Performance Anxiety with Dr. Nicholas Perna EYV75

My name is Nancy Bos and I'm your host. Today we are diving in with an amazing conversation about performance anxiety or stage fright from Dr. Nicholas Perna. Now, Nick is a tenor, operatic and music theater. He is a voice teacher, a voice researcher, and the Associate Professor of Voice and Voice Pedagogy at Mississippi College. He also teaches independently. He's got a YouTube channel that you'll hear about at the end and the Vocal Fry Podcast. All of this is to say that Nick is an amazing resource to be able to talk about his own journey through how he developed severe stage fright performance anxiety after already having a successful career as a young opera singer. His journey through that, how he healed that with reshaping his narratives, looking at his own personal stories, what he believed in, how he found balance in his personal life, his health, his body, the entire holistic instrument that we use for voice and speech. It was a lot of work, the journey that he went through. And that is one thing that I say over and over. I said it in my TED Talk. It's a lot of work to reframe your personal narratives so that they work for you and not against you, and Nick went through that work. Hopefully you hearing his story will help shave some time off of the work you need to do, or it will help motivate you forward to know that this is not going to hurt. What do you have to lose? Let's get this work done. Let's move forward. If you like what you hear today, I would ask you to please go to my website, nancybos.me, and click on the courses tab. There you will see a course called Empower Your Voice. Now, Empower Your Voice came out of my TED Talk this summer because as I talked about my own vocal empowerment journey, going from severe performance anxiety that completely changed the direction of my life because I was unwilling to be on a stage even though that seems to be my calling, to how I began to overcome that performance anxiety. That has inspired many, many people to reach out because they want more— how to empower your voice through your personal narratives, through your stories. I mean, this is classic work that a therapist or a coach will do, but we're talking about your voice. We're talking about your speaking voice, your singing voice, your written voice, your psychological voice. What is it that keeps you blocked, keeps you holding back, causes you anxiety or fear or just worry and keeps you from expressing yourself and your core and your passion and your mission to the world. And that's what you're going to hear Nick talk about today, is how this caused him worry and anxiety and fear, and he was not okay with that. And so he tackled it. You can tackle it. When you go to that Empower Your Voice tab on NancyBos.me, you're going to find the classes that I work— those are small group classes. You're going to find the webinars that I give that are free that you can attend to start this journey for yourself. And you can also reach out and book a time with me for a one-on-one consultation. This is important stuff. It stopped me for decades. It stopped Nick for a very long time. You're here listening to this story, you or someone you know suffers from this type of thing, share this episode, share this information. Because if you learn how to speak and sing and write from your heart, from your whole body engaged with meaning and purpose, that, that is what you have been called to this planet to do. And it is what you bring to this world that can change this world and make it a better place. Don't hold back. Move forward. Get this work done so that you can go out there and be frickin' Amazing. Now here is Dr. Nicholas Perna talking about his journey. Here we go. Hey, Nick, welcome. I'm so glad to have you here.

Oh, Nancy, I'm, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you, and honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. When we were talking on your podcast, it came up, the topic of performance anxiety, and you talked a little bit about your own journey. And so that got me super curious if you'd be willing to share it with my audience and, and hopefully, you know, other people too. So let's just dive right in. We already know that you've had an amazing performing career when you were younger. Uh, you're a professor now, singing now, but in between there was a time when I understand you experienced anxiety that kept you from sharing your voice. Can you tell us where that came from and what it was like for you?

Yeah, you know, I think like all things with singing, I don't think anything is ever about just one thing. I think it's about a holistic thing. And And there were a lot of things that affected me maybe not sharing my voice, and performance anxiety kind of came out of that. And so I think it's important that I set up the story just with a little bit of brief background about my singing journey.

Cool.

I grew up not a natural singer. I mean, I sang, but I didn't realize that I didn't necessarily have a naturally perfectly functioning voice. Um, I, I actually had to learn how to sing, as it were. Um, and but the one thing I always could do was sing high.

Okay.

