5 Day Solution

Tag: performance anxiety

  • Adele’s Fear of the Stage

    Adele’s Fear of the Stage

    No popular artist is bigger these days than the British singer-songwriter Adele, and few have been as open about their stage fright.

    Rolling Stone

    In a 2011 interview with Rolling Stone, Adele disclosed about her performance anxiety:

    I’m scared of audiences. I get shitty scared. One show in Amsterdam, I was so nervous I escaped out the fire exit. I’ve thrown up a couple of times. Once in Brussels, I projectile-vomited on someone. I just gotta bear it. But I don’t like touring. I have anxiety attacks a lot.

    In the same interview, Adele explained the reason behind her performance anxiety:

    I mean, the thought of someone spending $20 to come and see me and saying ‘Oh, I prefer the record and she’s completely shattered the illusion’ really upsets me. It’s such a big deal that people come give me their time.

    60 Minutes

    Adele echoed the same thoughts in a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper a year later:

    Cooper: So how does it manifest itself?

    Adele: It starts the minute I wake up. It I know I’ve got a live show, it starts…I mean I just try and just try and putter around and keep myself busy and stuff like that. And then I got to go down and sit down in the chair for a couple of hours, have my hair and makeup done. But it has gotten worse as I’ve become more successful. My nerves. Just because there’s a bit more pressure, and people are expecting a lot more for me.

    Cooper: So what’s that fear?

    Adele: That I’m not going to deliver. The people are going to enjoy it. That I’ll ruin their love for my songs by doing them live. I feel sick. I get a bit panicky.

    Cooper: Have you ever thrown up?

    Adele: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, a few times. Projectile.

    Oscars

    All of this admission of performance anxiety has resulted in somewhat of a public watch when it comes to Adele’s performances. For example, multiple news articles appeared about her attempts to combat her fears ahead of performing her title song from the James Bond movie Skyfall at the 2013 Oscars.

    Some reports had her undergoing hypnotherapy in Los Angeles. Others had her studying Chinese Qi Gong breathing techniques. As for her rather lackluster performance that night, speculation ran to some sort of connection between it and performance anxiety.

    Beta blockers?

    To me, the lack of excitement in her performance suggests that she resorted to using a beta blocker. (Be sure to check out my post on beta blockers and stage fright.)

    I’ll be sure to update this post as Adele’s ongoing stage fright saga plays out.

     

     

    What do you think? Do you have sympathy for Adele and her battle with performance anxiety? Let us know by commenting below.

  • Stage Fright & ‘American Idol’ Sonika Vaid

    Stage Fright & ‘American Idol’ Sonika Vaid

    One of the standout performers in the final season of “American Idol,” Sonika Vaid, is no stranger to stage fright.

    Now that she’s made it into the final stages of the competition, the Martha’s Vineyard native is starting to receive quite a bit of media attention. It includes a profile interview found on the NBC news website. In the piece, the 20-year-old pre-med student talks about her family’s musical heritage and how her mother served as both her vocal and stage coach.

    A mother’s love

    As NBC tells the story, “her mother would encourage her to pursue opportunities that would forcefully place her in the spotlight, a place Vaid was hesitant to step into.”

    Picking up the story, Vaid recounts “In sixth grade, she actually took the initiative to talk to the music program and asked if there were any singing opportunities or a chance to perform onstage and signed me up.”

    The remarkable part of Vaid’s story is what happened next.

    Fight, flight, or freeze response

    For a month, her mother helped the sixth-grade Vaid prepare for her debut at The Meadowbrook School of Weston. The day of the performance, though, performance anxiety struck. The younger Vaid felt sick to her stomach, one the classic symptoms of stage fright.

    When our minds sense an imminent danger, it triggers a physiological reaction known as the fight, flight, or freeze response. Adrenalin is released into the bloodstream to prepare the body to take necessary action and blood is shifted away from functions non-vital at the moment. Digestion is one the functions that shuts down, leading to feelings of queasiness or butterflies in the stomach.

