On Stage Fright and the Story We Keep Telling Ourselves

For a long time, I accepted stage fright as a given.

It was framed as part of the job, almost a badge of seriousness. If you were nervous, it meant you cared. If you weren’t, people assumed you lacked depth or respect for the music. That idea is so ingrained in classical training that most singers never pause to question it. They simply build their entire relationship with performance around managing fear instead of removing its cause.

I believed that story too, until experience forced me to look at it more honestly.

After years of performing, observing other singers, and paying close attention to my own body and mind on stage, it became clear that what people call stage fright isn’t mysterious at all. It’s not random. It’s not inevitable. It’s the result of a pattern, and that pattern shows up the same way again and again.

When you strip away the romantic language around it, three reasons sit at the center of the issue. They’re simple, but they reinforce one another so effectively that singers often feel trapped inside them.

Reason Number One: Your mindset

Most singers are not afraid because they are weak or sensitive. They are afraid because they have been conditioned to sing for the wrong reason.

From very early on, classical singers are trained in environments built almost entirely around critique. Auditions, juries, panels, lessons, masterclasses. Everything is evaluated. Everything is commented on. Over time, this creates a subtle but powerful shift in intention.

You are not to singing to entertain and sound beautiful. Instead, you’re singing in order not to be criticized.

That mindset changes everything.

When your primary goal is to avoid mistakes, your attention turns inward. You monitor yourself in real time. You listen for flaws instead of communicating meaning. The body responds exactly as you would expect. Breath tightens. Muscles brace. The mind races ahead, anticipating what could go wrong.

Fear doesn’t come from the audience in this case. It comes from the internal pressure to perform perfectly enough to escape judgment.

If you walk on stage believing you are supposed to be nervous, that belief becomes self-fulfilling. You treat fear as normal. You stop questioning it. And instead of asking how to move past it, you start managing it like a permanent condition.

Reason Number Two: You are not as deeply practiced as you think you are

When I entered my first NATS competition during my first year as a vocal performance major, I thought took it very seriously. I wanted to do well, but underestimated how much focused practice the pieces really needed. “How do you know?” you might ask. You know when you don’t know something well enough, if you’re honest with yourself.

I didn’t put in the kind of practice that leaves no gray areas.

And I knew it.

I convinced myself that I knew the melismas of the Handel art song “Hark the Echoing Air!” well enough, but I didn’t. I knew the piece, except for the places that felt a little muddy. I hadn’t fully decided where every breath would go or how each emotional moment would shape the sound. And my body knew that long before my mind wanted to admit it. As a result, I bombed my performance.

Here’s the part most singers don’t want to hear. You always know when you haven’t practiced enough.

Your body knows it.

That’s where so much stage fright actually comes from. Not from the audience, but from the awareness that something isn’t fully settled yet. There are still passages you’re hoping will go well instead of knowing they will.

And if you’re naturally gifted, this can work against you.

I’ve always been musically gifted and I have the gift of absolutely pitch, and early on in my music career, it worked against me. It allowed me to get away with less preparation early on, until it didn’t. Natural ability can create the illusion that you’re more prepared than you are. And if you don’t take the work seriously at that stage, I promise you, you will take it seriously the moment you bomb something you cared about.

Anyone who is truly serious about classical voice knows this is true. This isn’t a casual pursuit. If you approach it casually, you don’t last very long.

Deep preparation means knowing your repertoire the way an actor knows their lines. Every word. Every breath. Every dynamic choice. Every emotional shift. When preparation reaches that level, your body relaxes because it has nothing left to worry about.

Reason Number Three: You haven’t performed enough in the real world

Practicing and performing are not the same skill.

You can rehearse for hours alone and still feel completely undone the moment someone is watching. Performance is a physical experience. Heart rate changes. Breath patterns shift. Awareness expands outward. If those sensations are unfamiliar, the body interprets them as danger.

The only way to change that is repetition.

You have to perform over and over again, not just in ideal settings, but in real ones. Live streams. Small audiences. Singing for family and friends. Community events. National Anthem performances in front of thousands of people. Any opportunity where you experience being seen and heard. You practice putting the attire on. You practice doing your makeup. You practice walking into a room and feeling how an audience responds to you. You practice the entire experience, not just the music.

This is where singers need to borrow from the mindset of athletes.

A basketball team does not approach every game as if it will define their entire career. They play many games in a season. One game does not make or break them. This is exactly how singers need to think about performance.

When you perform often enough, each individual performance carries less psychological weight. It becomes part of a process instead of a verdict on your worth.

This also means being willing to take on opportunities that are primarily for growth, especially early on. Not every performance will be glamorous, well-paid, or paid at all. Some exist so you can learn how to function calmly and confidently in front of people. Approached this way, performance becomes a job, not a test.

When those bigger moments arrive, the recitals, the concerts, the high-stakes performances with many eyes and cameras on you, you are no longer encountering pressure for the first time. You’ve already lived there. And that gives you a massive advantage as a solo performer, over singers who have only practiced in isolation, which, for voice students especially, are about 95% of your colleagues.

These three factors feed into one another. A mindset rooted in fear makes preparation less effective. Shallow preparation increases anxiety. Limited performance experience magnifies both. Together, they create what people label as stage fright, even though fear itself is not the root cause.

The good news is that none of this is permanent.

Mindset can be rewritten. Preparation can deepen. Experience can be accumulated deliberately. When those three shift together, fear loses its grip, not because you care less, but because you are no longer singing from a place of self-protection.

This is a conversation that deserves more time and space than a single chapter can offer. I’ll be continuing it live on January 28th at 2 p.m. Eastern on TikTok, where we’ll go deeper into what stage fright actually is and how singers can move past it in a practical, sustainable way.