Humans need ritual. It helps us prepare for what we are about to do, and over time, rituals can ground us, calming our nerves and boosting our confidence. They don’t need to be elaborate. They just need to be effective and frequently done.

For choral leaders, ritual is a great way to help their singers prepare for a big performance. It’s in those moments when we all feel high-strung and anxious that doing something together can really make a difference.

But how do you start a good pre-performance ritual for choirs? And what makes a pre-performance ritual good in the first place?

Why use a pre-performance ritual?

Before diving into how to make a good one, let’s clarify our why.

There are a few reasons people turn to these rituals:

• Calms Us Down: When performed regularly, rituals have a calming effect. They are familiar, and we feel at ease doing something with others that we all know and understand. Before stepping out under the stage lights, a ritual gives us a soothing moment to come together and reconnect with our love of singing. 
   
• Draws Focus: Anxiety is energy. Rituals repurpose that energy into focus, and that’s especially true the more times we’ve done it. Converting our relationship to high adrenaline is one of the most compelling uses of pre-performance rituals, and more anxious choristers might find that it has implications for the rest of their lives.
   
• Boosts Our Confidence: By bringing the choir together, each individual singer is given greater confidence. The ritual helps us feel less alone. When humans feel less alone, they’re more able to perform freely and contribute their voices to the choir.

One final reason we use ritual is related to the central way our brains operate. It’s called state-dependent learning. This means you are better able to remember information and perform skills in the same state you were learning them.

Rituals, when we do them before rehearsal and performance, return us to the state of choir singing. That helps us leave behind whatever is going on in our lives and arrive fully present into the moment.

They prime us, getting our brains into the same state they’ve been in every time they’ve rehearsed and performed choir singing.

Reading through this section, you might wonder what choir leader wouldn’t want to give their singers these amazing benefits before any big performance? But there is still a major hurdle: coming up with a good pre-performance ritual.

How do I create a pre-performance ritual?

A great one should have a few main features:

• Stays the Same: This almost goes without saying, but a good ritual is performed more or less the same way every single time.
   
• Not Too Long: A ritual needs to be short and sweet. That’s because you can’t predict the situations where you’ll want to use it—and it’s widely been observed that shorter rituals are more adaptable.
   
• Use the Breath: Rituals that involve us coming together with long, slow breaths are a great way to coregulate. We slowly drop into the present moment with one another, and that starts to calm us and bring us onto the same wavelength.
   
• Focus on the Positive: If you add words to say together, focus on raising up the positive rather than the negative. So, better to say, “Let’s share the beauty of song with the world,” than something like, “We won’t sing poorly.”

Bringing Rituals Into Your Choir

For a ritual to really work, you’ll need to onboard your singers. It isn’t enough that you simply go through the motions. You want choristers to see the value and be an enthusiastic yes to the pre-performance ritual—that works wonders for morale and increases the effectiveness of the ritual itself.

One great way to do this? Let choristers help design the ritual. This gives them an added sense of agency and more deeply connects everyone to the process.

Once you have a pre-performance ritual, it’s now time to use it. The key here is consistency. A good ritual takes repetition, and that’s something you can’t really cheat. You just have to do it. If you do, you’ll start to see incredible group cohesion and anxiety reduction.

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