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, Reggie Dawson, your host of the Being On Stage podcast. Listen, I have not talked about fear in a couple of days, and I think that is a big, big word when we talk about performing on stage, is fear. You got stage fright, you got fear of what people think, which is kind of like the same thing as stage fright. You got fear of not making it, fear of failure, fear of success. There's so much fear when we talk about performing on stage. I wanted to share this with you, and I take my inspiration for my podcast from everywhere, just as you should take your inspiration for performing from everywhere you can get it. You know, sometimes it's business, sometimes it's television, sometimes it's a quote, sometimes it's another podcast I listen to. Today, it happens to be a Pixar short film. You know Pixar, they do movies with Disney such as Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3, Toy Story 4. But you know Pixar, and they're familiar, or they're known for doing little short films before their movies. And there's one where the gigantic bird tries to fit in with all the little birds, and he ends up getting revenge on them by flicking them all into the air and making them lose their feathers. There's a bunch of different ones, and some of their movies started out as shorts. But I happened to see one a couple of months ago that I've never seen with a film. And I was looking up funny motivational videos or whatever, and this happened to come up as a Pixar short. And so I watched it, and it's called Piper. So if you want to watch it, you can watch it. But I'm going to tell you, I'm going to ruin it for you on this podcast. So either pause the podcast and go watch it and come back, or just listen, and you'll know what happens anyways. So Piper happens to be this little tiny seagull. I believe it's a seagull. And he is, he or she is, I'm going to say he, because it's just, whatever, I'm just going to say he. He is freshly, and I don't want to say freshly hatched, but he's a young, very young bird. So his mom is trying to get him to go get his own food for the first time, and they happen to take, they happen to eat clams. And what happens is the waves come in. So I'm just going to tell you how they find their clams. You know, the waves come in, you see little air bubbles pop, and then they go stick their beaks down in the holes, they harvest the clam. When the wave comes in again, they run away, they see the air, you know, the wave recedes, the air bubbles pop, they go out, they get the clams out of the air bubble holes, thus eating clams. And so this little bird is used to being fed, and at first, you know, he wakes up in the morning, and the mom's trying to get him to go hunting for the first time. And the first thing he does is he just kind of sits there. He waits, he hides back under his mom's belly. And the mom, you know, moves, she leaves the nest, and she starts walking out, and she goes and gets a clam. And she shows the little bird what she's doing, and the little bird, first thing the little bird does is opens his mouth. Just, I'm sorry, you can't see what I'm doing, but that was my lip smacking and opening my mouth. But the first thing he does is open his mouth, tilt his beak up like he's waiting to be fed. And his mom basically eats the clam herself and squawks or whatever. Basically, the bird's trying to communicate to her child that, come on, it's time to do this for yourself. So the bird starts to come out a little bit, and, you know, begins to kind of be into hunting and looking for the little air bubbles. And finally finds one, sticks his little beak down in there, and as he's trying to pull the clam out of the shell, because he's a little bird, he's not that strong yet. Trying to pull the clam out of the shell, this huge wave starts coming, and all the other birds are running away. And he finally looks up a little too late, and the wave just crashes over. And then, you know, it opens up again, his feathers are all frazzled, he's got like one eye bigger than the other, he's looking like he's tweaking out on a meth trip. And he looks scared, you know, so the mom tries to get him to leave the nest to come hunting again. And he doesn't even go with the mom, he hides behind the grass, completely just hides behind the grass. And so the mom tries to get him to come out again, and I'm, listen, I know we're. I know we're five minutes in and I'm talking about this picture short, but I promise this is all going to make sense in like two or three more minutes. But I will roll it all up into a ball and hand it to you as a nice little performance nugget. I don't know what that was, but just go with me here. So he hides behind the grass, the mom tries to get him to come out hunting again, and he just, he won't do it. At all. He hides behind some other grass, you know. Or, you know, I'm sorry, he gets a little curious, and then he sees a wave coming from like way, way out. And he runs away. It doesn't even come near to where he was standing. Like he just, he freaked out because there was just that little threat of something happening. So this time when he's hiding, he's in a different type of grass environment, and he slowly starts to be gliding out. And as he looks down, there's these two tiny little crabs under his feet that are coming up from the sand. And, you know, he jumps off of them and everything, and he sees all these, you know, there's about three or four crabs that, you know, pop up. And they start walking towards the water. So he's following them, you know. He's following them. One of them turns around and like clamps on his beak or whatever to kind of say like, leave me alone, don't mess with me. So he's following these crabs, and he's real curious about these crabs. And in his curiosity, he doesn't realize that a wave is coming. And so all the little crabs, when a wave's coming, the crabs just hunker themselves down into a hole, and the wave comes over them. So he sees them start to hunker down in a hole. The wave's coming. He's freaking out. So he quickly just hunkers himself. Hunkers himself down, like wiggles himself some sand around him, you know, hunkers down to the ground a little bit, and the wave crashes over him. And you see him underwater, and he looks up, and he's looking around, and he's surprised he made it. He's good. And as