Speaker 1Shut up, and sit down. Welcome to Being On Stage, the only podcast that gives you motivation, inspiration, and confidence to be better on stage. No matter how you entertain, sing, dance, band, comedian, public speaking, MC, drag, burlesque, performance art, or street performer, this is the show for you. Hey, rock stars, it's your host, Reggie Dawson, and welcome back to the Being On Stage podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Last episode, I had mentioned that I was going to get into talking about how to develop your stage persona when you're going on stage. And I realized about maybe like two minutes into recording that I actually have done an episode about creating a stage persona and why it's important. You can go back and listen to episode 18. It talks about the importance of having a stage persona. So this time, I'm actually going to get into a little bit about what's important in developing your stage persona. As entertainers, we don't really spend a whole lot of time with developing our persona and really thinking about what we want to do on stage and who we want to be. And that's important because who you are on stage is who the audience sees. Have you ever heard the phrase, perception is reality? And what that means is how you're perceived is the reality of who you are to the person. So case in point, if you're performing on stage and you're a little more shy and you're kind of maybe back towards the middle to the back of the stage and you're real soft spoken like, hey, how are you guys doing? Thanks for coming out. I'm so glad you're here. We're going to do another song. Like if you do little things like that and you're very soft spoken, the audience is going to perceive you as lacking confidence, shy for one. And maybe you are shy and you're also not going to be perceived as approachable. You're not going to be perceived as energetic. You're going to be perceived as maybe even slightly boring. And we definitely don't want that while you're on stage. So one of the things to keep in mind when you go out on stage, you are playing a character for your audience. You may not be an actor, but every performer has to have some form of acting ability because you have to be authentic to yourself. But at the same time, there's going to be times when you're going to need to act on stage as well. I talked about it in Fake It Till You Make It. You know, there's going to be times when you need to act because maybe you're not as confident as you need to be. Maybe you are not feeling as energized as you should be. Maybe you're a little under the weather, but you still need to go out there and give it your best and give your audience a damn good show, quite frankly. In order to do that, you're going to have to have some acting ability and having a stage persona helps you. Having that persona that you step into when you're on stage is going to help you be able to get past anything going on. Step on stage and give a hell of a show. Look at celebrity entertainers. Look at entertainers like Beyonce. She has her stage persona. She's a different person when she's off stage. You know, she's not all hair flips and booty shakes when she's off stage. You know, she's a real down-to-earth human being with, you know, real goals and a real vision and real purpose and, you know, beliefs and morals and that sort of thing. And you look at other entertainers like I always reference Eminem because, you know, I connect with his music. He's different when he's off stage. You know, when he's on stage, when he's Eminem or Slim Shady and he's spoken about that, like he's even put this in his music that this is a show like this is all what you whatever you want it to be. And that's what it is, is all performers have that. I follow a belly dancer on Instagram, Ebru Becker. I can't pronounce it. She's Russian. Ebru Becker, B-E-K-K-E-R. I follow her on Instagram and when she's on stage, she's hilarious. She's fun. She's got so much passion. She's got such great facial expressions. You know, she's really into it. When she's off stage, you know, she's complete professional. She's got a business mind. You know, she still has fun and everything. And I don't know her personally. This is just what I picked up from, you know, Instagram and translating it from Russian to English. But the point is, is when when she's on stage, she has a certain persona and I've watched multiple of her videos and it's phenomenal. You know, there's other entertainers that I know personally. There's one drag king that I know. So she's female and she performs as a man. When she's off stage, you know, she's nerdy. She's down to earth. He, on stage, because she performs as a man, kind of like a Victor Victoria type of thing. He's badass, punk rock, in your face, outspoken. And so it's, you know, it's almost polar opposites, but it's still like a part of who you are. Me, when I was on stage, I was kind of like cocky, playful, flirty. I always wanted to, like, appear like the. the gentleman/bad boy/sensitive side. It's like a combination of characters that I found fascinating. You know, I've always wanted to be that bad boy. And then I've always also wanted to be like that cool, confident, cocky, yeah, you know, I'm awesome type of guy as well. And so that's who I was on stage. And it surprisingly worked pretty well for me. But when I was creating that persona, I knew one of the most important things to me was confidence. And so that was my number one. And whenever I was on stage, I wanted to appear confident. And I think we should all want to appear confident. That needs to be all of our number one. But then, you know, you have different layers. Underneath my confidence layer, you know, I had a playfulness. I had a flirtiness. Underneath that layer, I had like a little bit of a sensitive side. And underneath that layer, you know, I still had my beliefs and my morals and my outspokenness that I would, you know, occasionally bring out and do a little more of a passionate, meaningful performance. My point of all of this. My point of sharing these examples and talking about celebrities and people I know is to show you that everybody has one. Everybody who has done great things on stage. Everybody who's successful on stage has a type of persona. And it doesn't matter what your name is. It doesn't matter how you perform. It doesn't matter what you do. What matters is who you are when you're on stage because that's who your audience sees. That's who your audience is going to connect with is who you are. Number one, you've got to be 100% confident. You've got to be 