One other thing.. Fear is just excitement without proper breathing. Learn to breathe properly and turn fear into excitement!

You will aways be a little nervous
but confidence in your ability to
perform will help you.im always nervous
at the start of the show but after a few
tricks I calm down. show the tricks that you love the best
and practice your show tricks till your fingers and brain
can do it without thinking.the want to perform will conquer
the worry of being nervous.

When I started performing I was nervous to death! Now a month later, nothing! It feels natural performing now, and I believe this is the same for everyone, you'll have those nerves for the first few days, but they'll go away the more you perform, confidence was a huge problem for me, I kept worrying; they're gonna see this, they're gonna see that, the music isn't good, my costume looks horrible, the audience is too close to the stage.. Well, when complete strangers walk up to you shake your hand, say they almost cried because it was so beauthiful.. Then you're confidence will go up, at first I was certain they were just having some laughs with me, but the positive feedback kept coming.. Just be confident in what you do, you have fun, and the audience will have fun too!

Just think of it this way, if you look back in x years, wouldn't you regret that you didn't go through that first performance because of nerves?

Mr. Woolery nailed it on the head.

Practice, practice, practice. Especially practice recovering from a flub. Laugh it off- make it look like you deliberately messed up. Use the fail as misdirection to set up another trick- they'll be that much more taken off guard.

Great advice all around.

I'm *not* gonna practice to a metronome, though. I already had enough of that darn thing playing piano! LOL

I booked a show a couple months ago
for a elementry school 600 people including
students and teachers after I booked it
I thought can I do this show for so many people
but I knew my show well which was about a hour long.
I was confident in myself.and I went out and knocked
em dead.it was one of my best shows.afterwards I felt like I could have performed
at vegas.amazing what confidence will do for you.

I get nervous when I perform. I don't want to shake and try to slow it down and breath but it just seems to get worse. One piece of advice that I will give you that you can try straight away and I'm sure it will help (it has for me).

Pick 3 simple, direct and, dare I say it, self working tricks.

Card to pocket, Business Card Prophecy or I Should Have Done It Myself are some examples. These are three easy but strong tricks. I found when I started performing these the nerves reduced. I still noticed them but the audience didn't.

The point is that you wont have to do this forever, but give it a try just now. Pick three REALLY easy tricks and give it a go. All that harder stuff will still be there when your nerves begin to fade.

Mr Pink

If your hands are really shaky it might be best to start with a trick that doesn't involve to much sleight of hand or any. once you succeed with a few tricks the shakes should go away and you can move onto more advanced tricks.

I don't know if this will work for anyone else but this is something that helped me with the same problem: I would start off with a few flourishes, and then go into a self-working trick. For me the flourishes didn't make me so anxious, since I felt it was not such a big deal to screw up a flourish. But once I'd done a couple I had a lot more confidence to go on with trick. In some cases, and with some audiences, a few flourishes can also make a self-working trick much, much stronger--getting people to think you're using skill and not mathematics... Just be sure not to overdo it and seem a show-off.

-Rob