Stage phobia is a very common phenomenon that occurs in many people. Such people feel that performing in public is not their cup of tea. However, stage fright can take a huge toll on one’s self-confidence and self-esteem, and may suffer their growth.
In this blog, I’m sharing a few tips to conquer your stage phobia and convert yourself into a confident dancer.
Learn from your Mistakes
Whenever I ask people why they are afraid of performing in public, most of them tell me some kind of bad experience in the past where they made a huge mistake while performing and people laughed at them. This experience of getting humiliated in public develops a big impact on their mind and in turn, gives them performance anxiety or stage phobia.
I always feel that learning from mistakes is a booster dose to perform better and overcome such mistakes. The best way is to embrace your weaknesses, work on them and let your stage phobia collapse instead of your self-confidence. It is, therefore, absolutely okay to make mistakes while you are achieving something.
Mirror Practice
The most trusted person in anyone’s life is themselves. So, let you be your first and trusted audience who will never judge you on your stage phobia or laugh when you make a mistake. So, stand in front of the mirror and start practicing. If you make a mistake, then evaluate your mistake and do it again. Trust me this mirror practice worked for many people.
While you practice, observe your movements, posture, and facial expressions. Mirror practice is something that every dancer and performer often does to improve their performance.
Rehearse your performance in front of your family or friends
The second most trusted person can be your closest family member or your friend. Ask your close family member or friend to sit in front of you and rehearse in front of them. Your trusted person can help you to overcome your stage phobia and you will gradually gain a little bit of confidence. Your trusted person can also help you out with improving your performance skill.
You must be thinking about how a family member can help you out in improving your skills without knowing the technicalities of performance.
Well, It is not about the technicalities we are dealing with right now. And mind you, the audience is pretty smart. They do understand if you are going wrong somewhere or your performance is not up to the mark. So, now it is your skill to perform so well that your audience might not understand that you made some mistakes or forgot your steps.
Practice and Practice
You will not gain confidence unless you don’t practice your performance in front of people. At the very first time, you might feel,” Oh no this is awkward, all eyes are on me! What am I going to do now? What If I make a mistake?” The best way to overcome your stage phobia is to avoid making any eye contact with the public at first. Looking into the eye of people can give you performance anxiety. So, the best way is not to look at people.
Look at some nice painting or some auditorium or theatre wall which is in front of your vision. In this way, you can trick people into not looking directly toward them but making an illusion as if you are addressing them. This is my personal tried and tested and it worked!
Say I don’t have stage phobia
If you want to overcome this problem, then act like you don’t have it. Most of the time in group performances, your co-performers keep blabbering about their nervousness before the performance and this condition is so contagious that you get easily infected by it.
So, if you say, “ Being nervous or having stage fright is just a mind game. I don’t have stage phobia or I don’t get nervous at all.” You will definitely start behaving like you are one.
Just do it and Kick off Stage phobia
Do you know what stage-phobic people do? They are the ones who sit on the banks of a swimming pool and are scared of drowning. Keeping all the above tips in mind if you dive once into the swimming pool, you will realize that it is not at all that difficult. So, just do it once.
To sum up, Stage phobia is just like other phobias which people have. Once you make up your mind and face your fear you will surely realize that this was just a mind game and now it has vanished. So, take a deep breath and be ready to give a kickass performance.
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