From the Green Velvet Couch | A Conversation with Dina Nesterenko
What if overcoming anxiety through skydiving and music sounds like the most unlikely pairing you could imagine? What if the person who built her career on the concert stage also happens to be the person most afraid of malls, airplanes, and the thousand small what-ifs of daily life? And what if jumping out of a plane turned out to be the most healing thing she ever did for her art?
On her podcast, From the Green Velvet Couch, Shelly sat down with Dina Nesterenko, a world-class violinist trained at both the Curtis Institute of Music and Juilliard, and now a licensed skydiver whose story is as inspiring as her performances. The two met when Dina was performing with the Paducah Symphony under conductor Raffaele Ponti, where both Dina and Shelly were speaking about performance anxiety. The friendship that formed was immediate, and their conversation brings that warmth to life.
Here are the moments worth holding onto.
A Child Prodigy Raised in the Collapse of the Soviet Union
Dina grew up in Siberia during the collapse of the Soviet Union, a time when families had very little and children with musical talent were given the chance to practice their way toward a future the rest of the country could not offer. She represented Russia in major international competitions, including the Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow, where she became the youngest semifinalist in her category before a broken string ended her run.
From there, she was invited to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, a school known for being even more selective than Juilliard because every accepted student receives a full scholarship. But her three years at Curtis came with a deeply painful experience. Her teacher there was emotionally abusive, and the damage he did to her confidence nearly ended her career. By the time she left, she could not play without the help of beta blockers, a medication commonly prescribed for situational anxiety.
Despite her former teacher’s insistence that she would never be accepted, Dina went on to earn a full scholarship to Juilliard, where several renowned professors fought to have her in their studios. She made it. But the anxiety that had taken root in Philadelphia followed her, and it would take years and an entirely unexpected hobby to begin healing it.
This is the kind of deeply personal healing work that Shelly walks alongside her clients through in her wellness specialist practice for founders, executives, and high-profile clients, where the scars of past environments often matter as much as the pressures of the present moment.
The Last Person You Would Expect to Jump Out of a Plane
Dina described herself with refreshing honesty. She is one of the most naturally fearful people she knows. She is afraid of flying commercial airlines, afraid of turbulence, afraid of takeoffs, and even afraid of going to the mall because she worries about public shootings. She tends toward worst-case scenarios. She has worked hard to manage this, but it is still a part of her daily experience.
And yet, out of all the hobbies in the world, Dina became a licensed skydiver. She had completed her 62nd jump the day before recording this episode. In the skydiving world, that is a low number. In the context of Dina’s life, it is extraordinary.
What makes skydiving different, she explained, is the sense of control. On an airplane, she has no control over what happens. In a mall, she cannot vet the strangers around her. But when she is in the sky, she knows her canopy, she knows her emergency procedures, and she trusts her own ability to respond to whatever comes. Her fear, she realized, is rooted in situations where she cannot act. Skydiving gave her a place where she could.
The Cure Nothing Else Could Provide
For years Dina relied on beta blockers to perform. Her sound was shaky. Her confidence was in pieces. She took the medication because she needed it just to stand on stage and play. Then she found skydiving, and something began to shift.
Skydiving did not just reduce her performance anxiety. It cured it, at least in the ways that mattered most to her. She no longer takes beta blockers before concerts. She played her recent performance in Paducah and every other recent concert without them. What changed was not her nervous system on its own. It was her relationship with her own fear.
Dina described the familiar spiral that used to consume her before a performance. Two hours before walking on stage, her anxiety would start feeding on itself. She would worry about being nervous, then worry about how her nervousness would ruin her playing, then worry about that worry, and the spiral would deepen until she could barely function. Skydiving forced her to recognize something she had never noticed before. All of her anxiety happened on the ground. Once she was in the sky, she was calm. Once she was actually playing, she was in the music. The prison was the preparation, not the performance.
