What’s Different About me? I’ve got some skills, but I’m pretty much just like you. In High School and College, I was the drama jock, and singing star, won every trophy, was regarded as outgoing, risk-taking, humorous and fearless. You may think I’ve always been confident. Right? Unfortunately, No.

I moved to Hollywood to pursue a TV and film career. Almost immediately, I developed massive stage fright at every audition. I didn’t know what was going on. What the hell? I lost my grip, my mojo. It was gone, gone, gone! I waited in the hall at a number of auditions, got my sides, memorized my lines, got out of my chair, went into the room, the casting agent was sweet, warm and supportive, they turned on the red light to record me, the moment they hit record, I froze, felt threatened, I tried to hide my anxiety but couldn’t. They were warm and polite, but I still blew it.

There was nothing I could do! Audition after audition, I blew it! No sense of freedom, no sense of authority, no sense of control. Whatever I had, was gone! I figured, well “you’ve either got it or you don’t” and I just don’t. The magic is gone. Whatever it is, just figured I needed a shrink, some kind of therapy or something. One day out of frustration, I took my trophies off the shelf, awards off the wall, put them in a cardboard box and threw them in the trash and gave up on my dream.

A million years later, after many unsatisfying career choices, with the suggestion of my wife, I moved closer to my passion, by becoming a singing and voice coach, developing a number of innovations for masterful voice training, then expanded into developing solutions for stuttering, and other “impossible” voice issues, such as spasmodic
dysphonia. I really loved being a voice coach.

Then one day, one of my singing students walked up to me, confessing a serious problem, her greatest performance pain, a crippling form of presentation anxiety, she had suffered from her entire life. She told me all about it and asked if I could help. I told her I would think about it over the weekend. Here it was, the very thing that ended my dream.

How could I help her with something I suffered from as well? I knew this was an opportunity for me to potentially fix myself as well. What was this dreadful monster? Was I willing to face my personal shame as well?

We began working together and slowly over time, I discovered we shared many habits in common, she revealed her cruel internal dialogue habit, how she was mean to herself, her critical thinking habit, her inability to have a good time when on stage, and more. I turned to books looking for answers, I was a frustrated coach, I tried other peoples techniquesand nothing worked, until by trial and error, I slowly discovered The Confidence Edge :  The 9 Core Concepts of Personal and Public Speaking Confidence.