The auditioning singer comes just short – and they know it. Nerves strangle the performance. The facts of faith prove the missing link.
For anyone who’s battled performance anxiety in the heat of the pressured moment—and that’d be all of us—the minute difference between failure and success can be eternally eluding.
Faith is the missing link. Not faith in God. But faith in ourselves; it’s the X-factor.
What can we do?
We have to first believe that we have this ‘X-factor’.
Secondly, it’s anything to throw ourselves off the scent of the nerves without going over the top, which is our nerves manifesting themselves in a false confidence.
It’s harnessing the best we have whilst risk managing—to the finest possible point—the threats. It is honed self-awareness and the consciousness of self-reflective feedback in the moment... that ability to adjust right before the moment of weakness; anticipating it, catching it.
The good thing is this can be trained into us.
Training Augments Confidence
It involves focus. Copious sums of it. It’s the mind left completely absorbed for this task at hand, and that alone. It seems hard but truly we can discipline our minds to do this.
Our minds don’t cope well with a profusion of cognitive and emotional input when we’re to perform. But paradoxically it’s the performance itself that often brings all this stuff up. This is where momentary self-discipline, rooted in faith, is so important.
Faith in ourselves shelves this extraneous input and helps us put on the best display. But faith is augmented by practice... training! And practice augments confidence, feeding faith.
Through myriad practice we become that good at what we do we don’t stand for failure—but even if we do fail we’re impassioned to learn and perfect that thing.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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