3. Building self awareness
Performance Ready Signature
We can work with students by helping them identify what they feel and where. Depending on age, you may have to help with some guidance - as many students aren’t aware what they do feel and why.
Now we understand how anxiety happens, It’s time to turn to how we individually experience it. We call this the performance ready signature.
2) Mind (common psychological sensations)
This can vary per person hugely. A great way to approach this is asking students to reflect on their last exam or concert. What terms were repeated? Common things include:
“What if I fail?”
“What if I mess up?”
“What if people laugh at me?”
Other people may experience: Mind blanks, rush of many thoughts at once.
1) Body (common physical sensations)
Tension, shaking, fast heart rate, increased need for toilet, lump in throat, feeling warm, dry mouth, butterflies in tummy, nausea, headaches.
3)Behaviour (how you behave when anxious)
This can often be a really tricky one to notice and self awareness develops more here when you know it exists. As humans, we tend to have certain behaviours we partake in depending on how we react to anxious scenarios (fight, flight, freeze, fawn).
Fight - Talking quickly, pacing around, urge to just “get on stage”, fidgeting, forgetfulness, clumsiness
Flight - Feeling the urge to “run” away, staying away from others, hiding face, “closing” body by making self smaller (such as dropping head, raising shoulders)
Freeze - Feeling the urge to “stay still”, feeling unable to take control of body
Fawn - The urge to talk to audience, feeling the need to tell people reasons for mistakes, general feelings of controlling how people see/think about you