As a player of one weeks experience, Id like to say how encouraging I found your lovely little recording. I like the tune so much I might try to play it myself! If you can do that when you are feeling nervous I look forward to hearing what you play when youre relaxed.
Others here have given great suggestions about overcoming nerves; I can only maybe add from my experience (at the risk of stating the obvious): make sure you keep breathing. I had to develop a way of calming nerves as my work required me to do a lot of public speaking, sometimes to large gatherings. I am normally a fairly extrovert person but when I started giving talks my body had other ideas. I had a series of harrowing freeze-ups where I could barely remember my own name, never mind give a decent talk! The situation got worse and worse, until I finally realised that a simple physical act - breathing properly - could really help me keep a handle on the nerves and from that moment on the situation started to turn around. In the end I rarely experienced much in the way of anxiety any more.
I am sure you know we tend to constrict or hold our breath if we are tense; but with awareness we can use this relationship between breath and tension to literally breathe out our nerves. A little bit of practice at a time when you are NOT stressed will go a long way to helping you remember to breathe and relax at the tricky moments. Gentle breathing using the diaphragm (meaning, breathing down into the belly, NOT hunching up your shoulders or puffing out your chest) and making sure you dont hold your breath at all after the in-breath or out-breath, can work wonders. Choose a trigger word to remind yourself to relax and breathe consciously and see if that helps?
