Your hands shake, and drip with sweat.

Your voice  cracks.

Your mind races.

Your legs threaten to collapse.

Your thumping heart drowns out all                                  other sounds .

Any minute now, the audience will break into small groups

to discuss what a loser you are!!

You've got Stagefright!!!!

I. What Is “It”?

The four components of stagefright are:

               * Anticipation: the nervous, negative, and largely unrealistic thoughts and mental images                             you experience in the minutes, hours, days and weeks (sometimes months!) before a                                 scheduled performance.

      * Avoidance: when you avoid performance situations because of fear, you unfortunately     strengthen and maintain the stage fright. It prevents you from having the helpful experience of coping with the anxiety, and leaves you instead with the impression that you would have experienced a horrible disaster if you had actually tried to perform.

      * Anxiety and Panic: the fearful symptoms you experience during your performance before an audience. These symptoms may include physical sensations such as labored breathing, sweating, racing heart and dizziness, as well as numerous fearful thoughts about how poorly you are doing and how the audience is repelled by your nervousness and incompetence.

       * Appraisal: the period after a performance, when you come to some conclusions about    how you did.

II. Why Does “It” Happen?

           1.     In the first place, you should know that stagefright, like most anxiety disorders, is believed to stem from a genetic predisposition. This simply means that some people are good candidates to develop stagefright, by virtue of their physiology, and others are very unlikely to ever experience it.

2.   But for those who do have such a predisposition, stagefright is the product of a particular way of thinking about the performance situation, and a particular way of trying to handle it as well.

            3.     It’s the product of thinking of the performance situation as a threat, rather than a challenge.  Thinking of it as a threat sets off primitive ‘fight or flight’ responses which would ordinarily help you fight off a predator, such as a rush of adrenaline, diversion of blood to your major muscles, faster  heartbeat, and so on.. If you really were getting into a fight, all those changes would be helpful.  But if you’re trying to perform, they tend to get in your way!

            4.   Stagefright is also the product of focusing on yourself, and your anxiety, rather than on your presentation or performance. When you’re focused on yourself to an excessive degree, you’re unable to immerse yourself in the role of the performer.  Instead, you worry about how you look and sound; you imagine all the most critical thoughts, and attribute them to the audience; and then you try to control your anxiety by a variety of means..

            5.   The unfortunate aspect of these efforts is that they usually make the stagefright worse. They make the  performance less interesting, and create a barrier between the performer and the audience. They lead the singer to feel more alone, and therefore more self  conscious and fearful.

            6.    If instead, the singer could turn her focus to the task at hand and get fully immersed in that,  the process of communication with the audience would flow more smoothly.   Why don’t people do that? Why don’t they just turn their focus to their performance?

            7.    It’s because they have the idea that it’s not okay to feel anxious up there, and they think they have to get rid of that anxiety. They think that, if they  could get rid of the anxiety, then they could  perform.

                    a.   For a lot of people, it’s because they tend to think that the anxiety they have beforehand, the  anticipatory anxiety, is only the start of the problem. They’re plagued by this thought: “If I’m  this nervous now, how much worse will it be when I start singing?”   They assume that their anticipation is the low point of the anxiety, and that it will   increase terribly once they get on stage.

                     b.  The truth is, for most people, it’s exactly the reverse. The anticipation is the worst part of the anxiety. Once they get involved in the performance,  they start to feel better,  not worse.

             8.   But just hearing that isn’t usually enough to allow someone to manage the fear. A person with stagefright is driven to struggle against their fear.

                                  That’s the problem.

             9.   A successful treatment for stagefright will help a performer to accept, and work with, the fear, while they give their main focus to the performance.

TIPS FOR COPING WITH STAGEFRIGHT

            1. If you want to perform, sing, act, etc., you have to breathe. And if you want to do these things calmly, you'll need to breathe diaphragmatically, just the way you’ve been taught at your chorus rehearsals!    This won't always come naturally, and you'll probably need to practice.

            2. Remind yourself that the audience (even the judges)  isn’t there to see or hear you, unless you're a very famous person (or your mom is in the audience). They're just here to see the person who's singing on this stage.  Today that happens to be you. That's not really important to them.

             3. Expect, and accept, that you will feel anxious,  especially at first. That's OK. If you allow yourself to work WITH the anxiety, not against it, you'll be able to calm down and proceed. If you resist the anxiety, you'll make more trouble for yourself.

             4. Establish the right focus for your task. What do I mean by focus? I mean what you pay attention to as you engage in your performance.

             a.  If you are giving a talk, your focus should be your material and the audience reaction to it,  because your task is to inform or persuade them. You therefore want to be aware of how they are responding, so that you can connect with them in various ways.

 b.  Establish contact with the audience through eye contact  with your director and to the audience before, between and after your songs are sung. While your natural instinct will probably be to avoid the audience as much as possible, you will actually feel LESS anxiety once you hear the applause and know that the audience is involved with you.

  c.   You want to perform for the audience’s  enjoyment. During the actual  singing,  ignore the audience, and turn your focus to your music,  your character, and leave the audience to enjoy your  performance  on their own.

              d.   Where you don't want your focus to be is on yourself and your anxiety. This is why it's so useful to develop an accepting attitude toward the anxiety, to take a few steps to calm yourself a little, and then shift your focus to the task at hand.

              e.  Think of your performance as a gift you’re giving the audience, and “package it” accordingly!