Page 44 - How to Shine on Stage

tion (McCrae & Ingraham, 1987). Ana Butković and Ilijana Modrusan
(2021) confirmed the findings of numerous earlier research studies which
revealed that personality traits differ among musicians and non-musi-
cians. However, they also found that there are only minor, statistically
insignificant differences among the groups of instrumentalists.
Personality characteristics of top musicians coincide with the person-
ality characteristics of top performers in other professions. The latter are
42 often marked by strong personal integrity, introversion as self-sufficiency,
independence, sensitivity, and anxiety as creative capacity (Kemp, 1996).
Numerous studies have confirmed ten dominant personality traits
in successful musicians: androgyny, originality, independence, self- mo-
tivation, persistence, sensitivity, high interpersonal communication ca-
How to Shine on Stage 2.1.2.1 Perfectionism
pacity, extroversion, need for attention, and anxiety (Iușcă, 2021).

Since perfectionism is so common in musicians, I examine it in a sep-
arate section as a distinctive personality trait. It is a personality trait
marked by a striving for perfection. Perfectionism is completely ordi-
nary among professional musicians, as the classical music education sys-
tem instils in them a pursuit of perfection, with an emphasis on error-free
performance, from the very beginning of their musical journey.
There are several dimensions of perfectionism (Cleary, 2013; Pat-
ston & Osborne, 2016), but most researchers reference two main dimen-
sions: adaptive or positive perfectionism and maladaptive or negative
perfectionism (Cleary, 2013; Diaz, 2018; Kobori et al., 2011). Other
sub-categories have been developed to provide a broader understanding
of adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. For example, there are three
often referenced categories of perfectionism: (1) self-oriented perfection-
ism, which refers to perfectionist tendencies that stem from self- moti-
vation, (2) other-oriented perfectionism, which refers to expectations of
perfectionism in others, and (3) socially prescribed perfectionism, which
refers to external motivation stemming from the belief that others ex-
pect perfectionism (Hewitt & Flett, 1993; Klibert et al., 2005). Although
these categories were initially understood as maladaptive perfectionism,
they were connected to a certain extent to both adaptive and maladap-
tive perfectionism (Klibert et al., 2005).
A substantial amount of research has confirmed that maladap-
tive perfectionism is associated with stressful goals, rumination on mis-
takes, and increased performance anxiety in younger musicians (Clark
et al., 2014; Diaz, 2018; Dobos et al., 2019; Kobori et al., 2011; Stoeber