Stage Fright

The whole afternoon of yesterday I was with our aspirants (seminarian from first year to third year). Having been invited last week, I was conducting a workshop which was part of their semestral break seminar on public speaking. The topic that was assigned to me was “Conquering Stage Fright.” I told them right off: I was not very comfortable in accepting the topic assigned to me since I myself have not conquered stage fright. And indeed, it was a statement made sincerely and not just to be modest.

Yes, stage fright is still very much around in my life and I feel that it will never leave me. It is manifest even in the things that I regularly do—saying mass, preaching, giving the talks in our morning assemblies, conducting meetings, giving seminars (exactly like the one that I gave yesterday). The bottom line of all this is what stage fright is all about: fear. Fear will ever be present even in the most familiar acts that we do.

But yes, we can conquer stage fright. One thing I told my young audience yesterday was that fear can actually help us in the things that we do. Fear makes us shun complacency and pushes us to do better. I gave a familiar quote: “What will push one to drive the car better is to have realized that his license has expired.” Besides, although fear makes our bodies tremble, they add sparkle to our eyes and put more color to our cheeks. In other words, it makes us look better. This will make us forget about our stage fright!

Then I gave the young men practical tips in order to handle stage fright: think that you are good, pretend that you are just chatting with close friends, remember happy moments, be prepared, anticipate hard questions, put a picture of your loved ones with your notes, and so on.

Finally I gave them that time tested advice: practice, practice, practice! It is in being familiar to what we do that we feel so much at home with it. In our first attempts at doing something, in this case public speaking, we may stumble and fall and this surely will make us fear in our next attempt. But as what Friedrich Nietzsche said, “What won’t kill you will make you stronger.” Speaking in public, reading in the liturgy, conducting meetings, teaching in front of a class—even though these actions may give us the jitters, we will still come out unscathed and the experience will make us even better persons. As our young people of today would say: stage fright rocks!