Overcoming Stage Fright: A Comedian’s Guide
Yes, you can overcome stage fright. But you have to know what causes stage fright in the first place if you want to get rid of it and excel as a comedian.
There are two main aspects that work in tandem to either accentuate or reduce stage fright:
- The subconscious mental connection you have with the prospect of performing in front of an audience. This aspect is the major cause of stage fright but is significantly reinforced by the next aspect which is…
- The confidence that you have in the process you are using to create, develop, prepare, and deliver your stand-up comedy material.
The Mental Connection
If you are experiencing stage fright, that means that on a subconscious level you are mentally connecting stage performances with danger, which activates the sympathetic nervous system (also known as the flight or fight response).
Once you have this mental connection established (also known as an “anchor” in NLP), you might as well be facing a tiger that is about to attack you — the automatic physiological response is essentially the same as stage fright.
Confidence and Preparation
If you have taken an important test — whether for school or employment — and you did not study, you automatically have a sense of impending doom because you are fully aware that failure is imminent, causing a great deal of anxiety.
The same condition is true in stand-up comedy. Most comedians really do not know what they are doing when it comes to developing and delivering a stand-up comedy act.
They try to write jokes out of thin air from a blank piece of paper without any sense of whether they will be funny on stage. They don’t know how to properly prepare to deliver their stand-up comedy, so the result is the same as not being prepared to take an important test.
In other words, they are only armed with almost 100% blind trial and error as the primary means of trying to perform a stand-up comedy routine that works. Then, once they get on stage and flop, their anxiety continues to flourish, reinforcing the mental connection associated with stage fright.
The Solution
So, what’s the solution? I can tell you how I got rid of stage fright in 30 days:
I developed a system for developing and delivering stand-up comedy that eliminated most of the blind trial and error comedians experience (see the 5 free online lessons for more information).
But the second thing I did was replace the mental connection with my fear of getting on stage with a positive one. This eliminated the severe stage fright I was having, and I haven’t had to deal with it since.
The process I used is detailed in my online course as well — and it is very, very simple to implement. It basically involves daily listening to a set of specifically crafted statements to replace the stage fright programming with confidence programming.
Probably one of the most important aspects of listening to these specific “affirmations,” as they are commonly referred to, is that there is no requirement to believe in or even have confidence that they will work. I certainly didn’t, particularly after having tried several methods including therapeutic hypnosis that did not work.
But in less than 30 days, just listening to the statements I made on the way to work and back — my stage fright evaporated. This, combined with a solid process to create and deliver stand-up comedy material that actually worked to get laughs, was my ticket to success on stage as a comedian.
I should also mention that there are now also other powerful techniques to very quickly replace the mental connection or anchor associated with stage fright (e.g., NLP).
Final Thoughts
That should give you a very good idea of what you will want to consider if you really want to overcome stage fright. It’s not difficult at all, but you need to want to get rid of stage fright in order to take action to eliminate it.