How to Destroy Performance Anxiety and Deliver an Award-Winning Show Every Time

We don’t often think of it this way, but life is often like one big performance.

Whether it’s delivering a lecture, going on a date, or meeting a new person – we are often called upon to present our “best self” to others. And how we present ourselves can have a tremendous impact on how happy and successful we are in many areas of life.

This is also where “performance anxiety” comes in. We all feel at least a little nervous before giving a presentation to a big class or going on a job interview, because we want to look good to others. This fear is also completely natural – it stems from our common desire to be accepted and liked by others.

In Steal the Show: How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life, Michael Port gives a fantastic breakdown of how to become a better performer in both your professional and personal life. He gives you the tools to break through performance anxiety by ultimately teaching you how to become a more skilled and competent public speaker.

Throughout the book, Michael Port integrates his experiences as a trained actor, professional speaker, and marketing consultant into a fantastic guide on how to “steal the show” and nail all your performances in life, no matter what they are – a speech, an interview, a date, a music performance, or anything.

In this article, I’ll share what I’ve found to be his best advice for improving your public speaking and communication skills, from silencing your critics to using the power of “as if” thinking.

Silencing inner and outer critics

One of the main causes of performance anxiety is a fear of what our critics will say.

This includes our “inner critics” that live inside our head – the negative thoughts that tell us we aren’t good enough or don’t deserve to have people’s attention. It also includes our “outer critics” – people who disagree with us, people who want to see us fail, etc.

You can’t go through life without these critics, especially if the message you are trying to deliver to others is a bit different or controversial.

However, here are some important tips for silencing your inner and outer critics and delivering your message regardless:

• You have an important message to send to the world.
• It’s your mission to make your message as clear as possible.
• Your message will not resonate with everyone.
• Your job is to win over those in the “grey area”

If you’re performing in a rock band, or delivering a speech, or being interviewed for a job, you have to believe that deep-down what you are presenting is valuable and meaningful and important.

Delivering an “award-winning performance” isn’t about faking anything, but finding a message that resonates with you deeply. If your heart isn’t behind the message and you don’t believe in it, then you can’t expect to convince anyone else to believe in it either. It starts with your own conviction.

That being said, there will always be people who don’t care for your performance no matter how good you are. That’s fine too. You should be ready for that.

Maybe you just don’t match their interests or maybe they are just grumpy people. But your job isn’t to “win over” those people – those who are steadfast on seeing you lose or fail – your job is to find those who are willing to be moved and persuaded to your side. That’s where you make a difference.

At the end of the day, you need to focus more on delivering your message in the best way you can (to the right audience), rather than seeking everyone’s approval. You’ll never get everyone on your side, but you can get the right people on your side.

The necessity of preparation and rehearsal

Rehearsal is an indispensable part of becoming a great performer in any area in life.

However, most of us avoid rehearsal or just leave a quick moment to prepare ourselves last minute. Many people neglect rehearsal because it reminds them of their important performance coming up, and thus psyche themselves out and “push it back” in their mind.

Despite this hesitation and anxiety about rehearsal, the truth is it will lessen your performance anxiety in the long-run.

The simple truth is that the more prepared you are to present your material, and the more you understand your message both inside and out, the easier it will be to “let go” of your anxieties in the moment and let the presentation unfold naturally when it’s time to perform.

Throughout the book, Michael Port shares a thorough rundown of how to prepare yourself before a big performance and how to harness the power of rehearsal.

Here are the basic steps to preparation and rehearsal for a big speech or lecture:

