Please enjoy this article about managing stage fright from Certified Life Coach, Sue Hurwitz who also happens to be my mother:
As an audience member, what you usually see onstage are actors who know their craft well and seem to be full of confidence. But like most of us, actors suffer from stage fright. Research has shown that, despite anxiety, performers emotional needs are met by performing.
Well-known performers who have talked about their own fear onstage include: Edie Falco, Carly Simon, Alanis Morissette, Aretha Franklin, Nicolas Cage, Naomi Judd, Barbara Streisand and Cherry Jones.
Actor Al Pacino explains how he deals with stage anxiety in a 2013 interview, “If you feel as though you are presenting something to an audience that you feel good about, it takes a little bit of the edge off the fear. You want to communicate this play to them. Serving the play becomes the thing that bails you out of any real stage fright.”
Cherry Jones is a Tony-nominated Broadway actor. She has said that she was, “nearly paralyzed by a profound case of stage fright” by trying to live up to the “greatest performance” she had ever seen, which happened to be in the same role she was playing as performed by Colleen Dewhurst in “A Moon for the Misbegotten”.
Although the fear may be receiving negative reviews from an audience, with stage fright the most powerful heckler is within one’s own mind. For an actor, that can change the focus from the performance and change it to negative self-talk.
A key to dealing successfully with this self-talk and fear is to put the focus squarely on the material and not on oneself; easier said than done. Here’s what typically happens when a performer becomes immersed in their anxious feelings and negativity: An actor onstage who’s feeling anxious will tend to become self-involved, which takes him out of the performance and away from the audience. This leads to a break between both actors as well as actor and audience.
Some tools for managing stage anxiety are meditation, breathing exercises, making a list of your strengths as an actor, and talking to a professional who can help you work through it.
As a Life Coach working with people who have these issues, I find a first defense is something as simple as breathing. In a session with a client who needs to work through stage anxiety, we first settle in by deep breathing. Slow, deep breathing works wonders in putting someone in a more relaxed state.So, too, does yoga. Tension held in the body can be worked on by such movements as shoulder rolls, hanging loosely from the waist with hands towards the floor, and twisting gently from the waist side to side. Another tool I use is to have the client write a story about themselves having an enjoyable and relaxed performance. We then discuss what that would look like to them, and how we could work on achieving that goal one step at a time.
Whether famous or up-and-coming, diva or character actor, we are all human and at risk for feeling vulnerable. We all need to find a path toward feeling positive about ourselves and to treat ourselves with the same generosity of spirit that we give to our fellow humans.
Sue Hurwitz
Certified Life Coach