On Cue: Managing Anxiety, Inviting Excellence

On Cue is a guide to allowing your creativity full expression without being hampered by excess anxiety. It covers the management of anxiety, the importance of skill mastery, and the cultivation of loving attitudes towards one’s performance. Masterful Life-Performance, the name of the process, has been applied to stage drama, music auditions and concerts, public speaking, athletics (team and individual), professional presentations, academic test taking, creative writing, marital intimacy issues, and the performance of daily living. On Cue is organized as an exchange of letters between the author and a fictitious person who is a composite of many people the author has counseled. Stories and photographs illustrate the content of the letters.

Mr. Harris started Ron on the trumpet at age eight in the Theodore Judah Elementary School Band. A coin was flipped for the old silver Holton trumpet. Brucey Ogden got the mellophone. Ronny Thompson got the trumpet. Private lessons with trumpet virtuoso William Peron started a year later. By age fifteen, Ron was playing with Bill in the Sacramento Symphony Orchestra. An early high school graduation sped Ron on to the Juilliard School, where he won principal chair of the Juilliard Orchestra, and a summer stay at Tanglewood. At nineteen Ron became the youngest trumpeter in a major American symphony orchestra, winning an audition for the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. Ron also performed as principal trumpet at the Carter Baron Amphitheater and as soloist at the National Cathedral.After a move to the West Coast, Ron continued his music performance as principal trumpet with the Santa Barbara Symphony and the Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera. An audiophile recording, "Baroque Music for Trumpet and Organ," was released under the Water Lily Acoustics label. Ron taught trumpet performance in his private studio and was the trumpet instructor at Westmont College, Montecito. He notes that trumpet performance is a wonderful place to learn about performance anxiety, as there are no "soft" mistakes on the trumpet.While living on the West Coast, Ron completed a degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, and worked as an engineer for corporations in the Santa Barbara area.A move to the Midwest was followed by more formal education, this time resulting in a Master of Arts Degree in Counseling Psychology from the Alfred Adler Graduate School. Ron became a Minnesota State Licensed Psychologist-Masters with a specialty in performance anxiety.More recently, during his years in Central Vermont, Ron has worked as a licensed counseling psychologist in private practice specializing in performance anxiety. He has worked with people in diverse "performance" circumstances, including competitive high diving, theater, amateur golf, major symphony auditions, team sports, public speaking, creative writing, music performance, medical school examinations and daily living.