I never had a problem with that. Anyway, come to college, and I'm going to take you through two 18-month spans that kind of set this journey of performance anxiety.

Okay, so you're about 18 coming to college?

Uh, yes. And then I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk you through. Okay, so at the end of my sophomore year Okay, I fail my performance barrier. 18 months later, and that developed my first kind of like— I was aware all of a sudden, like those first couple years of college, like, oh, I'm maybe, I, I'm maybe not what I thought I was.

Wow, there's judgment and there's expectations, there's a bar that's being set that you can't control.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I was not being prepared for that mentally, and I'm going to come back to that as we go. Then But just 18 months after failing my barrier, I won my first audition to be an apprentice artist in Santa Fe.

That's huge.

It was that rapid.

I just—

I—

gosh, even to get into the chorus in Santa Fe is a big deal, and there you were, a paid opera singer.

So, so I like, you know, made my, made my pro debut fresh out of college, whatever. But then 18 months after that, my voice basically just fell apart.

Okay, so they loved your money notes, right?

Yes. And so when I was in that, I had no performance anxiety. When I was in that, like, young peak, I could sing Daughter of the Regiment without warming up, and I didn't even think anything about it.

Wow.

And, and, and was, you know, winning other auditions, competitions. People were interested in me. Agents were interested in me. Other companies were interested in me. You know, whatever. I was, I was doing the thing. I was doing the thing you were supposed to do, right?

Yeah, totally.

And then it was like, as quickly as it kind of coordinated the first time, it basically fell apart. And it's complex, right? It's not just— there were a lot of things about it. I had worked with a teacher that didn't work for me. I had gained a lot of weight. I had not mentally been prepared for the rejection, acceptance, rejection of the profession. Yeah, I had developed pretty severe acid reflux because of my obesity. I had— and all of a sudden, for the first time after my voice coordinating, I started struggling with my singing. Yeah. And then I started having problems in two specific ways that are very easily relatable to any singer. I started having trouble with my periodicity of my vibrato. And I started losing my high notes.

So did your vibrato get faster or slower?

Uh, actually it got less wide.

Okay, okay. So less noticeable for the ear.

Yes, it was there, but it perceived as faster.

Okay.

Sorry, my scientist brain kind of takes over.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, you would have perceived it as faster. Okay, and less consistent.

Cool.

Um, is, is what I would say.

And then you lost the high notes, which was the money notes, which was what— that's the fireworks.

Ah, right, right. And, and particularly singing the rep that I was singing as a young high lyric tenor. I mean, it was like everything. It was like my everything. And then all of a sudden, when I would go to perform, I, I, I can list some specific characteristics. Of extremely tight epigastrium. Like, I would just feel just this, like my entire upper ab area just feel like just a giant ball of tension.

Sure, sure.

That led to even worsening physical health. And so, like, my, my performance anxiety not only manifested itself in ways in the action of performing, but it manifested in my mental health. It manifested manifested in my physical health and then to my singing. It created in me a habitually high larynx, and which in some singing styles might be good, right? As a classical Western classical music singer at that point of my life and journey, it was not good. And it was not good particularly because I wasn't in command of it. It wasn't a choice I was making. It wasn't a, it wasn't a decision I was making to sing this way. It was my larynx was locked in a high posture.

Okay, so if I'm hearing you right, that this— I'm going to use the word solar plexus for the area of your abdomen right below the diaphragm. That's where you felt this tension, and you feel that the cause of that lump in your upper gut was anxiety?

Yes, and I know it was because as I ended— once I was able to come out of this years later, Whenever it does manifest itself in me, because I don't— I think that, you know, dealing with our performance anxiety is a journey, right? It's not like you just get over it, flip a switch and it's gone and you never deal with it again.

Well, we're always changing people, so the variables are always changing. And so.

Yep, exactly. And, and but when I do experience in, in moments where I might have some performance anxiety, that is still how it manifests itself in me.

Okay.

