Plan, Prepare, and Pray

Shut 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 here, your host of the Being On Stage podcast. Welcome back. It's been about four days since I've done a podcast. And yes, yes, yes, I advertise podcasts every day. But for those of you that don't know, I live in Florida on the East Coast, a little place called Hutchinson Island. And we just had it out with Dorian. He was just off our coast, the hurricane working its way up the East Coast to the United States of America. And, you know, part of a hurricane here is preparation. A lot of preparation goes into getting ready for a hurricane in Florida. I live about a block from the beach, not bragging. It's a small apartment I share with my wife and my daughter and two dogs. But I will say we had a lot of preparation to do because we couldn't stay here during the hurricane. So we had to put the boards up on the windows. And that's a hassle in itself on the Florida heat. And putting the boarding up your windows or putting up your shutters or anything like that. On top of that, you know, because we do live so close to the ocean and listen, let me let me back up for a minute. Yes. To answer your question, it's in your head. This podcast is all about performing. I tell you a little bit of a story and then I turn it into a very, very valuable lesson that you can take away and enhance your performance career. It's what I do. I'm a performance coach. So anyways, as we're, you know, we're prepping for the hurricane. I think Saturday I did a podcast. We put up some of the boards on Friday, put up some of the boards on Saturday. Actually, Saturday I did a podcast that compared you to a hurricane. And now I'm kind of flipping that around and talking about preparation and being prepared for something. And a lot goes into it because as I was saying, you know, we live about a block from the ocean. So we are in a danger of flooding from a storm surge, which is just where the water from the ocean just washes up on the beach and just keeps on going. So being a block away. You know, you have a Category 5 hurricane off your coast. You tend to take some precautions. So we spent a large chunk of the day on Sunday afternoon putting our outdoor furniture inside and then putting our indoor furniture on top of our outdoor furniture in case water comes into our house. And this all seems like a big, huge ordeal. And quite frankly, it is. So let me just give you the rundown of the preparations because we had to leave our home. For the first couple of days. So some of our preparations I mentioned, you know, putting up the boards to prepare to make sure that the wind and, you know, doesn't throw anything into the glass and break the windows. We had to prepare our furniture. We had to prepare our electronics, bag them up, put them under tarps like our televisions we put on the beds. Then we covered them with a blanket and then we covered them with a tarp, you know, our computers and everything we bagged up in garbage bags just to protect as much as we could, you know. We turned off the power to our stove because the people above us say that they have a leak above their stove. So we're thinking it's going to leak right down into our stove. We have a unit next door to us. It's an upstairs downstairs townhouse, completely vacant, has been vacant for three years. We went in there and did the best we could, kind of preparing in there, putting stuff up against the windows and the sliding glass doors. And one of the biggest things to prepare is when you have to leave your home, you don't know if you're going to lose your home. You don't know if you're going to lose power. You don't know what you're going to come back to. So you try to do as much as you can ahead of time. And we had to pack. So, you know, we had to pack the bag, the clothes bags. We had to pack the dog stuff. We had to pack food because if you lose power, all your food's bad. And so we've done all this preparation and we get out to my cousin's house. That's where we stayed for the past couple of days. Hence the no podcast. We were in a house with 10 people, three dogs and three cats. And I just didn't see a podcast getting done in that environment. So I did. I did take a couple of days off for that reason of being displaced. I think I think it's worth forgiving me for that. I hope so. I hope you can forgive me for leaving you hanging for a few days. But so, you know, we get out to my cousin's house on Monday, Monday morning, early afternoon, and we hung out there on Monday. I slept most of the time. I slept like 12 hours on Monday night and like 16 hours on Tuesday. It is crazy. I slept a lot. I do that during hurricanes. I just it's the weather because it's windy and it's rainy and it's just so I sleep. My wife hates it and I try to change it. I can't. I sleep during a hurricane. So all this preparation and everything and we're out there and it turns out that luckily this hurricane did stay off of our coast. We got pretty close there for a minute. It hovered over the Bahamas and man, the Bahamas got. Just wrecked. So prayers going up for them. Thank God. Thank God that didn't happen to us. I don't know what I would have done myself. I don't know what those people are going to do to to, you know, start. I mean, all you can do really is, you know, start cleaning up and start moving forward. But for us, you know, we did all this preparation and it turned out we just got a little bit of wind and rain. And by a little bit of wind and rain, I mean, 50, 60 mile an hour winds probably at our house. We only saw about 30 to 40 mile an hour winds out where we were staying at my cousin's house. And it kind of makes you feel pissed in a way. And I'm not I'm not discounting what happened to the Bahamas in any way, shape or