Hi Doc,

It’s great to have you coming into the Magic Cafe and sharing your thoughts and experience with everyone. Many thanks for that.

What are your thoughts with regard to "performance anxiety" (previously called stage ***ht I believe)?

Have you experienced this at anytime in your career?

The reason I ask is that, although I’m a relative beginner to magic, for some strange reason, recently, even on a one to one basis, when I perform an effect to a family member/close friend/work colleague (eg coin vanish/appear, disappearing silk (thumbtip)) I seem to get really "jittery" and my legs actually shake. They have actually noticed this and commented on it as being strange for me.

Its’ not that the effect doesn’t work - I’m well rehearsed and they say they are baffled (and entertained) by my peformance but, they say my nervousness is really noticeable at the start.

It’s really strange for me because part of my day job involves presenting in front of quite large groups of people regularly which I am generally ok about.

I know I’m putting my heart on my sleeve on this one but it’s kind of getting to me so any help/direction would be greatly appreciated.

I should say that longer term, I DO want to perform magic in front of people (as opposed to being a hobbyist) but feel that this is becoming an issue for me.

Hope you can help Doc!

Thanks and best regards,

Stevie.

P.S Understand you are coming to Edinburgh soon. This is great news!

I know just what you mean, Stevie...

I have years behind me as a professinal entertainer. I was a radio personality who thought nothing of opening the microphone in front of heaven knows how many thousands of people. When I made my community theater stage debut, it was with zero nervousness.

After all, I figured, I make a fool of myself for a living in front of tens of thousands every day -- if I look silly to another 300 tonight, so what? I’ve even taken the stage at free community magic shows and performed effects with scarsely a butterfly flutter in the stomach.

But...

I start to do a close-up effect for friends, family or customers and the voice gets quivery and the hands lose steadiness and the fingers get weak. Gads!!!!

In my case, when I’m doing effects for several people in a row, the performance anxiety disappears by the 3rd performance or so. But it’s SO annoying and out of character.

I find that I best avoid anxiety when I can convince myself that

a) a ***-up won’t matter and that

b) I’m confident of my ability to recover with humor even if the magic fizzles.

But it’s hard to avoid the feeling that it DOES matter with friends and family. They’re the ones we LEAST want to *** up in front of -- even if they’re our most forgiving audience. So it’s only natural to be more nervous then.

If Doc has a solution to the problem, he’s a wiser man than I and I’ll buy one of his products -- even if I’d never use it -- out of pure gratitude.

And here I thought I was the only one!



It's equally strange for me, because I'm a professional musician. I can play solo piano in front of 30,000 people and be as comfortable as if I were playing alone in my living room -- but I do Twisting the Aces for my dad and my hands start to shake.



I strongly suspect it's all a simple matter of confidence, which comes from experience, for which there's no shortcut. I used to be very comfortable performing magic before I took a 15-year break from it, but it seems that in that time my confidence went the way of my palming skills.



While I would love to hear Doc's input on this, I just now noticed that his stay with us has ended. Still, I'm sure some of our regulars would have some valuable advice, so I'm going to boldly take the liberty of restarting this thread over in the Food For Thought forum...

Dittos from the show me state.



I can play guitar and sing (badly) in front of a room full. I act like a complete doofus in front of a classroom of kids (several times a day). No problems. But go to show my brother a simple card trick and my hands go all jittery. Oh well. Good to know at least that I'm not alone.



Matt

I think a little stage ***ht is normal.
I get the butterflies a little every time I have to make a presentation but they go away once I start.

I just finished my 32nd year of refereeing high school football. Once a fellow official said to a young one "When I don’t get butterflies right before the game, it will be the first game of the rest of my last season."

It’s perfectly natural to get a little pumped before you start and probably good as well. It certainly reminds me that I am certainly mortal!

These jitters, I think, are nervousness about getting "caught". Especially if you can perform arts other than magic without the shakes. SO as someone has stated on another post, practice the moves so you can do them in your sleep and the confidence will follow.

One other thing to consider is environmental conditions for the jittery. I once performed outside at a party in Dallas and it was about 100 degrees. So the heat had already raised my anxiety level slightly. But when that first bead of sweat dropped from my forehead onto the cards, it might as well have been superglue. This induced more sweat, more sticking cards and it just went downhill from there.

Well, this certainly doesn’t seem to be an isolated problem.

I think it is a matter of frequency... the more times you do it... that is get in front of people with your magic... the more at ease you will be... as I mentioned somewhere else... Bob Sheets told me that you have to perform a trick a thousand times before it is yours.

And I think that somewhere along that road to 1000, the nervousness falls away. For those who know Bob, you will concur that when he is learning a trick he is almost(?) compulsive about performing it for you (or anyone else in a 10 radius!)... he will perform, if it is just you or a small group of people..... I have come to understand that he is working on that magic 1000 number.

As someone said here in an earlier post... there is no shortcut for the 1000 times... the only shortcut may a time thing - if you perform it once a day or 20 times a day... you will reach the 1000 faster (obviously) doing it 20 times a day.