How I Successfully Conquered My Fear of Performing and You Can Too

I have always enjoyed performing arts. I started to learn the piano at six years old, went to acting class at elven and became a student of professional magic at fourteen. But for a long time, when I was called upon to perform in front of an audience, I turned into a bag of nerves and was often unable to meet the request. And when I forced myself to meet it, the performance was usually under parr.

Performance anxiety became a dominant problem in my life and at one point I had simply accepted that I would never be able to perform confidently in public and would have to turn my attention to behind the camera and off-stage skills like writing.

During my college years, myself and a friend of mine used to hit the streets of the local city in our free periods armed with a video camera and do free demonstrations of close up magic tricks for anybody who was prepared to watch. I really wanted to be good at it. I really wanted to feel comfortable and at home talking and performing to strangers. But I just didn't. And I used to get violently nervous hours in advance of an impending performance.

Eventually I was forced to either face my fear and deal with it, or stop performing. Many performers face this decision during their careers and in an unfortunate number of cases performance anxiety claims their career.

I started getting introspective and began to think about exactly why I felt so nervous.

I isolated a couple of reasons:

First, I think it seemed to me out of the ordinary to be walking up to people on the streets and asking them if they wanted to see card tricks. It did not seem like a normal thing to be doing. And any time we do anything new, we will always feel a little (or a lot) out of our comfort zone.

Second, I think there was a degree of pure lack of confidence. I thoughtt he audience had expectations of me that I may not be able to live up to. As a magician - and espectially a new magician - you are always a little worried that your audience will figure out your tricks.

Third, I think I had higher expectations of my performances than did my audiences. When I played the piano I expected my performance to be flawless.

I figured out some solutions to my problems.

The answer to the first problem had to be simply go out and perform and keep performing until the fear goes away. So I did. I went out and showed magic to more and more random people until it was the most normal thing in the world. And of couse the fear did eventually begin to go away.

The answer to the second problem was a bit of self delusion and positive thinking. I convinced myself I was really good at what I was going. And the way I did that was by watching successful performances over and over again on video.

Watching yourself on video can be a very uneasy experience. Especially if you have insecurities about the way you look and such like. Watching your performances back on video until you feel entirely comfortable is a great exercise to do in order to just accept yourself and prove to yourself that you have got what it takes to really entertain and amaze the audience you are performing to.

The answer to problem three was to realize that I am just human. Mistakes were going to happen now and then, and it was okay if they did. After all, nobody was paying to see me. They all got in for free! The irony was that as my personal standards went down, the pressure came off and the performances got better because I felt more at ease.

So I conclude with what I hope is good and inspiring news. If you are currently in the position I was once in, where you thought you had to just accept that you could never perform in public, then there is hope. You can. Just do not expect it to be effortless and easy to get yourself into a position and state of mind where performances are stress free and comfortable. It can happen, but you need to face your demons and deal with them.