    Facing stage fright together

    Vaid’s mother helped her face her fear on that fateful day by joining her onstage for her debut performance.

    Vaid remembers, “That was definitely a turning point of my career, and ever since then I’ve signed myself up and sang and played the piano at the same time, and I just got more comfortable on stage. I’m just so grateful because you know your mom will always have your best interest at heart.”

    The ‘American Idol’ star still shows touches of stage fright, even in the series. For example, Annie Barrett of Refinery29 writes about “watching Sonika’s stage fright transmute into tentative power” during a duet with Season 13 winner Caleb Johnson.

    Transmutation

    Stage fright transmuting into tentative power is a fascinating idea.

    Transmute means to change in form, nature, or substance. So what Barrett seems to be saying is that she could sense Vaid experiencing stage fright at the beginning of her duet with Johnson that the contestant transformed into performance power.

    Vaid speaks to this herself in a behind-the-scenes interview aired with the duet. “When I found out I was doing a duet with Caleb, I was a little nervous. . . . I struggle a lot with putting myself out there on stage because I’m a little, I’m scared.”

    In her head a lot

    Johnson, for his part in the interview, gets at the essence with stage fright in a direct way. “She’s got an incredible voice, she’s got a pure voice, but I can tell she’s in her head a lot.”

    We get caught up with the negative thoughts in her minds when performance anxiety strikes, especially when we find ourselves outside of our comfort zone. Johnson teases this out of Valid when he asks her if she’s “played out much,” and his duet partner confesses that she’s only performed at relative’s weddings and at her school.

    Stage fright triggers

    Going from the weddings of relatives and school performances to the”American Idol” stage fright is certainly stepping out of a performer’s comfort zone. Valid’s fear is perfectly understandable, particularly when we keep in mind the two factors that trigger performance anxiety. You do something in front of others and are judged on it or at least, feel you’re being judged.

    Forget the last part of that statement. On “Amercian Idol” you don’t feel you’re being judged. That whole idea of the program is that you are judged.

    Watch Valid’a duet with Johnson to see for yourself.

    [x_video_embed type=”16:9″][/x_video_embed]

     

     

    I’d love to hear what you think. Please comment below if you’re inspired to do so.

  • Michael Bay & the Terrible, Horrible Very Bad Speech Fright Day

    Speech fright can be painful to watch, and this video certainly proves it. However, it seems to be painful in an entertaining sort of way except perhaps for its subject, the Hollywood director Michael Bay. How else do you explain the more than one million views the YouTube video of the incident has attracted?

    It was apparently meant to be a well-scripted moment staged for the press at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It ran off the rails almost as soon as it started, though. Bay stood before a crowd of reporters with Samsung VP Joe Stinziano to tout the company’s new curved screen televisions.

    Nervous from the start

    You can tell that Bay is nervous from the start. You hear his shallow breathing and the slight tremor in his voice. He’s also physically ill at ease and avoids looking at the audience.

    We’ve all been there at one time or another, one way or another, haven’t we? You feel for the guy. Bay looks more like a nervous high schooler than the director of the popular Transformers movies. It certainly shows that successful experience behind the camera doesn’t automatically translate into ease in front of it.

    Bay might have made it through the presentation if the technology had cooperated maybe, but he apparently discombobulated the guy running the teleprompter by skipping ahead in the script. In fact, he tells the audience, “The type is all off, but I’ll wing this.” He didn’t get far in doing so, however.

    He starts to freeze up

    Stinziano tries to prompt Bay by saying, “Tell us what you think.” The director only gets out, “I try to take people on an emotional ride…” before he starts to freeze up. You can see Bay panicking. The Samsung VP tries to prompt him again. Before he can finish, though, Bay wheels around, head down, and scurries off stage, stammering, “Excuse me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

    Later that day, Bay wrote on his personal blog:

    Wow! I just embarrassed myself at CES – I was about to speak for Samsung for this awesome Curved 105-inch UHD TV. I rarely lend my name to any products, but this one is just stellar. I got so excited to talk, that I skipped over the Exec VP’s intro line and then the teleprompter got lost. Then the prompter went up and down – then I walked off.

