Five Surprising Facts & Two
Big Secrets About Stage Fright

The second fact is that you’re in great company if you experience stage fright. Let me show you what I mean.

Here are just a few of the famous musicians who’ve suffered from it.

Of course, more than musicians experience stage fright. Here’s a short list of well-known actors who’ve also battled it.

Great company indeed. These lists show that you can obviously suffer from stage fright and still enjoy a successful career as a performer. But you don’t need to suffer.

Through mindfulness, you can learn to find your way beyond stage fright to achieve more of your full potential and even enjoy the spotlight.

Despite its prevalence, speech fright is a silent menace. People simply don’t talk about it much. Why?

It’s likely out of embarrassment with a dose of insecurity thrown in for good measure. After all, who wants to admit to being tripped up by the same thing that strikes third-grade spelling bee contestants? “I can’t let people know a successful executive like me gets nervous speaking in front of others. I’ll lose their respect, and they’ll think I’m a loser.”

The cost of our silence can be immense. First, it’s what makes us feel we’re alone in suffering from it. It also helps stoke the belief that there’s something wrong with us when we experience stage fright. After all, you don’t hear anyone else talking about it.

When I lead a group of performers who experience stage fright, I like to ask them to share a little about their experiences with it. Typically, it’s the first time in their lives they’ve had an open discussion about their anxiety. It winds up being quite reassuring, even liberating. “You worry about that too? I thought I was the only one.”

That’s the reason the Goodbye Butterflies online training course includes an optional forum for you to share your experiences with stage fright, anonymously if you wish. You can also lend support to one another.

Here’s another surprising fact. Three simple factors are behind speech fright.

First, you perform in front of others. But it doesn’t need to be a large audience. It can be just one person, and he/she doesn’t even need to be present physically but can instead be on the other end of a phone call, Skype session, or the like.

The second factor behind speech fright is that the audience judges on your performance (or at least you feel it’s judging you). Sometimes that judgment is formal, like during an audition. Other times, it’s more informal, like how enthusiastically the audience applauds.

The third and most crucial factor that determines when stage fright strikes is that the audience’s judgment constitutes some type of danger or threat. This aspect of stage fright is often overlooked but central.

In the Goodbye Butterflies online training course, I reveal how the threat or danger you perceive when you get nervous is often very real. It’s just that less-consequential surface worries conceal it.

With the help of what is known as the downward arrow technique, I help you drill down beneath your surface worries to reveal the deep danger or true threat that triggers your stage fright. You may be surprised at what you find.

Getting nervous when you speak in front of others is a natural phenomenon, not a malady or illness. What we call speech fright is simply the manifestations of the body’s autonomic nervous system preparing you to fight or flee from a perceived threat. In other words, it’s the hardwiring that protects us from danger. It’s essential to survival.

So, don’t think you’re somehow broken in experiencing speech fright. Far from it. In fact, I tell my students that getting nervous proves their perfect, perfectly human. Of course, natural or not, speech fright can cause you to be stuck, that’s the real issue.

The first secret is that there is no cure for stage fright, per se Again, it’s a natural human phenomenon, the body’s autonomic nervous system preparing you to fight or flee from a perceived threat, and that system is essential to our survival.

There will always be times when you become nervous performing in front of others. To put it in perspective, imagine setting as a goal never getting sad or angry again.

In therapy, they call that a dead man’s goal, because it’s the type only a dead person can achieve. The same goes for never having moments when you experience stage fright. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much an unattainable goal.

So, don’t waste your time trying to find a cure-all for your nervousness when you perform.

Here’s the second secret about stage fright.
While there isn’t a cure, there is an effective way beyond it. As reported in respected media sources like the New York Times, Psychology Today, and TIME Magazine, our modern age is discovering something age-old traditions have known all along.

The answer for maladies like stage fright is found in the simple power of mindfulness.

Stage fright is like the type of finger cuff toy that we played with as kids. What happened when you try to pull and tug to get it off your fingers? Its grip just got tighter. How did you escape? By doing the opposite.

The analogy with stage fright is that actively trying to fight it doesn’t work. Your thoughts fuse with your anxiety all the more. What does work is mindful acceptance of your worried thoughts. Through mindfulness, your anxiety’s hold on you loosens, it fades into the background, and you enjoy a more workable situation.

The type of mindfulness I’m talking about isn’t difficult to achieve once you understand the ins and outs of it. It’s simple and no-nonsense, and that’s important. What good is an approach that’s too complicated to call on when you need it most—when you’re in the throes of anxiety?

With mindfulness, you can also start to see results almost immediately. Your mindful abilities will increase with experience, but you don’t have to wait months or even years to begin seeing benefits.