Stage fright is a subject close to my heart. I am a singer songwriter, guitarist and drummer as well as a hypnotherapist and coach and for twenty years I suffered from debilitating anxiety every time I had to go on stage. The problem started when I was sixteen during a school assembly when I raised my arm to speak and as soon as I got the microphone I froze and forgot what I wanted to say. After that embarrassment I thought maybe practice would cure me but it never did. No matter whether the gig was just a bunch of friends or a big stage of three hundred the problem persisted and I was about to give up on one of my biggest life passions.
My symptoms included: a pounding heart, sweating, a parched throat, IBS, insomnia, an obsessive need to rehearse everything to perfection as well as peaking too fast, forgetting words and really not enjoying the performance itself.
Although I knew that my problem stemmed from the flight or fight or freeze response, knowing this did not help. Moreover, even though I was a hypnotherapist it never occurred to me to use hypnosis to cure myself probably because I was too close to the problem to be able to see the solution.
Fast forward to the present and now I mostly enjoy gigs! Needless to say the level of performance is a lot better as a result. Not only, but I now have dedicated a big part of my practice as a hypnotherapist to helping others overcome this issue so they can be better performers whether they are musicians, actors or public speakers.
So what solved the problem for me? My journey is a little unconventional and I guess I want to say that I do not advocate others to follow in my exact footsteps, because what worked for me might be too dangerous for others and I know for a fact now that there are safer ways to get the same results without any risk!
My problem, as is the issue with most people suffering from performance anxiety, was that I was stuck in a negative mindset that made improvement impossible. As a matter of fact I could only see what I was trying to get rid of (my anxiety) and could not see any other way of interpreting being on stage. What I needed was to know exactly what other people who didn’t have this problem felt so that I could work on adopting a similar mindset to theirs.
As a college student I studied philosophy and comparative religion and specialized in altered states of consciousness. This brought me to study psychedelic drugs and their relationship to mysticism and shamanism and later to practices such as meditation and self hypnosis . This in turn opened the way for me to experiment with the ritual use of drugs such as LSD and MDMA.
One day while at a festival, I got offered these two drugs and took them together in a small dose. I then got asked to perform and though I did not want to do so because I feared losing control I eventually caved in. What happened revolutionized my thinking: for the first time in my life I was able to actually enjoy performing without any self consciousness or fear. For the first time I experienced what it felt like to be on stage and just be interested in what I was doing and present with it rather than worried about other people’s criticisms and imagined judgements. In essence, I was able to have a snapshot of what I wanted to feel.
This knowledge opened the doors of change for me. Of course I was aware of the trap of using drugs to achieve a state I could not normally achieve so I didn’t try to use them again. Instead I decided to take that snapshot and use it in conjunction with hypnosis in order to focus on what I wanted by mentally rehearsing again and again what it was like to be in that state.
Why would this work ? Because the sub-conscious mind learns by repetition, metaphors, images, stories and feelings and moreover it does not distinguish between what is imagined and what is real. Take a dream: usually dreams are made up of stories that evoke strong feelings (however absurd the events portrayed) and when you experience them you feel as if they were real life. The same happens during hypnosis, because you are in a state of focussed concentration and relaxation, which is similar to a daydream. It is important to note that because the sub-conscious is dominated by images, it does not respond to grammatical negations, so if you say to yourself “ I am not thinking of a red bus” you immediately will think of the very thing. Given this principle and that whatever you focus on expands (whether negative or positive) what matters is imagining positive outcomes that elicit very strong positive feelings and then repeat the exercise as much as possible. In other words: it is best to never focus on what you don’t want (i.e. I don’t want to be nervous , make a fool of myself etc) but instead direct your attention onto what you do and imagine what it would feel like to already have that outcome as a reality.
The result was extraordinary. It allowed me to not only ‘cure’ myself but to also come up with a set of practices that help my clients adopt a mindset based on the principles I learned are associated with being on stage free of any stage fright such as : accepting fear, being in the present and focussing on creative self expression, focussing on authenticity and building a connection with the audience, moving from self criticism to self compassion, being in flow , fostering self trust and spontaneity, dealing positively with failure and mistakes as well as more physical and practical exercises that help develop calm, resilience and presence. Furthermore these practices can be applied to anyone with any type of performance anxiety so they can get real and permanent results without any drugs.
Finally what gave me the final push to put into practice my new found mindset was joining an improv comedy class, which I would highly recommend to anyone suffering from anxiety as a wonderful and playful way to discover that you are capable of much more than you think you are.