How to Overcome Stage Fright While Performing

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By Tasha J
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Overcome Stage Fright While Performing

Stage fright is one of the many phobias that are most common among individuals. They often deal with the anxiety that is associated with standing in front of a large crowd of people. We all go through it. Some people are born with the ability of performing in front of thousands or even millions of people, while others must work on developing this ability. In this article we will think of steps you can take in order to overcome this fear that plagues so many of us.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Confidence

Step 1

Feeling a little insecure, are we?

Take your mind off of yourself. Many people are self conscious, they are way too concerned with the “what ifs” of life such as “what if they don’t like how I look, what if I hit the wrong note while trying to sing, what if they don’t like me, what if I say the wrong thing, what if they don’t like what I have to say.” Right now you are spending too much time focusing on the negative aspects of performing or public speaking. Your goal is to focus on the actual performance or presentation and to not even consider failure or a possible negative outcome. You should work towards making your performance the best performance it can be. As long as you maintain a positive attitude and are confident while performing you will be fine. Keep in mind, confidence and the way you feel about yourself and your ability to accomplish the task.
Step 2

Practice your performance or presentation in front of a few close friends and/or family members and encourage feedback or constructive criticism. You can depend on your close friends and family to tell you their honest opinion, this would enable you to alter your performance accordingly. If you are comfortable with performing or presenting in front of the people closest to you then you should be able to perform in front of a multitude of people with no problems.
Step 3

The cardinal rule to overcoming stage fright is practice makes perfect. The more you practice your performance or presentation, the more you become confident that you can deliver. The objective is to internalize your performance so that you would be able to perform in the midst of distractions. Say for instance you have prepared a presentation and you decided to rehearse the night before, well one night of rehearsal isn’t enough time to determine if you have your presentation/performance memorized. It is best to prepare well in advance in order to ensure that you know the material you are presenting. Your audience could tell if you are unprepared so the last thing you want to do is show them that you were unprofessional and neglected to rehearse. When I was attending a University, we had to do presentations every week in which case we had a significant amount of information to cover, so I would begin preparing for our presentations as soon as I received the assignment. I was basically trying to avoid stumbling in front of the instructor and my fellow class mates. I remember watching an episode of the Apprentice one season (I forgot which one) and one team was unprepared, they were unable to pull up their presentation on the projector, the message they were trying to express was lacked clarity in which case they left Donald Trump in a state of confusion not exactly knowing what the project was about.