Attuned Performance Psychology, led by Clinical Psychologist Alexandra Frost, provides performance psychology services in Adelaide and via telehealth for performing artists, medical professionals, and other high stakes professionals. Alexandra Frost has close to 30 years’ clinical experience and began researching musical performance anxiety at Master’s level in 1997. Services include 1:1 sessions, online courses, workshops, and organisational consulting.
Most people assume the goal is to walk out calm, to feel nothing before you begin. Close to 30 years of clinical practice, and my own life as a performer, have taught me that’s not the goal. Chasing it is often what gets in the way.
The racing heart, the adrenaline, the sharpened focus are your body doing exactly what it’s built to do when something matters. Fighting it doesn’t make it go away. It adds a second layer of struggle on top of the first, and that second layer is what actually costs you the performance.
So the real question isn’t how do you get rid of this feeling before you perform. It’s how do you perform well while it’s here. That’s the foundation everything else I offer builds on: activation isn’t the problem. Your relationship with it is.
I bring close to 30 years as a Clinical Psychologist to this work, alongside my own experience as a professional performer and an approach grounded in evidence based practice.
That combination means I can work with you at exactly the level you need, sometimes a narrow, practical tool for the week before your audition or exam, sometimes something deeper.
You don’t need to know in advance which one you need.
When the news cycle moves on, the real work of trauma recovery is just beginning. Nicole draws on many years as a Critical Incident Trauma Psychologist — from the Kangaroo Island bushfires to the Christchurch mosque shootings — to share what she’s learned about resilience, the power of small kindnesses, and what genuine trauma support actually looks like when the cameras have left.
When we’re struggling, the people who love us most often want to fix things, and that instinct, however well-meaning, can leave us feeling strangely alone in our pain. In this post, Nicole reflects on what it means to be a ‘mud sitter’ in the therapeutic space: someone who climbs down beside you rather than throwing you a rope from dry land. Because sometimes, feeling genuinely heard is exactly where healing begins.
This article is part of a 3 part series by our psychologist Nicole Hendry exploring different aspects of navigating life’s
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