So I know for a fact it's not that I necessarily feel sweaty or feel shaking knees and all that. Yeah, no, nothing like that. And it's interesting, I actually have quite a journey with my own physical self as well. Right. And I'm very body positive. With folks, and this is not to at all play down on anyone's own body journey, but I, at one point in my life, was a 325-pound individual and have gone through 100-plus-pound weight loss. Yeah. And I carry all my weight in my abdomen. Okay. And there's things that you just take with you from your body image, your literal body, shape that also get attached to your, you know, to you as a performer. Because as singers, right, like we're putting ourself out there.

Our identity is our body when we're singers.

Exactly. So anyway, I, you know, one of the things then that happened, here's another characteristic of my performance anxiety. As I then went through that, I kept going on like a downward spiral for about 5 years. And it was actually kind of the years of my— the tail end of my master's degree, my doctoral studies, even the front end of my first tenure-track job.

And were you also starting a family at this time?

Yes.

Wow, that's a lot of stress.

We had gotten married and had our first child. Actually, it was— and between the birth— around the time of the birth of our first child, my son Charlie, we— that was about the point where I had kind of come to feel at the time that my singing was over.

Wow.

When I did sing, I basically, to deal with my performance anxiety, had fractured off the idea that it would ever be good again. So much so that my performance anxiety was actually resulting in a numbness and a lack of being nervous. Mm-hmm.

Aha. Aha. Just who cares? Whatever.

Exactly. And I had a lot of people turn their back on me, had some eventually colleagues stab me in the back, some really terrible.

Yeah, academic.

A lot of horrible things happen in the academy.

Wow.

Um, I've experienced a lot of them personally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, particularly because we are very quick in the singing community, or historically have been very quick to— if anything goes wrong with a singer, right, we blame, we blame their technique.

Yeah, yeah, we do. That they're doing this wrong. Yep.

And that, let me just tell you, speaking as both a singer, singer, a singing teacher, a voice pedagogue, a scientist, and whatever, let me tell you, it is not always about technique when stuff goes wrong.

No.

You know, as a dear friend of mine who is a speech language pathologist has said to me when I've told her this story, she's convinced that I ended up with some type of muscle tension dysphonia throughout all this.

Yep.

And, um, yeah, so anyway, it came to this point where I was both— I knew I needed to do something, and I thought that that was giving up singing because I was still teaching well at the time. I was researching at the time. I was already publishing.

Sure, you're having success.

Yeah, like, there were— we had our kids that had just been born. There were a lot of good things.

Yeah.

But universities can be bloodsucking, vampiric entities.

I've been hearing that a lot lately.

And my first job, you know, basically chewed me up and spit me out. Wow. But at the tail end of that, I had— I was kind of forced into trying to deal with my singing.

Okay, okay.

And, you know, yeah, go ahead, please.

No, how, how are you forced to? Was it because this had to be a career option again? Is that what you mean?

Essentially, yes. I was actually literally forced to explore new options of voice teachers, right?

Right, absolutely.

Kind of thing. Now, it, it really kind of leads us into You had prepped me with some questions, but like, what kind of actions did I end up taking?

Yeah, let's go there because you've done a great job.

Because let's, let's, let's, let's, you know, let's kind of get into like, because we could dwell on, oh, this was bad or this was whatever. No need. What's really useful is, you know, how do we move past this stuff?

Uh-huh. I completely agree.

And like I said before, it's not like you just flip a switch. And poof, you're not, you know, whatever. But one of the, one of the things that I changed was my perspective on performance anxiety.

Okay.

Um, changing it from rather than not trying to experience it, rather I actually now prefer when I perform to get a little nervous. Okay. To energize me.

Right.

And to kind of focus my brain.

So you've reframed your narrative around what performance anxiety is.