form. But as as someone who, you know, we spent the time to put the boards on the windows, we raised our furniture off the ground. I mentioned everything that we did. And then to just get a little bit of wind and rain and it kind of can make. You feel disappointed is that sounds terrible to say, but it can. And I talked to my wife about this, too. And we kind of agreed that, man, we did all this stuff for nothing. Like we could have just sat in our backyard, no boards in our house and just sat back there hanging out during most of the storm. Like it was it was that kind of that kind of day. Really, they didn't even shut down the bridge that goes over to our island. So it was just it was. It was nothing. And here comes the lesson. Thank you for listening to this story for six minutes. Here comes the lesson. As performers, sometimes that happens during a show. You know, we get all into our preparation and into our planning. And then when it comes time to do the show, it just kind of fizzles out like it's it doesn't pack the punch that we intended it to pack or that we prepared for it to pack. And there's multiple things could happen, you know. The day could come and maybe you're over rehearsed and you're just tired of it. Other things could be the crowd's not feeling feeling like it. There's no feeling in the crowd kind of kind of getting you amped up a little bit. And it sucks. It really does. It sucks to have all that preparation. And the worst, I think, I think that happens to anybody is you prepare for this big, big show. And there's like six people in the crowd. And that's happened to me a few times. It's it's disheartening. It sucks. I mean, it sucks. I'm not going to lie. It freaking sucks to put all your work into the show, into this performance. And then for it to just be kind of like, yeah, and that's it. Oh, come on. It sucks. It sucks. But I'll tell you, as as someone who's been through many, many hurricanes and someone who's been through many, many performances, I would prepare the same every single time when when I'm being I'm being threatened with a hurricane coming from my house. And my family, I'm going to prepare the same way every single time, whether it's going to turn away from us or it's going to come straight through us. I'm going to still do the same preparations every time because you just you don't know. And the same thing with performing is, you know, you're going to have these shows that just kind of fizzle out. And, you know, you you spend all this time preparing for and it's just not what you envisioned in your head. And it it's disheartening. You know, it can really send you back a little bit. And kind of make you question what you're doing. But you got to treat it like you got to treat it the same way a Floridian treats a hurricane. You prepare the same way, regardless how the last show turns out. You still continue to put all your heart into the preparation. You still continue to plan, plan, plan, because no matter what happens, eventually, eventually your preparation is going to pay off. So I'm I mean, I'm sad to say that eventually, you know, my preparation for a hurricane is. Probably going to pay off. We are going to get hit with a hurricane event. You know, it's inevitable. It's going to happen. It happened. It's happened three times in like three years now, four years. So it's it's one of those things that it's going to happen and you have to continue to prepare. As a matter of fact, I actually got interviewed out of from a news station in Orlando. And one of the when they interviewed us, they they asked, you know, so what do you think about the storm? You know, you're taking it serious. Are you staying? optimistic. And I told him the truth and I'll tell you the truth. You got to take it all. serious. Whether it's a hurricane or a performance, you got to take it serious, but you also have to stay optimistic. You have to take it serious. You have to prepare as if you're getting on stage in front of thousands of people, and you have to stay optimistic that it is going to happen, and there are going to be people there, and there are going to be this, you're going to have a performance. So you have to stay optimistic about it as well. But the same thing with moving forward after that performance, no matter what happens, you have to still plan and prepare the next one, and you have to still put all your heart into it all over again. Because I'll tell you, if I get it, if I wake up tomorrow and the news is saying that the hurricane is coming back around, I'm going to do all the same stuff all over again, and not even give it a second thought. And you have to do the same thing with your performance. You have to prepare, and plan, and rehearse, and prepare, and I say prepare a lot, but you have to. Every single time, no matter what's happened on your previous performance, you still have to get up, put the work in, prepare, plan, get ready, execute, and do it all over again. Every single time, no matter what happens. It's part of what you do. It's part of who you are, and it's that step to becoming that performer that you want to be. So no matter what, plan, and prepare, and pray for the Bahamas. I guess that's the message today, is prepare your shows, keep putting in the work, keep putting in the heart, keep putting in the effort. No matter what happens, just keep going. You have an opportunity to work with me if you're interested. You can jump on my calendar, beingonstage.com slash calendar. Put in your name and your email, pick a time. I'll call you at the date and time that you want to be on stage. Let's get it going. Let's get you planning and preparing your next show, and your next, and your next, and your next show. That's what I'm here for. I'm here for you. As always, keep on shining.