Nervousness is good!

My name is Thelma and I am a student at Florian Voss! I am currently preparing for an upcoming audition to begin my professional career as a musical artist and singer. My dream is to stand on the big theater stages and perform in the genre I love most - Musical! Since practice makes perfect and the industry is 99 times out of 100 very difficult to get a job in, I now practice constantly to be able to take on as many auditions as possible.

But with this kind of interest comes a lot of nervousness. What I've learned is that nervousness before a big or important performance is a good thing. It shows passion, motivation and a burning passion for what you are doing. Being nervous is therefore nothing to be stressed about as it is something completely normal. What I've been working on now is acceptance around my nervousness and turning it into a positive feeling. When you have expectations about your performance, that's when these thoughts can lead to negative nervousness. Instead, you want a mind-set that gives endorphins, adrenaline and means that your body prepares you for an exciting challenge.

What helps me before an audition is to let my body and my voice prepare at their own pace. This means getting a good night's sleep, eating breakfast in peace and quiet, drinking lots of water to hydrate the vocal cords, doing breathing exercises and a little yoga. It can also help to massage so-called pressure points. These are points on the body, on the pectoral muscles and inside the thumb that you can press to bring your focus to the right place and to make your nervous system react in a relaxing way before your singing. Also try to go to the bathroom 10 minutes before the performance and do a short warm-up again, and remember to focus on yourself. What the others do or have to say is not important in what you will do on stage. So talk as little as possible and try to be relaxed even if the moment before feels endlessly long.

During the audition itself, these pressure points can also be used to convey emotion and to make you relax during the performance itself. This is something that helps me bring out a more intimate and personal, vulnerable feeling in my performance. Also, I've been practicing keeping my eyes closed at the beginning of a song so as not to reveal too much before the powerful notes. And if you get nervous during the actual performance, you also have to accept this. To focus on whether you know the text or not, for example, so think instead that it doesn't matter if you lose it. They want to see if you know the notes in the song, and how you handle a situation where you forget the lyrics.

If instead nothing would work from what you practiced. Then let loose everything you have and go bananas, open your eyes and stretch out your arms like you're crazy, because the support is with you anyway. This helped me tremendously with a challenging song I was practicing. So finally, I now love my nervousness because it means passion and joy in what I do or will do. Good luck to everyone out there auditioning, I myself feel that I have the focus and joy within me to do my own performance. See you on stage out there!:)