This One Mistake Nearly Killed My Christmas But Launched My Career
How I learned to love my audience, see them for what they are and transform my clients’ communication.
Get me out of here!
It’s 2.01pm on December 26th 1987.
I am standing in the dark wearing what looks like a cross between a Cossack dance costume and the offcuts from Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ video.
I can hear people talking twenty feet away.
In front of me is a small red light.
In one minute that same light will flick to green and that will be my cue to walk forwards and say, ‘So please my Lord I might not be admitted.’
I’ve done this exact thing at least four times a week for the last year.
But today I can’t.
My 25 year-old knees have turned to jelly and I am praying for the earth to open up and swallow me.
Green!
I clench my jaw. I breathe. I move.
And the Boxing Day matinée of ‘Twelfth Night’ at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon carries on to its glorious conclusion with no one aware that the small part of Valentine very nearly spoiled the afternoon for a thousand audience members and a cast filled with luminaries of the British stage.
No one died.
But I had just suffered stage fright and was determined it was never going to happen again.
Surely it’s not that bad.
In her 2005 article for The Guardian, Lyn Gardner says that Sir Ian Holm called stage fright “the actor’s industrial illness.” And after a particularly bad bout in 1977 he walked off stage and didn’t return for another eight years.
Remember. This is a man who four years later won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in ‘Chariots of Fire.’
Trust me. Stage fright sucks.
But later in the evening, after my brush with the potentially career ending affliction, a revelation struck me.
My stage fright had come about because I was focusing on the wrong thing.
I was trying to impress an audience rather than connecting with my fellow performers.
I was worrying about whether a thousand people would like me rather than trying to snap Duke Orsino out of his love lorn reverie.
I was aiming for the wrong target.
Know your target.
Acting is a funny old game.
Your currency is determined by the way an audience perceives you. Do they love you? Do they fear you? Do they care at all?
But your audience isn’t your target. Your fellow performer is your target.
You rarely walk on stage and interact directly with an audience.
Of course, if you’re Hamlet then you are absolutely asking them for advice as to whether it is a good idea ‘to be or not to be.’
But generally you walk into a scene, meet other characters and go about changing the way they think, feel or do something.
The audience observes how well you do this and makes up their mind about you.
They might be impressed. But it will only be as a result of how well you have done your job.
As Marcus Aurelius nearly said, “You have power over speaking truly — not the audience reaction. Realise this, and you will find strength.”
The insight for my clients.
Just over ten years after this event I had changed careers and was working as a pitch and presentation coach.
Like most of my colleagues I peddled the usual ‘stand up, speak up and use your arms’ stuff that was seen as cutting edge in late 90s corporate Britain.
But I often found that there was something more fundamental blocking the success of my clients.
That block was fear of judgement.
In pitches, in strategy presentations, in company wide road shows these normally confident masters and mistresses of the universe were crumbling because they were trying to impress their audiences.
They were suffering from stage fright.
So I told them to flip a mental switch with the following thoughts.
- What you think is your audience isn’t your audience. They are your fellow scene partners.
- You don’t need to impress them. You need to connect with them and change them.
- Define what they are thinking, feeling and doing about your subject before you start and determine what you want them to think, feel and do after you have finished.
- If there was an audience anywhere it would be off to one side watching as you commit intellectually, emotionally and physically to changing the behaviour of your scene partner.
It was amazing to watch as people suddenly stopped being self conscious and gave their body and soul to changing the people in front of them.
And it was more fulfilling than any matinée performance to feel that I was really helping people change the way they connected, influenced and inspired.
I never went back to acting.
But somewhere in my attic are those pants from that Cossack dance costume.