    Learning from speech fright

    What can we learn from Bay’s speech fright?

    First, we see not one, but two aspects of the classic fight, flight or freeze response at play. First, Bay freezes, then he flees. As Wikipedia points out, fight, flight or freeze “is the physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.”

    A human moment

    The second thing we can learn from Michael Bay and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad speech fright day came out in an interview he did on the TMZ television program. About the incident, Bay said, “Look, it was a human moment.” He hits the nails right on the head with these words. In experiencing performance anxiety, Bay made it abundantly clear that he is perfect, perfectly human—like we all are.

    The third thing we can learn about performance anxiety from the incident also comes from Bay’s TMZ interview, “I was like, there’s no way that I’m going to be able to improve my way out of this, because this room looks so serious.” There are two criteria that determine when performance anxiety strikes. One, you do something in front of others. Two, you’re judged on it, or at least feel you’re being judged.

    [x_line]

  • Anxiety Robs Australian Swimmers at Olympics

    Anxiety Robs Australian Swimmers at Olympics

    The Olympic Games in Rio should have provided Australian swimmers with lots of opportunities for glory. Going into the Games, there was even talk of them winning up to ten gold medals. The actual take turned out to be just a fraction of that.

    Backstroke king Mitch Larkin took home one silver medal rather than two gold, freestyle star Cate Campbell came in sixth in 100m freestyle, and Cameron McEvoy came in worse at seventh in the men’s version of the same event. These provided the biggest disappointments for the Aussies, but there were others.

    What happened to a team expected to do so much better?

    Stage Fright

    The head coach of the Australian team, Jacco Verhaeren, chalked up Campbell’s lackluster performance to nerves. He said the same about McEvoy. It was a candid admission.

    It’s hard to find a different explanation for well-trained swimmers who had been the fastest in the world earlier in the year.

    Is it possible that nerves could spell the difference between putting in a gold-medal performance and finishing as an also-ran? It seems plausible given that the separation in time between one swimmer and the next can be one one-hundredth of a second.

    Fight, Flight or Flee

    An online Yahoo Sports article about the Australian meltdown points out that both Campbell and McEvoy faltered at the beginning of their races. Campbell “flinched” and McEvoy “froze.” Both are classic symptoms of the fight, flight or freeze response associated with stage fright and other forms of performance anxiety, including the type of competition anxiety that athletes experience.

    But why would the performance of Campbell and McEvoy be compromised by stage fright at the Olympics and not other competitions?

    Three Criteria

    As I explain in Understanding Stage Fright, three criteria are at play when performance anxiety strikes.

    • You do something in front of others (an audience)
    • They judge you on it (or at least you feel you’re being judged)
    • The judgment constitutes some sort of threat

    The first two of these criteria are certainly at play at the Olympics. Athletes perform for a worldwide audience of millions and judged on their performance down to the fraction of a second.

    What varies from one athlete to the next is to what extent that judgment constitutes a threat (if you don’t do well). You can see in the relaxed demeanor of, say, a Usain Bolt before a race, that he feels no threat at all. Nor should he. After all, he’s proven time and again that he’s the fastest man on the planet.

    For whatever reason, Campbell and McEvoy saw their races as constituting an elevated threat. And who can blame them? The hopes and dreams of an entire nation were riding on their backs in front of a worldwide audience.

    Not Just Australian Swimmers

    Competition anxiety likely plays a bigger role in determining the results at the Olympics than we realize. Television announcers occasionally make reference to it and a candid coach or athlete will sometimes fess up. However, it goes largely unrecognized, just as it does in other sporting events.

    What do you think? Have you ever suffered from competition anxiety? Feel free to comment below.