well, I don’t think so anyway. In the same way as a headache is not a migraine and a cold is not flu.
What’s more, performance anxiety is perfectly normal, natural and a good thing when you’re making presentations or doing some public speaking! In fact, a friend of mine recently defined the difference between the two ideas as the point at which it stops being a plus, enhancing your performance, and starts being a negative, reducing the quality of your performance.
Where-ever the exact break-point between the two, I’m pretty sure that this guy is wrong. He refers to them all the way through his article as the same thing: I think that’s doing his clients a huge dis-service because it’s putting them under a mis-apprehension. It also belittles those people who suffer from real Stage Fright.
I know it sounds like I’m just riding a hobby-horse here but I feel strongly about this. The reason is pretty simple: on our public presentation skills training courses I spend a lot of my time working with people who are nervous and think that they’re some kind of ‘failure’ or have some kind of ‘problem with public speaking’ because of that. It’s important that people understand that this isn’t the case.
Being nervous – that is, having presentation nerves – is normal, natural and useful. Calling it Stage Fright, with all the stigma and so on attached to that just isn’t helpful!