In one way. But there was another even reframing that really helped me even a lot more. One of the teachers that had been recommended to me was a dear friend of mine now who had heard me when I was a young artist and an aspiring, you know, high whatever. But who had— I had lost track with. His name is Gerald Sienna. He's a professor of voice at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he had been recommended to me that I go seek out some lessons with him. And I was like, oh, I know Jerry. He knew me. I had sung a masterclass with him when I was young and whatever. So I actually felt pretty comfortable with that. And before we went in, I kind of sent him some recordings and reconnected and was like, look, this summer I'd like to come out. We'll do a couple of weeks of work. I'll go back, I'll come back.

Wow, that's a big commitment for somebody with a family at home.

It was. Well, but we, again, we didn't really have it. It was kind of by hook or by crook. Um, we didn't really have a lot of choice.

Yeah.

Um, and before we started our first session, he said to me, you got nothing to lose, I got nothing to lose, let's go play.

Wow, wow.

Now, voice teachers, if you're a voice teacher listening to this, this changed my paradigm about voice teaching.

Mm-hmm.

Because that is now the thought that I think no matter how perhaps anxiety-ridden a client comes into a session online, sometimes they're on tour and they're panicked because something's not feeling right, or they've got a, you know, a performance coming up. It's Messiah season. A lot of people were doing Messiahs, you know, that maybe they're nervous about something and they come in and I'm like, okay, look, 'You've already got the gig. Let's play and see what's going on,' rather than, 'Let me take this problem you've got, diagnose it, and help you fix it, and we'll get to work.' Yep. That, that sentence, yeah, literally changed my life when Jerry said that to me, because I went into that lesson— it had been a few years since I had had a lesson at that point, because every— the, the last number of years of lessons that I had had, no matter who it was with, Nothing was working.

Yeah, who can you trust too?

And everybody just blamed what was going on with my technique. Oh, and he said something to me actually in that session also that always stuck with me because I had come up again, I was young, and, and what do we do in classical singing world? We try to keep people singing light repertoire and yes, safe and this, that, and the other. All of my coaches thought I was singing the wrong repertoire, but no voice teachers would let me sing different repertoire because they all said I was going to ruin my voice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what you're saying is that, that if there's already something wrong, if you add weight or meat or thickness to your tone, that could exacerbate the problem.

Except I was doing the opposite.

Okay.

Because I kept trying to over-lighten.

Okay, got it. With the— it can work both ways with the high larynx and the muscle tension that it requires to lighten both in the, in the throat and in the ribs and the abs.

Yeah, so it was a really complex equation. But what he said to me in that lesson, Jerry said to me, nobody ever let you grow up, child star. And I was like, yep, I, it— I had never, you know So a couple of other things about what I did. So I did find a new teacher who provided me a new perspective just on singing. And sometimes I think one of the things that we have to do is we get stuck as performers trying to keep doing the thing that always worked, the thing that did work, rather than maybe realize that we need a paradigm shift, that we need to— and so one of the things I try to do with all my clients is I'm always like, Okay, well, let's explore something else. If this is not working, let's try something different. Um, one of the things— so one of the things I did was find the new teacher. One of the things that I did was I literally had to confront myself, and I had to do some self-exploration of my own self from a mental standpoint, from a physical standpoint. I would even say, um, without getting into any specifics of religion, from a spiritual standpoint. And, uh, all of those things were all part of the equation of what I had to kind of either reexamine in my life, or, you know, make changes from a really raw, internal perspective, sometimes external. But one of the other things that really helped me through all that also was literally, you kind of said this earlier, changing my perspective on less focusing in life on myself and more perspective on, you know, keeping my perspective on, my gosh, I've got these two beautiful children. Let me, let me love them.

Yeah.

My son ended up being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. That changes the way you think as a performer.

Really?

If my son doesn't have insulin for 5 days, he will die.

Right.

If I give a bad performance, I will not.

Right, right, right. Perspective.

And it just, you know, I'm not wishing that, that on anyone.

No.

Or their child.

Yeah.

But, but there are things in life that happen that put what we do as performers in perspective. I also, um, you know, you talked about reframing. I reframed my goals.

Okay.

You know, I think universities, when I was going through school, and I'm sure it was probably this way when you were going through school, a lot of us, and it still is to some degree, although I think it's shifting.