100% confident when you're on stage. Two, you've got to have a couple of different layers that you want to peel off and show people as you develop. Three, speaking of development, as you're developing your stage persona, keep in mind, you can change it. Like, you can change it over time and develop it because as you grow as a person and as an individual and as a performer, your persona is also going to have to show some growth because you don't want to be performing 10 years later and be the same person. How will you ever get new fans if you don't evolve with your fans? You know? So getting into how you actually want to develop your persona and how you become that character on stage, there's a couple of different ways. I talked a little bit about dealing with a copycat and imitation, and I want to make a little correction. You know, imitation may not have been the best word. I'm going more for emulation. And the difference is, is imitation is like carbon copy, mimicking, you know, doing the exact same thing that someone else does. And what we need to do, we need to emulate the performers that we look up to and emulate. It means that you are looking to match their success or surpass their success and do so by still being yourself. And so when you emulate someone, you know, look at what they do, but then make it your own. And when they say make it your own, I mean, you still have to put your own flair into it. You still have to put your own personality because as an artist, you're naturally creative. You just have to kind of let it out. And that's one thing that I think holds a lot of people back from even creating a persona is you have that fear of letting. out certain pieces of you and you have to get rid of that fear. You have to get rid of the fear of letting yourself show. You have to show those pieces of you that you've always wanted people to see. You've just been too afraid of what they think. That's how you're going to find your fans is being the person that you're afraid to be because that's what creates the connection to your fans. Deep inside me, I've always been afraid of being overly confident because of what I look like. I'm a big guy. You know, I've always been. Big. I've always been awkward. I've always had to deal with, you know, bullies and people picking on me because I was big. I was a mama's boy. It was inevitable. I was very close to my mother. I was very sheltered. So there's a lot of things I didn't know that other people knew. I got picked on a lot. And so I was afraid to be that confident bad boy type that I really wanted to be inside. Now that I'm older, I look back at it. You know, this part of me has always been there. I've always had this confidence inside me, but I've always been afraid. I'm afraid of letting it out because I'm afraid of someone coming and smacking it down and smacking it out of me just with their words because people can be cruel. But you have to let that part of you, the part of you that's scared of someone coming in and tearing you down. You've got to let that go because here's the thing that's going to happen. You're going to have people that just don't connect with you. You're going to have people that just don't like you. You're just not their cup of tea as a performer, maybe as a person. And that's OK, because think about you. You're not going to get along with everyone. Everybody, you can probably name at least two or three people in your life right now that you're kind of like, I could really do without them. And I'm not trying to be rude. I'm telling you like it is. It's one of the promises I made to you. So likewise, there's going to be people that feel that way about you. You have to be OK with that. You have to be OK with being the truest version of yourself and letting that piece, those pieces of you out and show without worrying about who's not going to like you, because there's going to be people that don't like you. There's already people that don't like you. That's just facts. You can let the fear go. and be the person that you really wanna be. Look at the people you look up to. Like, who do you look up to as a performer? I don't care what they do. I don't care if you're a drag queen and you look up to a singer. I don't care if you are a dancer and you look up to a comedian. No, I don't care who you look up to, but look at how they present themselves on stage. How do they carry themselves? How do they walk? How do they talk? What's their face look like? You know, their presentation on stage is their persona. So look at what they do. Look at what you like about each of the people that you look up to and use that as a foundation to build upon for your persona on stage. You're going to have to put in pieces of yourself. You're going to still have to look deep inside and look at those pieces of you that you're afraid to show, but use something from the people that you look up to as your foundation. That's going to help you so much when you're ready to present yourself on stage. You're going to have a solid foundation and then you're going to have the authenticity, the true, deep authenticity that is yourself. And then on top of that layer, you're going to have a whole crap ton of confidence. Because as I've said before, confidence is the number one thing you need in your stage persona. No matter who you are off stage, no matter how shy you are, how introverted you are, confidence is number one when you step on stage. One way to get a lot of practice is to be social. Put yourself out there on social media. It's how you're going to do it. It's how you're going to word your posts, how you share your videos. I invite you to share it with me. I have a Facebook group free to join. It's called the Being On Stage group. Listen, I was told when you're trying to come up with a name with something, sometimes it's best to just keep it simple. And so I kept it simple. If you want an easy way to find the group, you can go to beingonstage.com slash group, G-R-O-U-P. And if you want to search Facebook, you can just search the Being On Stage group and you'll find us in there. You can also connect with me on Instagram at beingonstage.com. And I'll see you in the next video. Bye. Being On Stage. I would so love to hear from you. Tell me who you are, what you do, what you want to do. Guys, it's been an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much for tuning in. Head over to the website to sign up for the Rockstar Lounge, beingonstage.com. You'll get a free copy of my book when you do that. And keep on shining.
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