I just couldn't bring myself to do those things because there were other things that captured my interest. The drive wasn't there to do those things. I was constantly frustrated at how I didn't sound as good as I ought to, I wasn't improving as fast as I felt like I should or could. It's a weird place to be where you know what to do. You can't get yourself to do that. It also is incredibly frustrating that you don't do these things because you're constantly not performing at the level that you know you ought to be or could.

Certainly. When I see a musician who is geeking out a little bit about their craft, that's really awesome to see because you know that's going to bring good things for them, even if they end up not going into music at some point like myself in their mid 20s, maybe they decide to pivot in some other area, you know that they grasp and understand the joy of learning how to get better at something. That's the thing that really stands out to me the most and resonates when I see people who geek out about their craft and see how to get better. It's really not about the time that we put in. We do need to put in a lot of time, but it's how we use that amount of time. That also is a huge factor, obviously, in getting to where it is that we're trying to go.

For me, for instance, I certainly put in a lot of time, but most of the time was rather mindless. We spent in repetitions one after another with a lot of auto correcting of things that I instinctively just felt like I needed to do, as opposed to really digging into the details and trying to understand what the underlying problems were and the underlying mechanics and the principles of playing better in tune with a better sound and understanding the musical structure and so forth. When I see students who love solving problems and identifying problems and honing their craft and they kind of geek out about that process, that's exciting to observe because that's also universally generalizable beyond music. Whether they become teachers or administrators in music, you know that that's going to enable them to make an impact.

No, that's new. I have to check it out.

It's a really good question. I think the tricky thing is there are some folks who have really single mindedly pursued music from a very young age and achieved an amazing amount of success. Then there are others who have also achieved a great amount of success, but didn't necessarily have that single minded focus in a very narrow way from such an early age. I think it's probably the case in many other fields as well.

I'm reminded when you brought that up of the literature on deliberate play, which is where they find athletes, for instance, who didn't specialize so early in life, but actually engaged in a lot of other athletic endeavors or deliberate play being where you go out and play with your friends and create your own games and your own structures, and you cultivate teamwork and athletic ability and those sorts of things. But in not an organized sport setting, but in a setting with your friends that you've created a thing. What they found is that, there are folks who are single mindedly focused on a sport from an early age in the highest levels of athletic competition, and also people who did a lot more deliberate play in their younger years and didn't specialize so early, also competing at the highest level. Amongst those at the very highest level, they do seem to find oftentimes that it's the folks who cultivated more deliberate play in their life that do tend to be more creative strategy wise.

In a way, it seems almost like those who are able to get to the highest level, those with some background in deliberate play or more variety of experiences actually might be even better than the folks who are single mindedly focused, even though they're both excellent. I certainly find that, looking back at musicians back in the day, who I have done interviews and so forth do seem to be very thoughtful in areas outside of music as well. They just seem to be these really interesting, thoughtful folks that have multiple skills. A modern-day example is pianist Stephen Hough, who is a gifted writer who has published a couple novels, and is considered a polymath. He is an incredibly interesting person to talk to just because the things that he's able to explore and think about and talk about go beyond music.

Yeah, that's the challenge I think that we all struggle with from the time that we're young and start having to perform on stage. I just want to say really quickly, though, before we get to that. I think one of the challenges sometimes for musicians and maybe other folks as well is that if you don't put all of your energy and attention single mindedly into the pursuit of becoming a better cellist, singer or clarinetist. I think in some circles you can be looked down upon. There's this idea that, "Oh, you're not a serious musician if you're not obsessing about music 24/7." Sometimes that can be unfortunate because these might not be people who want to do that. If you are that person who wants to put all of your focus into geeking out about your craft and be a musician, then that's awesome. That's what it is that's you. But, if you're somebody who also has interests in architecture or writing or graphic designing or whatever it may be, it is unfortunate when those musicians then get labeled as being less serious about their craft, even though they could be amazing, incredible musicians as well. I just wanted to say that because it's something that popped into my mind. I've had conversations about that with some musicians as well.

