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Stage Fright and the Yips: Why Experienced Performers Suddenly Lose Their Nerve · Moving Minds Forward

• 0:10
  Gary Johannes: People aren't broke, and there's always a way forward. I know because I've lived it. I left school at 14, one of nine kids, and I joined the RAF at 16. Thirty years followed in sales, hospitality, and all the while believing there was a version of my life I couldn't quite reach. In my mid forties, I found hypnotherapy, discovered that that belief was wrong.
• 0:39
  I retrained. I built Inspire to Change. And at 60, I came out of King's College London with an MSc in the psychology and neuroscience of mental health. The same year I found out I had dyslexia and ADHD. I'm Gary Johannes, solution focused hypnotherapist, founder of Inspire to Change, senior lecturer at CPHT.
• 1:04
  This podcast is everything that's come from all of that. One condition per episode. What's going on? What's keeping it going? And what actually helps?
• 1:16
  If you find it useful, hit subscribe. Let's get into it. So Stage Fright. This episode is for a very particular kind of person, not for someone new to performing under pressure, someone who's already proved they can do it, the musician who's played hundreds of gigs, the teacher who stood in front of classrooms for twenty years, the broadcaster who's lived live on air without a second thought, the public speaker who's delivered keynote after keynote without a flicker of nerves, the spokesperson who's competed a level most people never will, and then out of nowhere, on a day like any other, it doesn't work anymore. I've watched lecturers with twenty years experience suddenly dread walking into a classroom they know better than their own front room.
• 2:24
  I've worked with professional speakers convinced their career is finished after one presentation went wrong. So today is everything I know from lived experience, from the therapy room, and from the neuroscience of why this happens to people who, by every reasonable measure, shouldn't be afraid of this at all. If you felt confident in your craft for years and then suddenly found yourself shaking, blanking, or dreading the exact thing you used to do without thinking, this one's for you. If that sounds familiar, stay with me. I think you'll find it useful.
• 3:07
  Let's get into it. So the ambush. You've stood on that stage, walked into that classroom, stepped up to the microphone, taken that shot more times than you can count. It's not just familiar. It's who you are.
• 3:24
  And then on some ordinary day, with no warning and no obvious reason, your body decides it isn't safe anymore. Your heart starts racing before you've even started. The hands that have never shaken before shake. The mind that's always been sharp, goes blank, or worse, fills with doubt mid performance. You get through it somehow, and you walk off shaken, not by what happened, but by the fact that it happened to you, and then the real damage starts.
• 4:02
  Because now you're not just dealing with the one bad performance, You're dreading the next one in case it happens again, and the dread itself becomes a thing that makes it more likely to happen again. You start wondering if you've lost it, if the years of doing this somehow stopped counting, if you suddenly inexplicably an impostor in your own skill. Here's the first thing I want you to hold on to. This is not the loss of your ability. It's not proof you were never really that good or that your nerve has finally run out.
• 4:43
  It's your alarm system doing exactly what it's built to do. Misfiring at the moment, it's never misfired before. And a misfire, unlike a genuine loss of skill, can be corrected. Before we go any further, I want to draw a line, because it matters. The nerves you feel before you walk out, the flutter, the sharpened focus, the sense of, right, let's do it, that's not what we're talking about today.
• 5:15
  That's a good thing. It's your body rising to meet something that matters to you, and it usually sharpens your performance rather than damaging it. In the trade, that's sometimes called a challenge response, stress in service of a task. If you've always had that, and it's always worked in your favor, keep it. Don't let anything in this episode make you suspicious of it.
• 5:45
  What we're talking about is different. It's not the edge before you start. It's the alarm going off during or right before something you've done a thousand times in a way it's never gone off before. That's not challenge stress helping you rise to the occasion. That's threat response.
• 6:05
  Treating the thing you're good at as danger. Same body, same adrenaline, completely different signal underneath. And that's the distinction this whole episode rests on. Let's start with what this actually is. This isn't ordinary stage fright, and it isn't a beginner's nerves.
• 6:29
  This is sudden onset performance anxiety. When someone with a genuine proven track record is hit seemingly out of nowhere by a fear response they'd long since stopped expecting. It shows up across every field where performance under pressure matters. Musicians get it mid tour. After years on stage, most people get it.
