My Most Painful Performance FAILURE Story

When I was in my late teens, I made a mistake at the Worlds playing with the SFU Pipe Band. A bad mistake. There’s a lot of evidence we would have WON the World Championships that year if it wasn’t for my mistake.

The mistake was in the last bar of the final tune. For a split second - perhaps because I was “glad” the set was over - I lost focus, got distracted, and before I knew it I had made a big “blooter.” This had never happened to me before. I had played the set hundreds and hundreds of times. I had played at the worlds several years before this with no mistakes. What happened? I was heart-broken. I let the team down. To be honest, this poorly worded paragraph is extra-poorly-worded because it’s so painful to revisit this!

For the next year I lived in fear any time the band would perform. And it showed. The first contest of the following year, I got cut from a contest early in the season because I was too far into my own head to perform up to standard.

Luckily, I had great teachers and team-mates within the SFU band to gradually pull myself out of my performance rut. I remember Alan Bevan teaching me about visualization tricks. Andrew Bonar had a humorous “devil may care” approach to mentally preparing for performances.

Over time, I learned the ins and out of becoming a solid performer. I learned how to mentally prepare ahead of time for important events, and I also learned what to do in the moment to make sure my preparations paid off. Since that mistake in my teens, I have not made any major mistakes in key competitions (don’t worry, I’m knocking on wood as I write this).

[In the picture: This is my brother Alex and I at the 2004 Worlds. I am on the right. If I'm remembering correctly it's right after my big mistake.]