Okay.

If you were not a jet-setting singer working as a soloist with X and X and X, you were not successful.

Correct.

And, and if you can even imagine yourself doing anything else, you should go and be a plumber.

Yes. Don't do this unless there's anything else that you can do. Yes.

And I, I really had to change my own perspective on like what it even means to be— to give a successful performance. And, and because I thought a successful performance meant a perfect performance.

Technically perfect, right?

With beautiful tone, beautiful tone, and, and perfect musical execution, and, you know, all this, that, and the other. And I had to— now when I hear, when I sing, when I perform, uh, and I listen back, sometimes I'll think, man, that was terrible, and I'll listen back and I'll be like, oh, that was actually a lot better. Or I'll think it was pretty good and I'll go, oh, but that comes through some really honest evaluation of realizing, not out of a place of hypercriticalness or hyper self-praise, of just kind of being like, oh, okay, you know, there were some things that were really good there. There were some things that maybe weren't as good. And you can do that with yourself too, realizing that like as you're, as you're going through your journey as a performer, You— let me tell— let me just— if you have any young listeners, you don't have to sing every repertoire ever created. You don't. You won't do it well. You can try. You will not. I had to learn as an adult singer what I sang well.

Yeah, yeah.

Like, absolutely. And I don't have to try to sing everything. You know, we were forced into an idea that if you didn't sing in every single time period and every single style and every single language and this, that, and the other, And now I'm like, you know what? I sing really well in Italian opera and I sing really well in American musical theater and I sing pretty well in a couple of other things too. But like, I know myself. Yeah. And, and boy, it will— if you can actually kind of go through the own journey of realizing like, hey, these are actually my strengths, these are actually maybe the things that, that are challenges to me. Not weaknesses, but that challenge me. You can, you can reframe your performance and, and, and the things you're choosing to do in performance. And I know it's, it's difficult if you want to be like a young working singer because you want to take any gig you can get, anything.

You got to be able to do it all.

And I get that, I get that, except that can create some unrealistic expectations of yourself as a human.

Yeah, it can launch you down a path that's not sustainable.

Right. Now, the one other thing I wanted— that I wanted to talk about in regards to this is the other thing that really helped, right, was literally going to therapy, right? And I just can't— I think my parents grew up in a generation where that was not a thing that, you know, you did. I think that is now growing much, you know, we are destigmatizing therapy of all— of many different kinds.

Yeah, yeah. People that I know in their 20s are now saying, I think I should go back to a therapist for a while. It's like, wow, in, in my generation you would never admit that you went to a therapist ever, right? Yeah.

I think that universities have done a bad job of preparing singers. I don't care what field we're talking about— musical theater, opera, pop music— I don't care.

Yep.

The journey of being a performer is being in touch with your inner dialogue.

Absolutely. I would say in my experience, one specific genre in the university system that does a terrible job with this is Christian musicians.

Oh, without question.

Don't look inside yourself because all the answers are out here. Just, yeah.

But, but, but you know, when, when I went through my operatic training, we weren't being told how to mentally prepare ourselves to view ourselves as a business model and how to mentally be ready from a performance aspect about how to handle that mentally when something does go wrong.

Right. You don't just quit. You don't give up.

If you look at almost every PGA Tour golfer now, they all have a performance coach, you know, a mental performance coach.

Peak performance coaches in sports are pretty common.

Yeah, exactly. And when you look at, you know, the great people in those fields, whether it was unhealthy or healthy, it was the people who refused to let their brain break that ended up rising to really high levels.

Yeah.

And I'm not suggesting that that's healthy because there have been some repercussions in a lot of those people's lives. I think Tiger Woods is the most obvious public public example of that. But, but we were not trained to be like, hey, you should probably be seeing a therapist regularly in seasons of your life. It's okay, it's appropriate, maybe it's necessary. Because being a singer, using your own— we as singers, we so relate our self-worth and our self-identity with what our voice is doing. Humans do this with our speaking voice. But as singers, if you're struggle-bussing with your— to use, you know, maybe a 2005 term— with your— I think that's where my, you know, youth pop culture knowledge ends.

