I’ve done presentations to over 1,000 kids in a gym, and to more than 200 educators at once. I don’t mind getting in front of people to speak. However, give me just three lines to read in a play and I’m a mess. The idea of acting is scary to me. That I need to worry about what I’m doing to portray a different character as well as speak is all too much for me. I don’t like doing it, and part of that comes from feeling I’m not good at it, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of my performance.

This past week my youngest daughter was in a couple plays at school. I saw one of them twice and the other one three times. The kids did an amazing job! The plays where both comedies and the performers’ timing and delivery were excellent. This always impresses me, when I see young people putting themselves ‘out there’, on the stage, putting on a character that is nothing like who they really are.

Watching them reminded me of the Shakespeare quote from his play, ‘As You Like It’:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

We are in some ways always on stage; always playing a part. I have shared this on my online profiles for well over a decade now:

A husband, a parent… An educator, a student… A thinker, a dreamer… An agent of change.

These are different parts of my life that I play. I do my best to be authentic in all of them, and I value each of these roles a lot. It is interesting that I don’t mind the role of presenter, but I fear the role as actor. I don’t mind one stage, while I loath the other.

I think this is partly why I enjoy going to a theatre, and why I enjoy watching my daughter in her plays. She gets to shine somewhere that I would struggle. She feeds off the audience where I would fear their judgement. She thrives on the laughter and applause where I would be embarrassed by it.

I can see that my daughter and I look upon a stage performance in completely different ways. This makes me think about how different my perspective must be to others perspective on life… on performing on Life’s stage. How does the idea of ‘family’ or ‘learning’ that we each have affect our performance? How does our mindset affect our skill set? My idea of acting is so different than my daughter’s. She thrives and I cower. What happens to parents that see themselves as incompetent or students that sees themselves as a stupid?

We are so different in the way we can view the same world. If I say ‘think of a dog’, one of you might think of a poodle, another might think of a pit bull; one of you might think of a pet another might think of a bite that created a lifelong fear. Our perspective is influenced greatly by our history, and while we share the same physical world, our minds construct significantly different realities.

What can we do to help those with stage fright when all the world is a stage?