Yeah, but to answer your question of how to avoid worrying on stage and how to avoid freaking out about all the things that could go wrong, that is a real challenge. One of the challenges, I think, is that the mindset that you need to adopt when you're practicing and developing your craft and your skill in the most effective way is actually quite different from the mental state that you need to be in when you're performing your skill. The artist, Sister Corita Kent, had this list of rules in her art studio. I believe one of them was something to the effect of how you should never try to create and analyze at the same time, because there are opposing processes or different processes.

I think there's even research in neuroscience, which seems to suggest that there is really something to that, that when we're creating effectively, it's a very different headspace than when we're analyzing or critiquing effectively. When you think about practice for a musician, when they're practicing effectively, they're not only executing and performing and playing, but they also have to self-monitor as they have to listen very carefully to what's coming out of their instrument. Then they have to critique that. Not just in terms of was it good or bad, but was it pitch wise, was it sharp or flat? Was it too loud, too soft? Was the articulation more this than that and all these little nuances and details, they have to be able to analyze and critique. Then they need to figure out why those things happen. They need to problem solve on a more technical and mechanical level of what they're doing.

The problem, of course, is if you start self-monitoring and critiquing and trying to problem solve when you're performing, you tend to choke or things tend to fall apart. You end up not playing in the way that you can. You have to essentially learn how to flip the switch from practice mode to performance mode on command when you need to under pressure and to be able to trust performance mode mentally in that headspace.

There's actually a great podcast episode on the Freakonomics podcast a few months ago or maybe a year ago with the gymnast, Shawn Johnson, who won a bunch of medals in 2008. I'd never heard an athlete talk about it in these clear terms. It was amazing to hear what she said. Basically, in addition to choreographing the physical movements for every routine, which obviously you had to do until it was all in muscle memory, she said it was also essential for her to create a mental script of thought. So basically, choreograph the thoughts that she was going to engage in during the course of any given routine. In a 90 second floor routine, she needed 90 seconds of scripted thoughts to engage in. So, she couldn't at that same time sabotage her performance by worrying about getting hurt, worrying about messing up, worrying about the judges or the other competitors and so forth.

It would look different for a musician than for a gymnast, for instance. In certain sports where things aren't scripted, it would certainly be different still. But for a musician, knowing, this is where I'm going to think about sound, this is where I'm going to think about the pulse, this is where I want to think about how I'm going to shape this phrase or the quality of sound that I'm going for on this particular note, or how I want the vibrato to sound like. Knowing exactly what to keep your thoughts occupied with so that they can't wander and start exploring the stage of the hall, the sounds that you're hearing backstage or worrying about a big shift coming up or worrying about memory or worrying about what the audience is thinking. That is one of the elements that does seem to facilitate flow and enable musicians to get into that place where they're not worrying about messing up and they're just creating this amazing music in the moments that we look for on stage.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's easy for musicians in the audience to sometimes get stuck in critique mode. I shouldn't speak for all musicians because this was just my experience. But it was hard for me to not still be thinking about, "Oh, did this sound good or did this sound bad," at least in my estimation. "Oh, that's an interesting thing. Maybe I should try that or why would they do that or oh, that was a little bit flat. A little bit crunchier. It seems like they're rushing here." It's very easy to get into that critical mode. I certainly know musicians who are at the very top of the classical world who are also able to enjoy listening to music. When they're listening to a colleague play or they're in the audience listening to a different orchestra or ensemble, they're able to just sit back and enjoy it, which I'm glad to hear, because I think if musicians couldn't enjoy other musicians playing music, then that would be a really difficult field to live in.

It's probably just my experience because I was still studying at the time all throughout. Every opportunity to listen to a performance was another opportunity to study the craft as opposed to just sit back and enjoy it.

Yeah, absolutely. What I'm about to say is going to be very logical. It's going to make perfect sense. It's going to be very simple. But it's not going to be easy and no one's going to want to do it. Having said that, essentially the thing that I marvel at and I don't know why I didn't see it much earlier in my own training was the importance of practice performances. I'm sure other people have talked about this as well. I think Steve Jobs has even written about it, perhaps it has been written about Steve Jobs in terms of presenting.

