These two thoughts about performance nerves are helpful to me. I often share them both, together, with my students.
- Nerves are a sign you’re doing something important. If it weren’t important, you wouldn’t get nervous, would you? When I feel nerves, I know I’m doing work of value. Put another way, nerves are a sign you care.
- You don’t have to let nerves last indefinitely. I absorbed this lesson via a Dan Millman metaphor about dentist visits, of all things. In short: if you get anxious when you’re in the dentist chair, that’s fine. But if you start getting anxious three days before the appointment, then you’re mentally living in the dentist chair for seventy-two hours instead of one. The anxiety doesn’t serve you very well, so postpone it. In the end, performance nerves are the same – letting them rule my life for days or even hours is not useful. After a few decades of working with this idea, I usually don’t feel my performance nerves hit until 5 minutes before I walk onstage.
Those two ideas – how to think about your nerves, and how to dance with them – are all I need to have a productive, rather than debilitating, relationship with nerves.