Today I want to talk to you about stage fright.

Yippee!

And or performance anxiety.

I want to start off with what is it?

I see stage fright slash performance anxiety as the anxiety that shows up before public speaking, presenting to a board, presenting to your board of directors, or getting on stage,

like classic stage fright. It's the anxiety and the overwhelming, almost shut down of the system

before doing something public. I saw your hands, like, come up, and it almost looks like this

whole tightening of the chest. I'm curious what you've

gone through with it. Yeah. It's a very personal subject matter for me because it was in a way my

intro to all of this work was I was an actor. I had been doing film and then I was seguing in

LA to stage and I started getting stage. And panic attacks. I had two panic

attacks in the ocean swimming, usually before, like, opening nights. And how it hit me was just this

overwhelming sense of anxiety. Like, I couldn't hold it in my body. It was debilitating and really made work thoroughly unadjoyable. And it was like

this sense of complete overwhelm in my nervous system. That sounds intense. It was intense.

Yeah. Where did that lead you? Well, it to a lot of retreats. Okay. A lot of studying, a lot of therapy, a lot of studying with elders,

working fear and anxiety and performance anxiety, stage fright everywhere I could, and really learned

how to see through it intellectually, physically with the body, and work with the nervous system so that it

didn't kill my career. That sounds really profound, honestly, because it's one of those things where

I would never have guessed I could even be on a podcast like this talking to you. Because when I

first met you, I was just terrified,

terrified of being seen. And so there's something, again, that feels very personal of like,

right, I remember acutely that experience of, please don't look at me. I don't want to be seen.

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