Musicians tend to not enjoy recording themselves because it means we have to listen back. We have to hear how things actually sound. It's a lot more fun a lot of times to just play and then have a good time and hope that it went well and not have to kind of face the truth of things. I'll give you a couple of specific examples of musicians who have put some numbers to this.

David Kim is the concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He is, of course, an amazing musician and can play pretty much anything any time. When he's going to give a performance of a concerto with an orchestra, maybe he hasn't played the concerto for a little while. He will do 30 or 40 practice performances of that concerto for smaller audiences in advance. He'll go to a retirement center or a library wherever he can get to, he will take a pianist, and he'll perform the concerto. No matter how long it is, 30 or 40, however many minutes live for a sample audience. Then after 30 or 40 of those, then he'll go and perform it with the orchestra. That's a pretty big commitment of time and energy. It's not something that a lot of people want to do. If someone like David Kim feels like it takes him not 2 or 5, but 30 or 40 of those, to really feel comfortable and be able to do his thing on stage, I think it's fair for us to still feel uncomfortable after 5 or 10 practice presentations and we still don't feel comfortable doing. It might just be that we need another 10 or 20 of them.

Another example is percussionist at the Met Opera. Rob Knopper is his name. Orchestral musicians know that the orchestral audition experience is very different from any other performance experience. That's before a screen, anonymous. You walk in there. It's very artificial. It's very cold, very dry. It's the difference between taking a standardized test and actually performing the skills that are tested on that standardized test in real life. That's what the orchestral audition is. He wanted to be more comfortable being uncomfortable in that situation. He knew he was going to have to go into. Instead of just doing a handful of practice mock auditions, he did 42 mock auditions, he did one a day for 6 straight weeks, and a lot of these were double mock auditions. We do a mock audition, get feedback, and we do a whole other randomized selection from his list of excerpts. That's not comfortable. But, he did 42 of them. Even before he did those, he spent months recording himself first thing in the day. Usually, the way musicians like to do things because we sound better is to warm up, to practice and then record at the end of the day when we've kind of worked everything up and we feel good about it. He did the opposite because he figured, that's not what happens on audition day. He would warm up, he'd record himself first, and then he'd practice.

Things like that basically centering our practice around the demands of performance as opposed to focusing our time around just finding ways of sounding better right now, even though that may not translate on stage, is probably one of the more valuable things that we could all do in various aspects of life. But it's tough on the ego, so it's easy to push that off.

The idea really with Rob's recording himself first instead of last is he wanted to expose the most realistic level of playing that was likely to happen on audition day or another way of looking at it is he wanted to try to expose the worst possible thing that's likely to happen so you can improve the floor of your playing, raise the floor of your playing as much as possible. Obviously, you're also trying to raise the ceiling, but if you're ceiling is high and your floor is really low, that's a risky situation to be walking into. If you know you have a really high floor, it makes it a lot easier to not be freaking out and worried at that moment.

Yeah, certainly. That's the fun thing about being in the zone, where you trust the mechanics of your playing so much that you are a little bit more spontaneous and freely improvisational in the moment. You trust that's going to work out OK. Actually, it's not even that you trust that it's going to work out OK. In that moment, you are convinced that it's going to work out and you know, it's going to be fine. Things often are in that sort of moment. It is something I think you can cultivate a little bit even. We don't need to get into it too much here. There's a type of practice known as variable practice, because our tendency is to figure out what we want to do and just be kind of rigid about just doing it that one way. In fact, there's a field teacher at Juilliard named Toby Appel, who says he doesn't practice what he's going to do on stage at this point, he practices all the things that he might do on stage. There are different tiny, subtle nuances variations of the ideal that he has just to make sure that it's all in his range. He has a bigger palette of ideas to pull from no matter what happens with his colleagues at the moment. That kind of practice, again, is something that has to be done well in advance, but it can be something that prepares you to have a freer performance experience where you trust yourself to take those little tiny risks because you've practiced those risks well in advance.

It probably is very similar to that. It can be quite subtle from like an extra bigger vibrato here and there to something that your colleagues wouldn't even notice that you did differently all the way to relatively overt nuances, playing things much faster, much slower, much louder or softer in very different ways.