he looks around, there's all these clams. He can see where all the clams are. So when the wave recedes, he goes and easily finds a clam. He's all excited. He survived the wave. So now he has this new method of getting food. And not only for himself, he's helping his other family get food. He's bringing. He's bringing clams for other people. Because he doesn't have to wait for the air bubbles. He knows where they are exactly. So he goes right to it and gets them. That's pretty much the moral. That's pretty much it. You know, he learns a way to get all this food and make the easier way for him. And he's enjoying it because he's, I don't know, he's just got this new way of doing something. He found his own way of doing something. And that's kind of where I want to get to, is finding your own way of doing something. You've got to get around that fear and find a way to do something. Listen, as a performer, you're going to want things to be handed to you. Yeah, I was there. Don't deny it. It's not an ego thing. It's a confidence thing. But it's also a wish thing. And I think, honestly, we all would love something to just be handed to us. Like, we'd love to say, hey, I'm a dancer. Oh, my God, I have this amazing opportunity for you. Come on over here. We'll pay you $500. And you're going to perform. And then you're going to go on So You Think You Can Dance. And, of course, you'll win. And you'll become super famous on YouTube. And go to Vegas and all this sort of stuff. Like, we want that to be handed to us. I'll admit it. I wanted it. I wanted something to be handed to me. I didn't want to work for it. Why work for it? Just hand it to me and let me do what I love. That's what the bird wanted in the beginning. He wanted just the food handed to him. It's what he was used to. And maybe it is what you're used to. I got used to that. I got used to being booked three and four times a month at the same place. Like, it was handed to me on a silver platter. Here you go. Eventually, you're going to have to go out and work for it. And you know what's going to happen is that wave is going to come. And it is going to crash over you. There is going to be something. You're going to have some failures. You're going to have some slip-ups, some mistakes. You're going to have waves crash over you and knock you out and push you down. And just tear at you. It's going to happen. It's going to ruffle up your feathers. You're going to look like you're freaking out, tweaking out on a meth trip. It's going to happen to you. It's part of the journey of a performer. Ask anybody. Anybody that you know that's like, maybe there's someone at a spot that you want to be. Go ask them. Hey, listen. Did you have any failures on your way? Like, anything mess up on the way to where you're at? They're probably going to look at you and go, hell yes. Let me tell you about ten stories at least. That's the thing. It's going to happen to everybody. It's nothing to be afraid of. And that's what happened to this little bird. The wave crashing over him. He let that dark moment in his life affect his ability to survive. And in your case, your ability to perform. But you know what happened? He got back out there. He found another way to do the same thing. Not only that, he got his inspiration from something else completely. Sometimes that's what it takes to get over your fear. Sometimes you have to learn something from something. someone else, sometimes you have to step out of your own box and the normal a way of doing things, you will find your way. I promise you will find your way, but you cannot let fear keep you from going towards the ocean. You cannot let fear keep you from getting on that stage. You're going to have failures. You're going to slip up. You're going to make mistakes. People are not going to like you. Truthfully, there's already people that don't like you. Oh, what? Yeah, it's true. Whether you perform or not, there's already people in your life in that have interacted with you that just you're not their cup of tea. Is that surprising to you? It shouldn't be because let me ask you this. Do you like every person that you meet like 100% besties? No. So why would everyone like you? Listen, it doesn't mean that they disrespect you. It doesn't mean that they're rude. You may just not be their cup of tea. And the same thing happens when you're on stage. There's going to be people that just you're not their thing. Oh, my dog's barking. Sorry about that. If you hear any noises, you're it's going to happen. And you're going to have to be OK with that and keep pushing forward because one person's opinion of you, first of all, shouldn't concern you. And second of all, it doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you a bad performer. Just not the performer for them to watch. And that's fine. The the point of this podcast is not to talk about who's not going to like you. The point of the podcast is, fear is always going to be there. You have to keep finding ways to overcome it. You have to keep pushing yourself back to doing the things that you need to do to survive. You are a performer. You must get on stage to survive. That brings me to my normal little spiel that I do. Listen, don't hang up just yet. Hang up. We're not on a phone call. Don't press stop just yet. Wait. I want to talk to you. I want to. I want to talk to you about whatever it is that you're fearing, whatever is holding you back from being that performer that you envision, whatever you feel like standing in your way. I want to talk to you about it and help you make a plan to get through it. So book a call with me on my calendar. Go to being on stage dot com slash calendar. Pick a date and time. I'll call you and we will make a plan to get you on that path to where you want to be and where you need to be and truthfully where you belong. So thanks again for listening. Oh, and if you haven't done so already, and I appreciate those of you that have, please go into iTunes and leave a five star rating on this podcast and a comment. I would greatly appreciate it. I thank you for those that have recently done so. And as always, while you're beating that fear and you're overcoming the things that are standing in your way and the waves that are crashing over you, you will continue to shine. Or as I like to say, keep on shining.
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