I don’t think anyone truly gets over stage nerves.
Stage fright, that particular anxiety that arrives somewhere between a few minutes and many hours ahead of a performance, is real and can be light or debilitating. I don’t think you ever get past it.
Instead, I think performers learn to experience it without letting it overwhelm them. It’s a little like marathon runners. As Seth Godin has written about marathon runners, “In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he’s tired. Everyone is. That’s not the point. The point is to run.”
You never run a marathon without getting tired – you just set it aside and keep going. It’s the same with stage nerves. It’s not about getting over them permanently. It’s about letting them exist, and then doing what needs to be done.
I recently heard someone say that Barbra Streisand’s greatest performance wasn’t the one she gave in her live shows – it was the force of will she used to overcome her own debilitating stage fright to walk onto the stage each night.
For me, the biggest improvement has been to compress the time that I feel nerves. What used to be something that hit me early in the day of a performance and simmered until showtime has slowly shrunk to a big hit about five minutes before the start. I greet it as a friend – a friend reminding me that I’m doing something of value that I want to get right.
That also means I love to see signs of stage nerves in my students – it means they care about doing well.