One of my clients is a professional musician and this morning needed some help with stage fright. I found this session very interesting as having been a professional musician myself I have faced similar issues and successfully developed NLP based strategies to handle them.

But I’ve also realised, as I worked a lot with people suffering from public speaking anxiety and performance nerves that the internal thought processes in all those situations are very similar. I taught them those strategies and it did work as well as with the musicians or actors I worked with in the past.

The most common reason why people get nervous when performing is that they disassociate. Meaning that they step into their audience’s shoes looking at themselves performing. And wondering what people think of them, or even worst, assuming that their audience is judging them in a negative way. The best approach I found in dealing with that pattern is to force myself to stay associated, which means fully engaged in my sensorial experience rather than lost in my thoughts ; Focusing on the content of the performance, whether it’s the music, the lyrics or the words. In a sense it’s very close to meditation, because our (negative) thoughts are the strongest element that pollute our experience. And by taking control of those thoughts, we are able to step into our experience in a better way and access our useful internal resources.

Here are a step by step simple process to help improve your performances:

1. Identify your triggers, how do you know you’re getting nervous? Are you having negative thoughts? Is it a physical sensation?
2. As soon as you become aware of those negative triggers, take a deep breath and remember to breathe and relax.
3. Give yourself a pep talk: what would you need to hear to feel more confident?
4. Take yourself back to a time when you felt really confident in your abilities. That might be in another presentation or in a complete different context.
5. Step into this memory using all your senses, see what you see, hear the sounds around you, feel the temperature and the sensations in your body, focusing especially on that confidence feeling
6. Imagine yourself presenting next time with this level of confidence; what’s different in your body position? Facial expression? in your voice?
7. Next, imagine you’ve performed in this new way already a few dozen times; how natural does it feel after that many times to  be confident now?
8. Enjoy your performance!

As a final thought I’d just like to invite your to remember that you’ve done it before when you were rehearsing, therefore you have within you the resources you need. It’s only a matter or recalling those resources at the exact moment you need them. And most of the time, people who come to listen to you are here to learn from you, to enjoy a nice concert or a nice play. They’re not here to judge you but to have a good time. And after all, we’re all human, we all make mistakes, don’t we? Have you ever judge harshly a live performer or presenter because they made a couple of mistakes? I assume that your answer is no, of course not…so why would it be different for you?