Confidence Checklist

✓ Focus on whatever you can control.

✓ Put in the preparation so that you can make good choices.

The physical practices

✓ Sleep seven to eight hours a night.

✓ Take regular sessions of aerobic exercise to cleanse the brain’s toxins.

✓ Drink lots of water (around two litres a day).

✓ Eat the right foods (good carbs, nuts, fruits, leafy greens, grains, fish oils).

✓ Eat foods that you like.

✓ Eat around two hours before a performance.

✓ Avoid caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, recreational drugs, and sugar.

The psychological practices

✓ Make sure you have ways of physically and mentally relaxing.

✓ Focus on your breathing.

✓ Enjoy as many tasks as you can for their own sake, without agendas and expectations.

Basic principles for creative work

✓ Keep your choices simple.

✓ Don’t have all your choices for your performance worked out in advance.

✓ Get out of your own way and let yourself truly listen to the playwright’s words.

✓ Cultivate a constant state of inner improvisation.

✓ Know what you need to warm yourself up – for a class, rehearsal or performance.

Good line-learning practices

✓ Learn your lines on your feet as much as on your sofa.

✓ Give your lines your undivided attention.

✓ Learn your lines through repetition – as that’s the way the brain knows this information is important enough for you to create some new neural maps.

✓ Have downtime – take breaks between line-learning sessions, almost to the point of forgetting what you’ve learned.

✓ Make sure you know what your lines mean – personally as well as literally.

✓ Repeat till you habituate (certainly for theatre).

✓ Be prepared to throw it all out of the window for film and television, and if they ask you to improvise, know that you’re well enough prepared to play about with the lines and the structure and the relationships – and have fun.

Good rehearsal practices

✓ Mine the text through detailed text analysis.

✓ Look for the physical clues within the language and rhythm.

✓ Look for the psychological clues of objectives and intentions.

✓ Look for the psychophysical ‘bits of action’.

✓ Be sure (for theatre at least) you’re dead-letter-perfect in your line-learning.

✓ Remember that ‘cued recall’ helps us all keep the flow going: be collaborative!

✓ Personalise the images so that they’re much harder to forget.

✓ Turn a stressful rehearsal into a good opportunity to train under stress – just as a fireman or a soldier would.

✓ Speak to the director if the ‘blocking’ needs unlocking.

✓ Remain open to notes.

✓ Remember, rehearsal is play.

✓ Rehearsing is listening.

✓ Listening is incorporating and using whatever you’re feeling here-today-now – nerves an’ all!

✓ Understand that you and the character are already merged: the brain only knows ‘now’.

Good performance practices

✓ Keep your attention on your partner (even if your partner is a prop or a sound cue).

✓ Get some perspective on your perception: your nightmare stage fright really won’t ruin your career – the audience might not even notice!

✓ When cast in a small role, keep your expectations realistic: you’re probably not going to experience a great sense of flow, so just enjoy the job for what it is.

✓ If you forget your lines mid-scene, just move (if possible). It doesn’t have to be a major move, but you’ll be switching channels in your brain from linguistic signals (of ‘No! I’ve forgotten my lines!’) to the spatial signals, so that you free up the linguistic channels for the lines of the text, rather than the Fear Voice.

✓ Rehearse your success in your imagination.

Long-term strategies for facing and embracing fear

✓ Acknowledge that your stage fright exists – get it out in the open somehow: the talking cure is invaluable.

✓ Understand that we can only be creative if we take risks. In other words, reframe your stage fright as a great chance for creative growth, rather than a will to run away.

✓ Care less! There’s no such thing as a perfect performance, so release yourself from being full of cares about perfectionism.

✓ Understand that we need the dark times of unemployment. True creativity can only exist if we face the difficult times and appreciate their value.

✓ Talk back to the Fear Voice: tell it that you’ll deal with it later, but you’ve got a job to do now.

✓ Reframe the ‘problem that can beat you’ as a ‘challenge that can be overcome’.

✓ Reframe the stage fright in the light of humour. See it from a different angle. Laugh it into submission.

Mindsets for auditions

✓ They need you as much as you need them!

✓ Enjoy it for its own sake!

✓ There’s no one like you in the whole world! So knock their socks off!

Good practices for post-performance

✓ Have a sense of perspective on the feedback – praise or critique: it’s just someone’s taste (and that includes the professional critics).

✓ Know whose feedback you trust.

✓ Trust your own sense of truth.