Learning to Make Mistakes Without Punishing Herself
One of the most meaningful lessons Dina has taken from skydiving is permission to be imperfect. As a child prodigy, she was raised to be a perfectionist. Every mistake became something to beat herself up over. Every performance was measured against an impossible standard.
With skydiving, every jump brings the possibility of forgetting something. She might miss a step. She might execute a move slightly wrong. But her instructors treat every mistake as a learning opportunity. You come down. You reflect. You try again. That repeated exposure to imperfection without shame has begun to transform how she treats herself on stage.
She is starting to apply the same grace to her music. She is letting herself feel curiosity about what went well and what could be stronger next time, rather than drowning in self-criticism after every performance. The result is a kind of creative freedom she has never known before, and audiences are feeling it.
This kind of reframing, where growth replaces shame as the dominant story, is at the heart of Shelly’s performance mentoring work with leaders, athletes, and creatives, where the ability to fail forward is often what separates good from great.
Playing Like a Skydiver
Dina shared something that stopped Shelly in her tracks. When asked how her playing has changed, she said she now plays like a skydiver rather than a violinist. She takes more risks on stage. She communicates with the audience in ways she never could before. She expresses emotion without fearing criticism from the person in the third row. She plays the way she imagines the most daring skydivers swoop in for a landing, right at the edge of what is possible.
Shelly witnessed this firsthand. During one of Dina’s performances in Paducah, she played an original arrangement called “Death of Vanity” that took the melody of the Aqua song “Barbie Girl” and reworked it into a baroque-style chaconne, the solemn processional form Bach once used when his wife died. It was a playful, technically brilliant piece that combined high art with pop culture in a way that delighted everyone in the hall. That kind of risk-taking only happens when an artist has permission from herself to play.
The Letting Go That Changed Everything
Toward the end of the episode, Dina shared something she called either psychology or spirituality, she was not sure which. For years, she was bitter and obsessive about not having enough concert opportunities. She clung to every rejection, resented peers who seemed to have more, and carried the weight of scarcity wherever she went.
Then skydiving gave her something she had not expected. Joy. Euphoria. A sense of agency over her own happiness that she could create every single day the weather allowed. Suddenly she was not dependent on concert bookings for her emotional wellbeing. And as soon as she stopped clinging so hard, her manager began landing her major performance opportunities with professional orchestras. The bookings started flowing in almost the moment she stopped desperately needing them.
Shelly named this pattern for what it often is. It is the scarcity mindset, and it shows up everywhere in life. When we focus on what we do not have, we often end up with more of the lack we fear. When we shift our focus toward gratitude, health, and what we can create, the things we once longed for tend to find their way to us. This is not magical thinking. It is what happens when a person becomes healthy enough to receive good things without strangling them on arrival.
This kind of mindset work is central to Shelly’s wellness consulting practice for organizations and leadership teams, where unhealthy leadership patterns are often rooted in the same scarcity thinking that once held Dina back.
A Reminder for Anyone Who Thinks They Cannot
Dina wanted her story to land in a specific place for listeners who might be hearing it. If she can skydive, anyone can. If she can step on stage without beta blockers, anyone can do the hard thing they have been avoiding. She was raised by loving parents who also happened to be deeply anxious themselves, and those fears imprinted on her in ways she has spent years working to untangle. That is a journey many of us know well.
Her story is not about becoming fearless. It is about finding the one thing that gives you enough control, enough clarity, or enough joy to walk through the fear anyway. For Dina, that thing came with a parachute attached. For others, it might be a conversation, a routine, a faith practice, or a community. The shape of it matters less than the decision to keep trying.
And maybe, like Dina, you will find that the version of yourself on the other side of the fear is the one you were meant to be all along.
🎧 Join the Conversation
If this post sparked something in you, the full episode is waiting with even more warmth and thoughtful insight.
✨ Listen to the full conversation on the From the Green Velvet Couch podcast. Visit the Podcast page to discover more episodes focused on resilience, leadership wellbeing, and holistic wellness.
Let this be your invitation to slow down, breathe deeply, and step into a well-grounded life full of growth and intention.
