When I was in first grade, I had my first role in a school play.  Actually, it was a summer camp play.  I played the old wise man in the story.  Since I didn’t exactly have facial hair in first grade, I wore a piece of paper cut into the shape of a beard, and we glued cotton balls on top to give it a white beard appearance.  There was string going into the sides that looped around my head to keep it on. Halfway through the performance, the string started slipping, my face was sweating and the paper ripped.

I had to hold my beard up for the remainder of the skit.  I was mortified.  I was absolutely positive that all six hundred people watching were laughing at me, and that I had completely destroyed any credibility I had as a person.

For the next twelve years, I refused to stand up in front of a group of people unless I was forced to.  In school, I would refuse to give a Current Event report.  I’d turn in my written draft, but I refused to present it to the class.  I didn’t do book reports, presentations, class skits, or school plays.  I took zeroes rather than present them to the class.

My junior year of high school, I was forced to present a scene to my English class.  A scene from “The Crucible.”  I played one of the adult men whose wife had been taken away for stoning, and my partner played the priest.  Honestly, he did a terrible job.  Very monotone and boring, while I was passionate and angry.  I felt pretty good about it, actually.  I decided in my moment of bravado to jump off the stage rather than walk around to the steps.  When I landed, I twisted my ankle and slammed my head against the front row of seats.  I was fine, but my ego was bruised once again.  Again, I refused to participate in any sort of public speech for years.

At the end of my freshman year of college, I was required by my school to take “Oral Communications” or speech class.  I opted to take it during a summer term, so as to minimize the time spent in that class.   Get it over with as quickly as possible.

Our first assignment was to read an excerpt from anything we wanted to the class.  I procrastinated and grabbed “The Hobbit” off my bookshelf on the way out of my dorm room.  I got to class early, perused the first couple of pages til I found a page that I felt would be entertaining.  “Hobbits are creatures…”  I’m a fast reader, so I was able to read a whole sentence at once and look up while I said it.

The grades came down and I got an A.  “You must have practiced.  Great eye contact!”

The second assignment was to give a 2 minute speech about a quality about ourselves.  Guess what I chose!  You’re right:  stagefright.  I was so scared.

I got up at the podium and began to speak.  My legs were shaking, my palms were sweating, I gripped the podium.  I shifted from foot to foot, I stuttered.  I said “uhh..”

“My uh.. quality is that I’m uh.. scared of uh.. getting up in front of people.  I, um, get really nervous, and I uh.. stutter and say Uh… uh… and I sweat and um.. shake.  And I feel like I’m about to, uh.. to pee in my pants.. It’s like, uh.. like you’re staring at me like.. that… and it makes me, uh.. nervous.”

This went on for the requisite two minutes.  I literally described everything I felt at that moment.  I was literally about to shit myself.  Finally, the whole ordeal was over and I sat down.  I shook for the rest of the class period, I was so nervous.

Grades came back.  I got another A.  “Great acting!” she wrote.

What?

What acting?

I was seriously nervous!

At that moment, I had an epiphany.  I realized that she honestly thought I had been acting.  She WANTED me to do a good job, and so she projected that desire onto my performance.  She would rather assume that I had acted than believe that I had done so poorly.  The rest of the class had convinced themselves of that, too.

Armed with this knowledge, I gathered up the courage to audition for the next Shakespeare production.  I had developed an obsession with Shakespeare following our 10th and 12th grade studies of “Julius Caesar” and “Macbeth”, as well as watching the film “Shakespeare in Love.”  If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this, go rent it and watch it.  Dude, seriously.

At any rate, the play I auditioned for was the Scottish Play, and I actually got cast and had lines!  By the time opening night came around, I wasn’t very nervous.  I had performed my bit in front of the cast dozens of times, and when the audience was actually out there, I didn’t even notice.

I realized that they paid money to see a GOOD performance.  They don’t want me to screw up.  They don’t want me to forget my lines.  So long as I didn’t go “OMG, WTF HAX!” I’d be okay.  So long as I didn’t admit that I messed up, they’d believe that I meant to do whatever it was that I did.  If I missed a line and Glenn covered it for me, they’d assume that was supposed to happen.  If I forgot my hat and had to walk back onstage to get it, they’d assume that was supposed to happen.

People will assume the best of you most of the time, and they will project that view onto whatever you do.

Ever since that moment, I’ve performed in dozens of shows on stage, I’ve taught for two years in public high schools, and worked in three drama camps teaching kids how to act and other aspects of theatre.  I think we can safely assume that I’m over that insecurity.

It’s not entirely gone.  There are moments when I get really nervous when I’m about to speak, or times when I really don’t feel comfortable speaking in front of people.  But by and large, I’m comfortable speaking.

As an actor (or really, this applies to anyone), self-confidence will help you with everything.  It will help you land jobs, make friends, make contacts.  Insecurity will diminish your options in those areas.  People don’t want to work with someone who’s constantly afraid of losing their job or afraid of hurting someone’s feelings or whatever.  They don’t want to hang around someone who’s needy and desperate.  People want friends who act sure of themselves, who act confident in their own abilities.

Self-confident people aren’t people without insecurities.  They’re people who have worked through their insecurities and are able to function in spite of them.  It’s okay to be insecure!  It’s okay to be afraid.  It’s not okay to let them take over your life.  Insecurity is like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you’re afraid of losing your job so badly that you act like you’re afraid of losing your job… you’re probably going to lose your job.  If you act like you know exactly what you’re doing, if you act like you’re going to be just fine, they’re much more likely to believe that you can recover from your mistakes and let you keep your job.

For the first 18 years of my life, I let my insecurity and fear get in my way.  I let it hurt my GPA in high school.  I let it keep me from making friends.  I let it keep me from meeting new people, from developing the social skills I needed so that I wouldn’t have to learn them later.

Now, I take my insecurities and push them aside.  I know that I can succeed, and I can’t let a tiny thing like fear get in the way.

This is different from false confidence.  Being self-confident means that you have to actually convince yourself that you can succeed, despite that fear that holds you back.  False confidence will get you nowhere.  False confidence is getting up there to speak, and then shitting in your pants anyway.

If you’re insecure about something — moving to a new place, speaking in front of people, auditioning for this show, applying to that school — just remember that people will think the best of you in the worst situations.  Use that to your advantage and don’t give in to fear and uncertainty.  Reach for that goal, and you’ll find you can make it.

Be self-confident.