What Karaoke Can Teach You About Performing at Your Best

I recently read about an incredibly interesting study that demonstrates how your mindset, and what you say to yourself before you complete a task, can improve or detract from your performance.
 
This experiment was conducted by Harvard Business School Professor, Alison Wood Brooks.  She had 113 people sing the song Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey to an audience using the Nintendo Wii game Karaoke Revolution.  This game tracks how accurately you sing the song and gives you a percentage score at the end.  100% means you sang the song perfectly.
 
She broke the individuals up into three groups.

• Group 1 was the control group and they were given no instructions by the researchers.
• Group 2 was told to keep saying the phrase, “I’m so anxious” in their heads before they were about to perform
• Group 3 was told to keep saying the phrase, “I’m so excited” in their heads before they performed

 
Well, did this have any impact on their scores?  Sure enough it did.

• Those in Group 1, who were given no instruction, had an average score of 69.27%
• Those in Group 2, who were saying, “I’m so anxious” before they got up to perform scored worse, with an average of 52.98%
• And those in Group 3, who were saying, “I’m so excited” scored the best of all, with an average of 80.52%.  That’s almost 30 percentage points higher than the anxious group!

 
While this is a fun example to talk about, it is important to note that Alison got very similar results when she did experiments with people giving a work-related speech and another one in which people had to solve a difficult math problem.
 
So the next time you have an important event coming up in which you need to perform your best, I encourage you to reappraise your anxiety as excitement.  Perhaps, this and just simply repeating the words, “I’m so excited” in your head can help you perform at your personal best.



Wishing you success in all aspects of life,
Tom Klisiewicz
Founder and President
Smart Health Wellness and Performance

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