I've never heard that word before, so there's our difference.

But if, but if But if you are struggling with your singing voice as a singer, the self-anguish that that creates.

Yes.

And so I will really say that that has helped me as a teacher as well and helped me feel more whole as a teacher. Not even in the fact that if I want to demonstrate a phrase for a student now, yes, I can demonstrate a phrase. Fine, whatever. I actually rarely demonstrate.

Faculty recital, you can show up and perform.

But I can. Yes. But I also, you know, can share with them, hey, it's okay that, you know, we're struggling with this. And we look at like, look, we would never at this point in the singing community, hopefully, be shy about sending someone out to an otolaryngologist, right?

If there's something physically— stuff happens to the body, like your GERD, your acid reflux.

Exactly. Why would we be any more ashamed by sending someone to a psychologist?

Right.

I, I, so I just, I can't, um, you know, I'm, I'm very grateful. My, my, uh, one of my therapists, his name was Fred, um, Fred the Therapist, saved, saved my life.

Wow.

Um, in a lot of ways. And, and, um, yeah, it, so it's, it's a holistic thing though, right? Like, oh, you know, I, I don't know that for me like so many things in singing, it's often not just about, now let me do this SOVT exercise and it will fix everything in my life from my finances to my exercise habits. No, no, no, no, no. Life is much more— being a singer is much more holistic than that.

It is.

And so that was a, you know, I'm happy to say that now when I sing, I sang my first professional opera back after that journey in 2016. I have a nice relationship here with Opera Mississippi. I've sung with them 5 of the last 6 seasons, either on their cabaret series doing my own cabaret or on the main stage doing an opera. I'm actually doing Alfred in Die Fledermaus in April. Cool. But even within that, I specifically remember actually only 3 years ago in 2019, I gave a faculty recital and it was the first singing I had done back where I thought— and I sang a number of— I sang the Liszt, one of the Liszt Tre Sonetti di Petrarca with the high D-flats in it. And I sang "Made of Stone" from Hunchback, added the high C at the end. It was where it was the first time I felt like, oh yeah, this is— this is actually not only my— am I back to being a tenor? But like, this is what performing— like, I remember this, like, but it was in a much healthier way.

Yeah.

Like, it wasn't about like, hey, watch me sing these high notes. That was just part of the craft. That had come out of years of, yes, lessons and technique, technical work, artistic considerations, therapy, reframing my perspective, you know, and—

And getting healthy with your food choices, finding balance in your personal life.

And thank you for saying that. And I think that's the thing too, that for me, I have a personality type that is very Type A-ish, and I will make things happen by my will, whether they will happen or not.

Got it.

But because of that, I have struggled through my life also with a kind of a journey of arrogance to being humbled.

Oh, got it.

And and sometimes very publicly, sometimes very privately. But I think what you end up needing as a performer is that balance. You can't go out as a performer and think you're going to fail.

Right.

But you also don't want to go out afraid of succeeding either.

Wow. That's right. You have to have that confidence that this is good.

And but it's about, it's, it's the balance in that.

It is.

It's the balance in, yes, in your, in your food choice, in your physical life, in your mental life, in your balancing your work-life balance, which is full confession, a struggle for me.

Um, for me, the, um, the important part for me in my journey was realizing that it's not about me, it's about the message and the impact, and that I am the vehicle for that message and impact. And so if I optimize my life, my instrument, and my mental state, then I am the best possible vehicle for impacting that audience. That's how I wrap it all together for me, you know.

And, and for— and, and as I have matured, that has become a, a great part of what I do as well as a performer, because now when I choose repertoire When I was young, I was just like, "Let me sing the highest note I can to look very fancy." Yeah. Now I'm actually in the middle of preparing. In the next season or two, I'm going to start using Finzi's A Young Man's Exhortation as kind of what I'm going to call my mature tenor song cycle. I have no interest in doing a Winterreise or doing a Die Schöne Mühle. It's not my thing. But the reason I want to do it is because I have some very specific things with the poetry of the Hardy poetry.

