Winning the Mental Game: Auditions and Tryouts

7 mins read

By Dr. Chantale Lussier, PhD, CMPC

I still remember the third year I auditioned for the world-famous Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Professional Division. I had already tried out the previous two years unsuccessfully and had known the deep pain of disappointment and sense of failure. But this third time was different, I was not only physical, technically, and artistically ready for this next step, but I was also mentally prepared. I had been gifted a book by the father of a fellow dancer who I would later come to know as one of my mentor: Dr Terry Orlick, one of the first predominant figures in sport psychology in Canada. In a time when few people in sports, and even fewer in dance spoke of the mental side of performance, Dr Orlick’s book would not only help me prepare for my audition that year, but little did I realize then that it would also plant a seed for my second career now as a Mental Performance Coach. So I come by all this honestly: I know well that mental preparation is the difference between debilitating nerves or steady preparedness, nagging doubts or courage in the face of uncertainty, being in our heads overthinking or being focused on the right things, and mental skills is ultimately the differentiator between whether we experience success or failure.

Stepping into an audition or tryout can feel like crossing a threshold. Same body. Same skills. But suddenly, everything feels amplified. Your breath shortens. Your awareness sharpens. The room seems to watch you more closely than usual. And in that moment, it's not just your technique on display, it's your ability to perform under watchful eyes, evaluating your seemingly every move. For professional, elite, and competitive athletes, dancers, artists, and high performers of all kinds, preparation is rarely the problem. You've trained. You've practiced. You've put in the hours and have the reps under your belt. And yet, what often determines the outcome isn't what you can do, it's what you can access under pressure. That is the mental game.

In this piece, we'll go deeper into:

• What research actually shows about performing in evaluative environments

• The subtle psychological traps that interfere with execution

• A practical, evidence-informed roadmap to help you show up fully when it counts

What the Research Actually Tells Us

Confidence matters.

That's well established. But research shows something more nuanced: confidence alone doesn't guarantee performance. What matters is how that confidence interacts with your coping strategies in the moment. In a study of over 400 athletes, higher pre-competition confidence predicted better subjective performance but only partly. The relationship was mediated by how athletes coped. Task-focused strategies (like imagery and attentional control) enhanced performance, while disengagement (e.g., resignation, frustration, avoidance) undermined it (Gould, Weinberg, & Jackson, 2008). In other words: Confidence sets the stage but your mental skills determine whether it translates into execution. Learning effective mental skills helps you develop coping strategies that allow you to be able to better access the capacities you’ve trained well.

Confidence Shapes Your Experience of Pressure.

Confidence is not just a feeling as it actively shapes perception. Research with elite performers shows that when confidence is high, athletes interpret stress as facilitative rather than harmful, maintain attentional control, regulate emotions more effectively. But when confidence drops, the same environment is experienced very differently: more threatening, more overwhelming, more personal (Hays et al., 2009). This aligns with broader cognitive science on stress appraisal. As psychologist Alia Crum and colleagues have shown, how we interpret stress ("this helps me" vs. "this harms me") meaningfully changes physiological and performance outcomes (Crum et al., 2013). So the goal is not to eliminate pressure. It's to change your relationship to it. While we can be intentional and have strategies to cultivate our confidence in the face of pressure, it is equally vital to address and reframe how we perceive pressure so that it stops impeding our ability to perform.

Pressure Disrupts Automaticity (If You Let It)

One of the most consistent findings in performance psychology is the phenomenon of choking under pressure. Under stress, performers often shift from automatic execution to conscious control-thinking about mechanics that normally run outside awareness. This disrupts fluidity and timing. As Sian Beilock explains, "paying attention to the step-by-step details of well-learned skills can actually hurt performance" (Beilock & Carr, 2001). This is why overthinking mid-performance can feel like suddenly "forgetting how to do what you already know." I remember experiencing this once in a ballet exam. I had rehearsed for months all the necessary exercises, drills, and choreography that was to be performed. When suddenly, my mind went blank. I was overthinking under pressure and in that moment, undid the hours and hours of training that could have made it all flow automatically. I hadn’t learned then, what I know now, so I was trying to over control skills I had already acquired and automated. The result? Momentary disaster. There’s good reasons why we so often say “trust your training”.

