How to Get Over Stage Fright: Try Generosity Instead of Confidence

You know the feeling before you know the words for it. Something gathers in your chest and your hands in the hour before you go on, and it does not feel good, and you have been told your whole life that this is nerves and that the goal is to have fewer of them.

Most advice on how to get over stage fright takes that goal at face value. It offers you techniques for removing the feeling. I have spent a long time on both sides of this, as someone who has performed and as someone who works with performers, and what I have come to think is that the advice is aimed at the wrong target. The energy is not the problem.

Be Generous Instead

People come to me wanting to know how they can feel more confident and less self-conscious. Sometimes it is about stepping onto a stage. Sometimes it is about walking into a room full of people. The question is almost always the same shape: how can I feel more confident? I do not feel confident.

What I often tell them is: be generous instead.

If you are stepping onto a stage, it is because you have something to offer. You have something to give. That is the actual reason you are there, and it is a reason that has nothing to do with how you are feeling about yourself.

Confident Performers Impress Us, Generous Performers Stay With Us

Think about it from the other side of the lights, as an audience member.

Confident performers might impress us. But generous performers stay with us. They move us. We can be changed by a generous performance, and we are almost never changed by an impressive one.

So if you step onto that stage excited to give what you have to give, thinking about the audience and what they might receive from you, giving yourself to that moment fully, that is better than confidence. It is better because it is not about you. Self-consciousness needs you at the centre of the frame. Generosity moves you out of it, and the self-consciousness has nowhere to stand.

The Same Thing Works Off the Stage

This is not only a performer's trick. If you walk into a party and you think about helping somebody else be at ease, that can come across as more confident than confident. There too, it is not about you.

Which is worth sitting with, if what you actually have is social anxiety wearing a performance costume. The instruction is identical. Find the person in the room who needs something, and give it to them. If that pattern runs through most of your life rather than just your performances, it may be closer to the high-functioning anxiety I work with in Brooklyn than to stage fright as such.

But the Energy Is Still There

Here is where honesty is required, because the generosity piece does not dissolve the physical thing. You are still left with the more visceral feeling of stage fright, the one that grips your body.

Something I learned from my mentor, the pianist Connie Crothers, is that there is a certain energy that comes into you when you are anticipating a performance. And that energy does not really understand the notion of waiting. It is ready to come out once it knows the performance is coming.

That energy is uncomfortable. But so is excitement. Excitement in its rawest form is uncomfortable in the body, and we forget that, because we have learned to like the word.

Nervousness Is a Story, Not a Sensation

Our egos want to interpret the information arriving in the body. So we take that energy and we give it a story. And the story we give it is called nervousness. Fear.

We do this despite the fact that excited energy and nervous energy, when they are plainly observed as sensations in the body, are almost indecipherable from each other. What distinguishes them from one another is the story that we tell ourselves.

That is not a reframing exercise or a trick to talk yourself into. It is closer to an accurate observation you can make in real time. Before you name what is happening, notice what is actually there: heat, speed, a wide-awake body, everything sharpened. Then notice the moment your mind reaches for the word.

When the Fear Goes and the Energy Stays

I want to be careful here, because when I had this realization in my own performing life, something happened that most articles about how to overcome stage fright will not tell you.

My fear and nervousness went away. And the energy was not any more comfortable.

I still did not feel very good before a performance. Understanding the story did not make my body a calm place to be. So the question changed. It stopped being how do I stop feeling this, and became how do I hold and move this.

How to Deal With Performance Anxiety in the Body

There is not a one size fits all answer for everybody. But sometimes the simplest things are effective. Before going on, I might pace back and forth, or rub my hands together, or do some deep breathing while jumping up and down.

None of that is sophisticated. What it has in common is the point: I am not trying to stifle or stuff down this energy that really wants to move. I am giving it somewhere to go.

If you are struggling with this kind of performance energy, you can play with what works for you. Walk the corridor. Shake your hands out. Breathe low and long. Make some noise where no one can hear you. The test is not whether it looks calm from outside, it is whether the energy is moving rather than being sat on.

And this is worth saying plainly, because most advice on how to get rid of stage fright quietly skips it: moving the energy is a better approach than the common alternative of trying to get quickly drunk before you go on. That works exactly once, and then it becomes the thing you need.

Music Performance Anxiety Has Its Own Shape

I play jazz, so I will say something specific about musicians.

Music performance anxiety tends to attach itself to precision. The fear is not usually of being disliked, it is of the one bar you cannot play cleanly, and the mind circles that bar for days. Improvisers have a version that is stranger still: the fear of arriving with nothing, of opening your mouth and finding the room empty.

What helps, in my experience, is that improvisation is itself the practice. You cannot rehearse your way out of not knowing what comes next. You can only get more used to meeting it. That tolerance is trainable, and it transfers to a great deal more than music. More about how I came to this work is on my about page.

When Stage Fright Is Pointing at Something Older

For a lot of performers, this is enough. The story shifts, the energy gets somewhere to go, and the night is survivable and sometimes wonderful.

For some people, though, stage fright is not really about the stage. It is carrying something older: a fear of being seen and found wanting, a childhood where attention was conditional, a perfectionism that turned every performance into an audit of your worth. When that is what is underneath, no amount of pacing in a corridor will reach it, because the fear is not actually about tonight.

That is where depth-oriented, psychodynamic work earns its place. Not managing the symptom, but going down to what the fear is protecting, and what it costs you to keep it. Often the same thing that makes the stage frightening is the thing that has been quietly organising the rest of your life. It also tends to sit close to the questions in creative identity, which is the other half of this conversation for a lot of working artists.

Performance Anxiety Therapy: When It Is Worth Working With Someone

Not everyone needs a performance anxiety therapist. Plenty of people read something like this, try it on the next three occasions, and find the ground has shifted.

It is worth seeking out performance anxiety therapy when the fear has started making decisions for you. When you turn down work. When you stop auditioning. When the recovery after a performance takes longer than it used to, or when the drink beforehand has become non-negotiable. Those are not signs of weakness, they are signs that a protective strategy has outgrown the thing it was protecting you from.

Therapy for performers is not about drilling the nerves out of you. Whether it is therapy for actors before an audition, for musicians before a recital, or for writers before a reading, the work is the same: finding out what the fear is loyal to, and whether that loyalty is still earning its keep.

If You Want to Take This Further

I offer therapy for creatives in Brooklyn and online across New York State, working with artists, actors, writers and musicians. If any of this sounds like your particular version of it, you are welcome to request a private consultation, or to get in touch with a question first.

The energy is not going to leave. That is not the goal, and it would be a loss if it did. The goal is that you stop needing it to.