Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety with Dr Shona Erskine

Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety: When your body thinks you’re in danger, but you’re just trying to do your job.

Standing in the wings, waiting for your cue, your mind and body can feel like they have completely misunderstood the assignment and forgotten all those hours of rehearsal you have done. With a racing heart, tightening breathing and tense muscles, your nervous system is behaving as though something dangerous is about to happen.

Performance anxiety can be debilitating and for each of us it can appear in different guises and under different circumstances.

From a psychological perspective, attention and activation control can be an ultimate set of skills for a performer to develop. Sometimes you need to settle yourself to land the performance. Sometimes you need to energise yourself and lift out of a tired slump. The skills are there to get your attention exactly where it needs to be and your activation at the right level.

In this conversation, we’ll explore what happens psychologically and physiologically when we are experiencing performance nerves. But we won’t linger here, we will focus on the practical skills you can develop to manage your attention, breathing, thoughts, emotions and ultimately your level of activation.

We’ll move from strategies that can be used in the moments before you walk on stage, through to deeper psychological work that develops over time. We’ll also explore the idea of a “performance script”. This psychology script is different from the types of scripts actors use. It is a personalised psychological routine that is developed and rehearsed alongside your acting work and is one of the most effective tools for focusing attention and managing performance anxiety.

Bring your sticky performance anxiety experiences along. There will be time to check in and prise them open for a bit of reflection. Please note: This event is at 12:00pm AEDT (Sydney/Melbourne time) and 2pm NZ time. You will be sent a Zoom link to tune in.