• Choose your big idea – What’s the big message you want to deliver to your audience? What’s the purpose behind your presentation? You need to have something you want to share with others before you can start building a presentation around it.
• Make an outline – First make an outline of how you want to present your ideas. What’s your big idea? What small ideas do you need to present along the way to build up to your big idea? This can just be a rough outline, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to update later.
• Write a rough script – Once you have an outline in place, write a rough script of the things you want to say about each idea. Try to keep in mind that you’ll eventually be reading these words out-loud, so it’s best to write similar to how you speak.
• Table reading – Now that you have a script, you can practice reading it and seeing how it flows together. You can try reading it to yourself inside your head, though it also helps to read it aloud since that is eventually how the script will be performed on your big day.
• Content mapping – In this phase of the rehearsal, you will be focusing on the flow and rhythm of your speech. What words do you want to emphasize? Where do you want to pause after making an important point? What ideas are worth repeating or saying twice? You can make small notes on your script (underlines, circles, text) to signify how you want to deliver the speech from a performance standpoint.
• Blocking – Blocking is your plan for how you will move during the speech or presentation. It includes how you will walk around the stage, make use of lighting and space within the venue, and how you present yourself through your posture, movement, and gestures. These are often neglected areas of presentations that people don’t think about, but they can have a powerful impact on how well your message is delivered to others.
• Costumes, props, and media – If your presentation includes costumes, props, or technology (like a powerpoint presentation or speaker system), it’s important to go through these items in the rehearsal phase so that you aren’t caught off-guard during your presentation. Have a good working knowledge of the props and technology you’ll be using, and make sure you double-check everything is working before you get on stage. This also includes what you plan to wear during the event. Don’t wait last minute to try on that new suit or dress.
• Practice improvisation – Once you have a lot of the basic essentials figured out for your performance, it can help to rehearse while also leaving room for improvisation. Improvisation during rehearsal can be a great way to find new material to add or take out in a performance. Maybe while rehearsing your performance, you think of a joke or story you can add that will add an extra punch to your message. Discovering this new material through improvisation can be a great addition to your performance’s script.
• Invited rehearsals – Now that you are prepared to deliver your presentation, try a couple rehearsals around friends, family, or coworkers and see if they can give you any feedback. At this point, you probably won’t be making any major changes to your presentation, but you might get valuable feedback from others that you can incorporate into your presentation. Maybe someone notices you aren’t making enough eye contact with the crowd, or you tend to keep scratching your head during performances. Having an outside perspective during the rehearsal phase can often make you aware of little changes that you would’ve never caught on your own.
• Open rehearsals – Open rehearsals are rehearsal performances that are open to the public. Many performers, bands, and stand-up comics will “test their material” in front of a small live audience before they deliver a big event. For example, I know comedians like Louis C.K. and Aziz Ansari will often do open mic nights at bars or clubs to test out new material before doing a new HBO special or big tour around the country. The feedback you get from live audiences can also be a powerful way to shape your performances in the future.

All of these are very useful considerations when preparing for an upcoming performance.

This advice is specifically geared toward lectures, presentations, and speeches, but it can also be applied to smaller things like job interviews or first dates. For example, doing a “mock interview” with a friend can be a great way to prepare yourself and how you’d like to present yourself and respond to certain questions.

Ultimately, the more time and dedication you spend on rehearsal, the easier your main performance will be once the big day arrives.

The power of acting “as if…”

There’s a lot of advice in self improvement literature about “faking it until you make it.” In the acting world, this is sometimes called the “as if” technique.

One powerful way to explore different ways of presenting yourself is to act “as if” you are already a confident and dominant presenter. Simply pretending to be something you’re not can often open you up to new ways of thinking and acting, especially overcoming performance anxiety.

As a trained actor, Michael Port frequently cites acting tips throughout the book to teach you what it means to be an excellent performer. After all, no one is better at embodying another character like a professional actor.

“Most actors agree that acting ‘as if’ early in their training is a magical elixir for inhabiting the challenge of developing a character. It helps them focus on what that character wants to achieve. Then they start thinking as if they were that person, as if they lived in that time, as if they were in the character’s situation. Most actors use this principle to begin the process of filling in a multilayered understanding of a character, often drawing on nothing more than their life experience, some research, and, most profoundly, their imagination.”

By acting “as if,” you give yourself permission to be something other than what you typically think of yourself as. This can have a huge impact on your ability to be the best performer you can be.

One story in the book mentions how one of Michael Port’s friends worked as a greeter in Bloomingdale’s. This means she had to smile and say “Hey, have a nice day” to everyone that walked into the store, even if she wasn’t exactly in a good mood or having a good day.

Like many jobs such as this, especially in customer service, it’s important that we display the right emotions – which sometimes means we need to “put on an act.”

