Overcoming Performance Anxiety

Overcoming Performance Anxiety

This morning I had to sing two extremely hard songs. I haven’t sung in public for about a year. I’m not sure why it has been that long, but for some reason I have shied away from performing. So, you can imagine the amount of anxiety that built up as this morning arrived. Here is how I dealt with the stress.

First of all, preparation is the most important part of performance anxiety. If you have prepared well and have coached your piece/s with someone who knows what s/he is doing, then you have taken the majority of your anxiety away from the process. The next thing to do is record your self. You are definitely going to be your hardest judge. So, when you pass the test of being your own critic, you have gotten through another big hurdle of allaying your stress.

Once you know that you are duly practiced ready and your project is at a stage that is good enough to be performed, the only other thing that is a problem is what will happen when you get in front of an audience.  So, you must set the stage for creating a space in your mind for an audience. You can even invite some close friends to listen to your final practices, which I did. Their opinions were favorable, so I felt even more at ease.

Now, since I was working with my voice, an important facet of creating less stress is dealing with the health of the voice. You must make sure that the few days before you sing that you are getting enough sleep, drinking enough water, and vocalizing daily. If you are an instrumentalist or an actor, you should prepare your craft according to whatever exercises you see fit.

On the evening prior to your performance, you must take even more precautions about your voice, drinking warm beverages, eating the right food, sleeping no more than 8 hours. Sleeping too much can make it very difficult to get your vocal chords back into shape, especially if it’s a morning performance.

The morning of the performance, you should wake up early enough to get a little exercise, a hot, steamy shower, and a light and healthy breakfast. In the shower hum and use your head voice, but try not to sing anything in full voice. Work on your speaking voice first. Lifting the soft palate and generating sound with your breath so you feel nothing in your throat the entire time you speak but resonance and vibration in your chest.

The objective as you warm-up that morning is to keep the muscles in the larynx and the back of the throat completely released (except for the lifting of the soft palate and the temporary closure of the epiglottis for high notes) and out of your practice completely. In so doing, you relax the throat throughout the warm-up, continuing as you begin to sing through your songs.

The morning of the performance, I sang my songs seated, in half voice, a couple times before I sang them full out. Then, as I had practiced completely before, I sang them through at performance level once. That was it. I kept a copy of the words near me, in case I had any blank outs with the words. Sometimes, just having the words near you on a music stand is enough to keep you from having to look at them.

I think during the entire performance, I glanced down maybe three times for both songs, just to be sure of a couple words. Since it was my first performance in a long while, I gave myself the luxury of having a music stand. I usually don’t do that.

Next was the rehearsal with the musicians and back-up singers. I sang very lightly for that, even though we needed a good sense of what the song was going to sound like for the sound tech. I gave the sound tech enough of what my voice would sound like to get a good feel for the performance.

The entire time I sang, I kept breathing slowly and affirming that the performance was not about me, but about sharing something important to me with people I cared about. This is an important facet of taking the burden from the ego self. If you let the entire performance be about the measure of your self-esteem, then it makes for a very anxiety-driven performance. But, if you focus on the words and the message, and more importantly who you are singing to, then the action and intention of the song lead you out of that last bit of performance anxiety.

I hope that helps.

This is the YouTube of the performance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWJ7qychymU

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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