These Principles Transfer Beyond Sport

Although much of the research comes from sport psychology, the underlying mechanisms also apply meaningfully to auditions and artistic performance:

• Evaluation

• Time pressure

• High personal stakes

• Exposure to judgment

Studies in music, dance, and performance psychology show that techniques like mental imagery, structured routines, and attentional control significantly reduce anxiety and improve execution in auditions (Clark & Williamon, 2011). Different stage. Same nervous system.

The Mental Traps That Quietly Undermine You

Most performance breakdowns don't come from lack of skill. They come from predictable psychological patterns. Think of these as mental potholes we inadvertently fall into, costly if unnoticed.

1. "This Is Everything" Pressure

When one tryout or audition becomes THE audition in your mind, your nervous system treats it like a threat. Mistakes feel catastrophic. The stakes feel absolute. But performance thrives in environments where there is room to move, not just room to be judged.

2. Over-Control and the Need to Get It Right

Under pressure, the mind tries to help by tightening control: Adjust this. Fix that. Don't mess up. But this often leads to fragmentation instead of flow. What you need is not more control. It's trust in what is already trained, automated, and embodied.

3. The Inner Narrative Spiral

"I'm not ready."

"They're better than me."

"I always mess this up."

These thoughts aren't harmless commentary; they compete for attentional bandwidth. And attention is one of your most limited performance resources.

4. Social Comparison and Evaluation Anxiety

Waiting rooms and locker rooms can become psychological minefields. You scan others. You compare. You assume. Meanwhile, your attention moves further and further away from the only place it can help you: your own execution.

5. Misreading Your Body

A racing heart. Shaky hands. Tight breath. Most performers interpret these as signs something is wrong. But physiologically, this is activation; your system preparing you for action. When interpreted as danger, it escalates anxiety. When interpreted as readiness, it becomes fuel. As many performers eventually realize: The nerves never go away. You have to practice performing with them. That shift from resistance to integration is where the mental game changes. When we see the body’s experience as normal, and even performance enhancing, we start to work better with it rather than against it.

A Practical Roadmap: Training Your Mind for Auditions and Tryouts

You can't remove pressure from performance. But you can train how you see it, interprete it, and ultimately, how you meet it. What follows is not a checklist but a set of trainable capacities.

1. Reframe the Moment: From Judgment to Expression

At the core of performance anxiety is a subtle question: "What if this defines me?" Shifting that question changes everything. Instead of defining the moment as either an opportunity to succeed or fail, consider this: What do I want to express here? How do I want to show up? What can I learn here today? Research on stress reappraisal shows that reframing arousal as helpful improves performance and physiological efficiency (Crum et al., 2013). A simple shift from "I'm nervous" to "My body is getting ready" helps us to create an entirely different experience and outcome from the same sensation.

2. Train Mental Rehearsal Like a Skill

Imagery is not wishful thinking: it is neural training. Functional equivalence research shows that mentally simulating movement activates similar neural pathways as physical execution (Jeannerod, 1994). But effective imagery is designed with intention for varying specific purposes and effects: See the room, feel your body moving, hear the sounds, and if / when useful, use it for contingency planning by including mistakes or unexpected situations and your capacity to recover effectively from them. You're not just visualizing success. You're rehearsing adaptability and mental agility.

3. Anchor to Process, Not Outcome

Outcome goals ("make the team," "get the role") create pressure without control. Process goals create direction you can act on in real time.

Examples:

• Stay connected to breath in the first 30 seconds

• Commit fully to each movement phrase

• Reset quickly after every shift

Research consistently shows that process-focused attention enhances performance under pressure by stabilizing focus (Weinberg & Gould, 2019).

4. Build a Repeatable Pre-Performance Routine

Consistency regulates the nervous system. A strong pre-performance routine might include:

• Physical activation (to discharge excess energy)

• Breathwork (to regulate arousal)

• A cue or phrase (to direct attention)

Over time, this becomes a psychological anchor, like a signal to your system that says we've been here before. Let’s do this. In that way, no moment, game, or tryout situation is too big. It’s all simply part of your great work.