• 6:56
  A golfer who suddenly can't putt, a cricketer who can't throw the ball back to the wicket keeper, a footballer who can't take the penalty they've taken hundreds of times before, the broadcaster gets it live on air. Teachers and lecturers get it in front of classes they've taught for decades. Public speakers get it. Someone who's delivered keynote talks to hundreds of people without a second of thought. Suddenly, dreading a stage they know inside out.
• 7:29
  Surgeons, pilots, anyone who depends on skills performing under watching eyes can be hit by this regardless of how long they've been doing it. One survey of over 2,000 professional orchestral musicians found that nearly quarter had experienced genuine stage fright, not just ordinary nerves, and it isn't confined to music. UK surveys suggest around one in four people feel anxious at just the thought of presenting an idea in a meeting. This is not a rare or fringe experience. It happens to people at the very top of their field all the time, and it's far more common than people admit, because admitting it feels like admitting you've lost something you can't get.
• 8:22
  You haven't. This is known, well documented for Sports people call versions of it the yips. Musicians talk about losing their nerve, and every profession that performs under scrutiny has its own quiet name for the same thing. What they're all describing is the same underlying event. So what's actually happening in the rain when this hits?
• 8:50
  Your alarm system, the amygdala, doesn't run on logic or on your CV. It runs on pattern matching and threat detection, and it can be triggered by something as small as one bad moment, one piece of criticism, one performance that went wrong for reasons that had nothing at all to do with skill. Once it's flagged that specific situation as dangerous, it doesn't need your permission to fire the next time you're in it. It floods your body with adrenaline, narrows your focus, and critically sidelines your prefrontal cortex. The calm, skilled, experienced part of your brain that actually knows how to do the thing you're trying to do.
• 9:39
  That's the part that explains everything. The skill hasn't gone anywhere. It's still there, intact, exactly as strong as it's always been. But in the moment, the alarm fires, the parts of your brain holding that skill has been temporarily taken offline by a system convinced you're under threat. You're not failing.
• 10:04
  You're being interrupted. Skill doesn't disappear overnight. Access to it sometimes does. So why does it land on people with years of experience out of the blue with no obvious triggers? Sometimes there is a trigger, even if it doesn't feel connected.
• 10:25
  A single bad performance, a piece of harsh feedback, an injury, a health scare, a period of high stress somewhere else in life. Very often, though this has nothing to do with the thing you can't do, your skill hasn't declined, and nothing about your performance itself has changed. It's that your brain, dealing with pressure somewhere else entirely, a relationship, money worries, exhaustion, grief, has quietly turned its overall threat sensitivity up. And the extra sensitivity doesn't always show up where the stress came from. It shows up wherever your nervous system is already primed to notice risk.
• 11:15
  For you, that's the stage, the pitch, the microphone. Think of stress as a bucket. Every pressure you're carrying, work, sleep, money, relationships, health, pours into the same bucket regardless of the tap it's coming from. Sleep normally drains a little bit each night, keeping the level manageable. But when sleep's disrupted, or the pressure keeps coming faster than you can drain it, the level rises.
• 11:45
  And a bucket that's nearly full doesn't need a big new problem to overflow it. Just one more drop. For you, that drop happened to be a performance you've done a thousand times. It's not that the performance became dangerous. It's the bucket that was already close to the top, and it's where it spilled over.
• 12:10
  It's the same mechanism behind a short fuse that comes from nowhere or a habit that suddenly gets harder to control. The bucket finds the nearest opening. For you right now, that's the thing that you're best at. Sometimes it's cumulative instead. Years of performing without incident, quietly building pressure of its own, the weight of reputation, the fear of being the person who never fails.
• 12:40
  And sometimes, honestly, there's no clear cause at all. The nervous system doesn't always announce its reason, and that doesn't mean you need to find one before you can move past it. So why does it stick around once it started? The first time it happened, your brain files it as evidence. Something went wrong here.