To help with her job performance as a greeter, the friend used her imagination a little. One day she imagined that each shopper was a classmate from college going to a reunion, and another day she imagined she was part owner of the store.

Were these things true? Of course not. But by acting “as if” they were true, the greeter was able to stay highly engaged at her job, create the right emotions, and deliver the best performance she could.

A rock band or stand-up comic performers the same routine day-in and day-out when they are busy touring. That can sometimes get old and create a duller performance. A rock band can overcome this by treating every show “as if” it was going to be their last performance ever.

Have a collection of awesome stories

Facts and statistics are nice, but nothing sways people’s thoughts and feelings more than a powerful story. If you’re going to be a great public speaker, lecturer, or persuader, you need to master the art of story-telling.

The first big step is finding awesome stories to tell – preferably real stories from your life. When trying to find relevant stories that support your presentation and your message, consider stories in terms of:

• People – Many of our best stories center around interesting people in our lives – friends, teachers, family, college roommates, or a first girlfriend can all be potential sources for good stories.
• Places – Places are also powerful anchors for stories. A childhood summer camp, a family vacation spot, a semester you studied abroad in Europe, or your first apartment experience are all examples of places where you may have strong memories and strong stories.
• Things – Stories can also be focused on objects and things, like a favorite baseball glove, diary from your teen years, or a lucky shirt you used to always wear. Are there any objects in your life that have a crazy story behind them? How you got them? Lost them?
• Times/Events – There are also many standout experiences in our lives they may not be tied to people, places, or things. A car accident, your first day of high school, your daughter’s wedding, a serious illness you had to deal with are all extraordinary events that may have a powerful story behind them.

These are good places to draw from if you’re looking for stories.

Of course, once you find a good source for a story, you still have to make time to craft it and present it in the best way possible. The basics of story structure include a 3 step process of: 1) Setting up the situation and characters, 2) Identifying a conflict or obstacle, and 3) Discovering a resolution for the conflict.

You should take time to discover stories from your past and then write them down in a short story format. Then, save them somewhere on your computer. A good “Story Collection” can be a very valuable resource for a public speaker or presenter.

(Even if you can’t immediately connect a story to a presentation, it’s nice to have a collection of “good stories” on the back-burner for the future – perhaps even just for future conversations.)

A lecturer may find that a particular story really resonates with the lesson they are trying to convey to a classroom, while a salesman may find that a particular story seems to make people more motivated to buy their product.

Finding the right story to connect you with the right audience can be a very influential thing.

Once you’ve completed all of your mental and physical preparation, it’s time to take the stage and there’s no turning back.

One of my favorite pieces of advice in Steal the Show is that everyone is going to hit “wrong notes” from time to time – because no one is perfect – the key is to keep playing through the wrong notes.

There’s an excellent quote in the book from Broadway actress and singer Idina Menzel, best known for her roles in “Rent” and “Wicked”:

“There are about 3 million notes in a two-and-a-half-hour musical; being a perfectionist, it took me a long time to realize that if I’m hitting 75% of them, I’m succeeding. Performing isn’t only about the acrobatics and the high notes: It’s staying in the moment, connecting with the audience in an authentic way, and making yourself real to them through the music. I am more than the notes I hit, and that’s how I try to approach my life. You can’t get it all right all the time, but you can try your best. If you’ve done that, all that’s left is to accept your shortcomings and have the courage to try to overcome them.”

Every great performer needs to accept the shortcomings that will happen on stage, but they can’t let that take away from the magic of the moment.

From an audience standpoint, most people are happier to see a passionate and heart-felt performance than a performance that only excels on a strict technical level.

Hitting a wrong note, stuttering a word, or losing your place for a brief moment aren’t going to make or break your performance. Even bigger mistakes can be gracefully bounced back from if you are well-prepared and have worked on your improvisation skills.

Letting go of this perfectionist mentality will help take some pressure off of you and ease performance anxiety when you find yourself in the spotlight.

Overall, Steal the Show is a very helpful book with a lot of practical advice and tips on how to improve your public speaking and performance ability. I highly recommend checking it out if you liked this article and you’re interested in learning more.

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