Performance anxiety and public speaking
I am going to make a confession. One reason why I feel so drawn to working with people with performance anxiety, difficulties with public speaking, any kind of stage right, is that I, myself as a musician, struggled with that so much, for so many years. For me, tapping was the first thing that made a difference. And I had been trying for about 35 years previously. It was an extremely dark difficult and sad time in my life. I had a passion, and I felt hopeless about ever being able to share it. Let me share with you my very first experience with tapping. It was the middle of the night and I was cruising the Internet. I was on the site of one of the top players in the world, And saw that he was taking some students on Skype. Before I could stop myself I fired off a message letting him know I was interested. It took over a month for him to answer me and his answer was very noncommittal but I replied right away with all the earnestness and passion that I had in me. I confessed about my performance anxiety, and that I did not think I would actually be able to play for him in a lesson. I was at that time also working at a book which has since gotten international recognition. The book was in his early stages but I told him all about it and looking back I am not surprised that my message to him peaked his interest. He emailed me back this time within less than 10 minutes! And the first word of his email was “WOW!!”…. Long story short we set up an audition date and as that date grew closer I became more and more frantic. I knew there was no way I would be able to play in front of this person. About 10 minutes before the lesson, I was crying, in an utter panic knowing that there was no way I would be able to play in front of this person. Especially not for an audition. Talk about feeling judged… the friend on whose shoulder I was crying suggested that we try this "tapping thing”. well my lesson was about to start and we didn't have much time but we tapped and then in a mad dash I said OK goodbye and I hung up Skype with her and turned on Skype with Mr. T. He started off by acknowledging he knew that I would be scared but that he did need to hear me play LOL, and I just said "OK OK”, and I played through the music that I had prepared for him. I played it better than I ever had in any of my practice sessions!! It was absolutely miraculous. By some seemingly random fluke I was able to go to that place of spiritual magic and just be in my element. When I finished he was silent for a couple of seconds, obviously very moved. I forget the exact conversation we had but he told me he did not have any advice to give me on what I had just done it had been beautiful and asked me to play something else. Well by then my hands were shaking so bad that I was not even able to string two notes together. In those first 10 minutes he saw me at better than my best and worse than my worst he took me on as a student and I worked with him for three wonderful years. So I look at my first experience with tapping as one of those one minute miracles, which in my case it only lasted for about 10 minutes, but what it gave me was the knowledge that it was possible for me to be able to play for people. |
I found myself a tapping practitioner started working with her. In our very first session, I remembered being six years old and my mother telling a friend of hers in front of me, that I wanted to be a musician when I grew up and they both laughed as if this was the silliest thing. In another session I realized that it was not my job in our family setting to be the one to shine. That was my older sisters job. If I stepped on her toes in that department she would not be happy. These were just two of the many many many aspects that were all entangled in my gnarly world of performance anxiety. The gift of performance anxiety, is that it allows us a doorway in, in dealing with things that might otherwise be hard to access. In my case there was a lot that was tied in to how I perceived my role in my family, and in the world. Part of me thought it was laughable that I might be a musician. Now, having shared all that deeply personal stuff, I need to stress that performance anxiety is 100% universal. One thing that really helped me in those lessons was realizing that this person who really is one of the top three players in the classical guitar world (every single classical guitars knows of him; his concerts always sell out, even if he's playing at Carnegie Hall, and he gets nervous. He has had bad performance experiences and embarrassed himself on stage. So in order to address it, we use tapping in combination with a practical plan. A person may start playing at parties, when the people listening are only half listening, and there is a lot of background noise. In this setting mistakes don’t matter. We can relax and let loose, people will hear us and respond favourably and our confidence increases. Eventually playing in this setting is not really all that satisfying, and so we can move up just one notch in challenge, gradullay building our confidence and experience. At the same time, while we are engaged in this process, stuff comes up. We may have a lot of anxiety leading up to a performance or we have negative thgouts distracting us and causing ruffles to our performance. This is where tapping comes in. Tapping can help calm the nervous system, and when it comes to negative thoughts, or disempowering beliefs, I have never seen anything work as well as tapping does. Because tapping discourages your body from making adrenaline as well as cortisol, more and more people are turning to tapping to help them have successful experiences on stage. Aside from the immediate physiological benefit of tapping, We can use EFT to access some of the deeper reasons why we may feel stage fright. Is there a part of us that thinks we're not good enough to be in the limelight? And if we think we aren't good enough, what happened to give us that idea? Do we have previous failures, and we are afraid of repeating them? Are there people in our lives who would be less than happy to see us having huge successes? In spite of all this, many of us have a real gift, and a deep yearning to share it. |