• 13:04
  This might not be safe anymore. And the next time you're in the same situation, the brain is now on alert, scanning for the same threat. What makes the anxiety more likely to show up again, which becomes further evidence, which makes it more likely the time after that. It's a loop, and it can tighten quickly if it isn't addressed. Then there's the weight of your own history working against you, because you know what you're capable of, The gap between what you used to do effortlessly and what's happening now feels enormous, and that gap itself becomes something to fear, and you start performing anxious about being anxious, which is his own particular trap.
• 13:59
  And avoidance creeps in quietly. Turning down the gig, the talk, the shot, the broadcast, anything to sidestep the risk of it happening again. Every time you avoid, you get short term relief. And everybody knows that avoidance worked, but it never gets the chance to relearn the situation was actually safe all along. The cycles that tighten can also be loosened, and that's exactly what the solution focused approach does.
• 14:34
  Here's how we actually work with this. We don't spend the session picking apart the bad performance that started it. Digging through it rarely helps, and it tends to keep the brain rehearsing exactly what you're trying to move past. Instead, we look forwards. What does it feel like to walk out there again, doing the thing you've always been able to do?
• 15:01
  With your skill fully available to you. We get specific about because the brain moves towards what it's shown. And right now, it's been shown the misfire on a loop far more than it's been shown the years of success that's came before it. We build on the same three pillars, positive interaction, talking about it rather than carrying it alone, because isolation makes this worse, and connection steadies the nervous system. Positive action, controlled low stakes exposure that lets your body collect fresh evidence that the situation is safe rather than avoiding it altogether.
• 15:45
  And positive thinking, not blind confidence, but accurate reminder of the track record you actually have, which the fear has been quietly drowning out. And this turns out to be less about performance itself and more about your overall threshold. Everything else going on quietly turned up your sensitivity. We widen the lens. We look at what's actually loading you right now, away from the stage or the pitch entirely, because bringing that down often does far more for your performance than anything aimed directly at your performance itself.
• 16:32
  You're not fixing a broken skill. You're lowering the general pressure your nervous system is under, so it stops flagging the wrong thing as dangerous. And this is where the hypnotherapy comes in. In trance, the prefrontal cortex, the calm, skilled part of your brain, stays engaged. And we use that state to rehearse performing the way you used to before the alarm started firing.
• 17:02
  We're not teaching you a new skill. The skill is already there. We're helping your nervous system remember it's safe to use it. This isn't wishful thinking. This is neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to rewire itself through repeated experience.
• 17:21
  It's well established neuroscience. The pattern that got learned in one moment can be unlearned the same way. And this isn't just a theory. Inspired to Change run a formal research study with Northumbria Police, working with officers and staff dealing with anxiety, confidence issues, and specifically public speaking, among other presenting problems. Every single participant who completed treatment responded, and the majority recovered completely with no clinical symptoms left by the end.
• 18:01
  I've watched experienced capable people walk back into the exact same situation that ambush them and find their nerve again. That's because it was never actually gone. Before I close, one thing you can do. The next time you notice a dread building before you perform, don't wait to feel confident before you start. Confidence isn't a prerequisite here.
• 18:29
  It's the byproduct. Instead, focus on the first small mechanical action of your craft, the first note, the first sentence, the first step of your routine. Do just one thing on autopilot, and let the rest follow. Here's why it worked. The skill lives in your body as much as your mind, and the first movement tends to wake the rest up, even when your head is telling you it's forgotten how.
• 19:04
  So let me speak directly to you. You haven't lost it. You haven't gone soft, and you're not an impostor in a life you've spent years earning. You have an alarm system that's misfired. In a moment, it's never misfired before.
• 19:20
  And that same brain that built your skill in the first place can learn to let you use it again. That's not me being kind. That's neuroscience. It starts with understanding what's going on. You've just done that, and that, quietly, without any fanfare, is a step forward.
• 19:42
  If this episode has helped, please do hit subscribe, and leave us a review if you can. It helps more people find the podcast. Every episode, one condition, the same honest lens. What's going on? What's keeping it going?
• 19:59
  And what actually helps? There's a lot more to come. And if you'd like to find out whether Inspire to Change can help you get your nerve back, we have a nationwide network of solution focused hypnotherapists across The UK. You can find your nearest hypnotherapist, read about how we work, and book a free initial consultation at Insplot BIZ, and you'll find the link in this description below. See you on the next one.