5. Regulate, Don't Eliminate, Arousal

The goal is not calm, like you’re at home watching a movie calm. The goal is optimal activation and readiness. The exact feelings you seek will naturally vary depending on your sports, art form, or high performance context, and your specific position, role, and responsibilities or tasks within it.

Techniques that help:

• Slow, diaphragmatic breathing

• Grounding through physical sensation (eyes, feet, contact, space)

• Labeling emotions ("this is anxiety")

Naming our emotions, known as affect labeling, has been shown to reduce emotional reactivity by engaging regulatory brain regions (Lieberman et al., 2007). Practice labelling it without personalizing it; name it like it’s a visitor passing through. Then, decide how you wish to respond to it.

6. Work With Your Self-Talk, Not Against It

Trying to "eliminate negative thoughts" rarely works. Approach your self talk more like an ongoing download stream, a wifi network, or like a radio channel who’s signal you keep picking up. Do you like this channel? Is it working for you? It is too loud or too quiet? Or might you prefer to change the channel entirely?

You can also prepare performance cues:

"Stay with it"

"One moment at a time"

"Commit"

Short. Clear. Actionable.

7. Practice Under Pressure (On Purpose)

Confidence grows from evidence. Gets reps under your belt of performing with pressure. Use some tryout or auditions purely as opportunities to get better performing in such situations. Or creatively consider how you can simulate the environment:

• Perform in front of others

• Add time constraints

• Introduce mild distractions

This is how you train not just the skill but the context in which the skill must be executed in. In dance, I remember as a coach forcing myself to be quiet in the last few weeks before my dancers’ exams so they would become accustomed to performing only with the sound of the music; paying attention and focusing on the music and the feel and flow of their movements rather than my voice actively coaching, supporting, correcting, or directing their performance all the way through.

8. Debrief Without Self-Attack

After the performance, your instinct may be to evaluate harshly. But learning requires accuracy, not judgment. Instead:

• What worked?

• What did I learn?

• What will I adjust next time?

Self-compassion is not softness: it's what allows continued engagement after imperfection. Debriefing a tryout or an audition becomes much more useful in your growth and development when it is done accurately and constructively. Judgment rarely made anyone better. Accurate appraisal including in the context of tryouts or auditions offers another valuable opportunity to grow and getter better from your experiences. Stack those experiences well and with care.

A Final Word

Auditions and tryouts are not just tests of ability. They are tests of attention, interpretation, adaptability, and more. The performers who stand out are not the ones who feel no pressure. They are the ones who have learned how to: stay present inside it, recover quickly within it, and express themselves through it.

As Leonard Cohen once said: "You don't want to be flawless, just touch the thorn."

There is something deeply human about performing while not fully in control and doing it anyway. That's not weakness. That's the work.

Embrace it and then, go for it!

If You Want Support

Do you have an upcoming audition or tryout and want to prepare your mindset as intentionally as your technique, I'd be glad to support and help you get mentally ready. You can book a free 15-minute intro call here.

Want to learn more on this topic? Consider signing up for my next webinar: Clutch! Winning the Mental Game of Tryouts, Testing, and Selection Camps coming up on Monday, April 13th 2026 at 7:30pm EST. Email me at chantalelussier (at) gmail.com. See you there!

References

Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701-725.

Clark, T., & Williamon, A. (2011). Evaluation of a mental skills training program for musicians. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 23(3), 342-359.

Crum, A. J., Salovey, P., & Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: The role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733.

Gould, D., Weinberg, R., & Jackson, A. (2008). Coping strategies in sport and their relationship with confidence and performance. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 30, 471-488.

Hays, K., Thomas, O., Maynard, I., & Bawden, M. (2009). The role of confidence in world-class sport performance. Journal of Sports Sciences, 27(11), 1185-1199.

Jeannerod, M. (1994). The representing brain: Neural correlates of motor intention and imagery. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17(2), 187-202.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421-428.

Vealey, R. S., & Chase, M. A. (2008). Self-confidence in sport. In T. S. Horn (Ed.), Advances in sport psychology (3rd ed., pp. 65-97). Human Kinetics.

Weinberg, R. S., & Gould, D. (2019). Foundations of sport and exercise psychology (7th ed.). Human Kinetics.