There’s a particular kind of energy backstage and it isn’t necessarily peaceful. It’s the silence of a held breath – yours, mostly. The hum of the crowd bleeds through the curtain, a formless noise that somehow makes the space behind it feel smaller. You check your notes one more time even though you know them. You shift your weight and try to swallow as if you’ve never drank a glass of water in your life… You wonder, briefly, if you’ve forgotten how to speak.
This is the backstage experience that almost no one talks about honestly. And it’s completely normal!
What It Actually Feels Like Back There
Backstage feels like a liminal space – you’re neither here nor there. The version of you that was calm at breakfast and confident in rehearsal seems to have gone somewhere else, and in its place is someone hyper-aware of their own heartbeat.
You feel like you can’t breath right. Your hands might feel oddly cold or oddly warm. Some people get a strange urge to laugh. Others go very, very quiet. I like to tell a lot of jokes! A few feel a wave of emotion where you want to cry, which is just good old adrenaline.
What’s happening physiologically is straightforward: your body has decided this moment matters, and it’s flooding your system with the chemicals it reserves for important events. The same cocktail that sharpened your ancestor’s focus before a hunt is now making you hyperaware of whether your shirt looks right and your collar is straight.
Here’s the reframe that changes everything: your body cannot distinguish between fear and excitement. The symptoms are identical. Elevated heart rate, heightened senses, quickened breath – that’s not panic. That’s readiness. The only difference between the two is the story you tell yourself about what’s happening.
The Moment Before You Walk Out
There’s usually a moment – ten seconds, maybe thirty – where you can hear the person introducing you. Your name is out there in the room before you are. The audience is forming an expectation and that moment can feel enormous.
Most people try to calm down at this point. They take deep breaths, they tell themselves to relax, they try to dial the feeling back. I’m here to tell you that this is the wrong instinct. Trying to suppress adrenaline right before you speak is like trying to un-brew coffee. The energy is already made. The better move is to redirect it, not reduce it.
Roll your shoulders back. Plant your feet for a second and feel the floor. Not to calm down – but to get grounded inside the energy rather than swept around by it. There’s a difference between being nervous at the stage and being charged up for it.
Then someone says your name, or a hand gestures you forward, and the curtain parts or the door opens, and you go. No turning back now!
The Walk Itself
The walk onto a stage is one of the most psychologically loaded ten seconds in public life. Every eye in the room turns to you before you’ve said a word. You are being read – your posture, your pace, the expression on your face – and the audience is already deciding how they feel about you.
Walk slower than you think you should. Nerves make people rush – they want to get to the podium, get behind something, get somewhere that feels like safety. But a hurried walk signals anxiety and hands your authority away before you’ve opened your mouth.
Own the distance. Take up the time the walk gives you. Look at the room – not scanning frantically, but actually seeing it. Find one friendly face in the first few rows and let that be your anchor.
When you arrive at the front, don’t speak immediately. Stand for just a moment. Breathe. Let the room settle around you. This pause – which will feel unbearably long to you and last about three seconds in reality – tells the audience that you’re not afraid of the space. That you belong in it. And in telling them, you begin to tell yourself.
Five Ways to Beat the Jitters That Actually Work
1. Warm your hands up before you go on. Cold hands are a classic anxiety symptom and they pull your attention inward at exactly the wrong moment. Rub them together, hold a warm cup of water, press them briefly against the back of your neck. It sounds trivial. It helps.
2. Hum quietly in the minutes before you speak. Not to warm up your voice – though it does that too – but because humming activates the vagus nerve and genuinely dials down your fight-or-flight response. Thirty seconds of quiet humming backstage does more than five minutes of anxious deep breathing.
3. Name what you’re feeling out loud, to yourself. Whisper it if you have to: “I’m nervous.” There’s solid research behind this – labeling an emotion reduces its intensity. The act of naming it creates just enough psychological distance that it stops running the show.
4. Find something to be curious about. Anxiety is largely self-focused -it’s all about you, your performance, your potential failure. Curiosity points outward. Before you walk on, ask yourself a genuine question about the audience: Who’s in this room? What do they actually need from this talk? It redirects your attention away from yourself, which is exactly where it needs to go.
5. Accept that the first 30 seconds will feel worse than the rest. This is the most practical tip of all. The jitters almost always peak in the first half-minute and then dissolve once you’re actually speaking and the audience is responding. If you know this in advance, you stop interpreting those opening nerves as a sign that something is wrong – and you ride them out instead of panicking about them.
After You Step Into the Light
Something shifts when you start speaking. It doesn’t always happen immediately, but it happens. The audience becomes real and individual faces instead of a blur, and the connection you came to make starts forming. The nerves don’t vanish, but they change character because they become fuel rather than friction.
The backstage version of you – dry-mouthed, second-guessing, quietly terrified – was never the real story. It was just the price of admission! Every speaker you’ve ever admired paid it too, standing in that same wings-darkness, listening to their own heartbeat, wondering if they were ready.
They weren’t ready. They went anyway.
So will you!