Yeah. That's the one thing that I wish I could go back in my life and change, because I spent most of my life practicing quite mindlessly through lots of repetitions and auto correcting my skills. The problem is that it works. You can intuit your way to a higher level of playing. But it's very frustrating, very inefficient. You hit a ceiling and so forth.

It's actually something my advisor often said in grad school. He said, "When you misdiagnosed the problem, you're probably going to misdiagnose the solution as well." I think for me anyway, looking back at how I practiced, I didn't spend a lot of time trying to identify what the mechanical cause of the problems that I was experiencing were. Just as a simple example, if something was out of tune, I just knew it was out of tune, I didn't bother to figure out, is it sharp? Is it flat? Is it a lot sharp? Is it a lot flat? Which exact note is out of tune and why? Let's say that it's flat. Well, why exactly is that note flat consistently? Is it because of something my thumb is doing? Is it because of my elbow? Is it the angle of the violin"? Is it the tension in my chin and shoulder? What is actually causing me to come up short on that particular note.

One of my advisor's favorite questions to ask was, what's the problem? He just wanted us to identify and articulate exactly what is stopping us or stopping this client from achieving a particular outcome. For me with this note that's out of tune, is it OK, my thumb is getting a little bit tired. I'm not lifting up enough and releasing my shoulder and my chin at that moment. I'm not preparing my elbow in advance of the hand frame; my hand is a little bit too vertical instead of around. Once I adjust all those factors, Oh, now it's in tune. Once I started practicing that way, identifying the problem and then identifying solutions, things started progressing in a much more rapid way, and also the solutions stuck, so it's not like, "Oh, I kind of intuited my way on the fifth repetition how to play this in tune." But the next day, it's back to square one again, because I didn't actually identify the problem. I didn't identify a solution. My body is still doing the same old thing that it's accustomed to doing.

Once I identified how to problem and solution my way to a better level of playing, things were more stable. I trusted things better under pressure. Progress was remarkably different. I also just felt that I knew that I was getting things done because I knew that I was coming to a deeper understanding of how to play the way I wanted to in a consistent way.

Yeah, I actually kind of painted like a throwaway part of the conversation. But it's actually an important part of that process. Certainly, having a conversation with my parents was important. But even before I got to having a conversation with my parents, my girlfriend and I had been together since college. We met when I was 19. We kind of grew up together a little bit and this conversation between she and I happened when I was in grad school. It was probably maybe four years into our relationship or so. We hadn't talked about marriage or anything like that, but I knew she was an important part of my life. I think that was actually an incredibly pivotal moment, just having this conversation with somebody who I knew cared about me and who I cared about, and for her to say that basically she gave me permission to explore what my life might look like away from the violin or away from music.

I don't know what would have happened were it not for that. Basically, what she did is she gave me permission to entertain other aspects of who I might be. She said, "You know, it's going to be fine, it will be OK." It is something along the lines of what she said. I'm eternally grateful that she was there and was able to say the thing that enabled me to then have the courage to talk to my parents and explore these other paths, because I knew that no matter how it turned out, she'd be there, we'd be OK. We'd figure something out. It actually was a really important part of that process.

If they didn't say go for it in as many words, that would have been a whole other challenge as well.

I don't know if this is aspirational or inspirational or anything, but just maybe observational. The thing that I found myself gravitating towards, especially in the last six months, maybe is, rather than me being the person that exposes young musicians or musicians in general to sports psychology, performance psychology and understanding how to experience performing as a more positive thing. I've become more interested in working with teachers. I think teaching has always resonated with me. Even when I was a kid, I never would have thought that I'd want to become a teacher. I've been doing more work with teachers and trying to empower and enable teachers to work with students on performing optimally under pressure and feeling more confident on stage and discovering that they have the ability to actually enjoy performing for other people from an earlier age.

I think that to me feels really meaningful, because then instead of me having to wait until they become grad students at Juilliard to help them, have this experience they are going out into the world, having these experiences on their own. Hopefully when they get to Juilliard and take my class, it's like, "Oh, I didn't learn anything from you. This is stuff I've been doing for 5, 10 years already. Why don't you have anything new for me?" So that's sort of what I'm hopeful about.