Cool.

That I, that I want to say to my kids before I can't say it to them as a singer anymore.

Wow, I love it. This is big.

Um, and, and so, uh, yeah, there are just— and to my wife, I should not just say to my kids.

Oh yeah, that's right.

Um, but, uh, I have—

anyway, I have one big burning question though before we wrap this up. Yeah, you had said very early in this conversation that you now look forward to the nervousness. And let me add this, that I have not ever since I really tackled this hardcore when I was 35, and it took me about 5, 6 years. I don't get nervous anymore. I feel energized, excited. If I sometimes— like, I was just interviewed on an NPR show a couple of days ago, and so I thought, should I be nervous? Is this nervousness? And it was so easy for me to say, you know what, no, I'm just excited. I don't know what's going to happen, but it's going to be good. So I would like to hear— I think you've got a different perspective on nervousness, and I know there's a lot of people who never get over being nervous, even if they learned to overcome most of the debilitating impact. So I'd like to hear your nervousness.

I guess maybe it's just that I have used it, learned to use it as a tool for good rather than a tool for evil. I, Folk, I've never been diagnosed, but my brain functions very much like someone with ADHD. I've never been actually tested.

You and me both, baby.

And, and focusing can be an interesting thing in my life. Um, and I find that that little bit of nerves gives me the focus I need to focus on being strategic in my performance. Um, and it's interesting, I will say I don't get nervous when I'm on stage. I don't get nervous for opera or musical theater.

Cool.

It's really only when I recite or sometimes when I give talks at conferences or things like that, although not so much with that anymore.

When the solo spotlight is on you and you alone and you're carrying the entire show.

And I'm not someone else.

Yeah.

Oh. Because when I'm someone else— Yeah. I did Showboat a couple seasons ago. I can be Gaylord Ravenol right now and not worry about, you know, not— I'm not, I'm not worried about doing Alfred at all, even though Alfred being a literal tenor and singing teacher in the opera of Die Fledermaus might— but I've also done that show a bunch, so I'm not really worried about it. But, but, uh, yeah, it, it's so— I, I, I guess it's situational, but like in a recital, I really do need to I need to focus.

Yeah.

And it's a different, it's a different, uh, energy, right? It's a different space.

Yeah.

Um, and, and so I just try to, you know, use, use what nerves I do have for good rather than to debilitate me.

So do you recommend to your students that they develop characters in all cases, or do you recommend that they be themselves? What, what do you teach them when they're dealing?

I think, I think it, I think it varies by—

okay.

I think it varies by the rep. I think that there are times in any kind of repertoire where we— I think any time we're even playing a character, we're drawing on ourself and our own life experiences to embody that. But I think that there are moments when you're singing where you really need to be in touch with your reality to reflect the poetry.

Yeah. Oh wow. I really want people to know how to learn more about you and what you do and take advantage of what you have to offer the world, Nick.

So nicholasperna.com, um, if, if you want to just learn more about me or you want to actually work with me, I do have quite an online studio. I teach a lot of voice teachers, I teach a lot of, um, post-grad musical theater and opera folks, um, professional musical theater singers. Um, I, uh, have a YouTube channel, Nicholas Perna. Tenor and teacher. And also, if you've not listened to Nancy's episode from this fall of the Vocal Fry Podcast, I run a little podcast called Vocal Fry with an I, which is one word, vocalfry.com. Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever you like.

Cool. Well, thank you so much for being here, Nick. It has been great to have you here, and I know there's a lot of gems the audience is going to take away.

Thank you for having me. My pleasure.

My deep gratitude to Nick. You heard where you can find more and learn more about Nick and even work with him. I will put those links in the show notes. I'm so happy that you were here for this today. You stuck through to the end. Way to go. Remember to go to NancyBos.me, click on that courses tab, look for Empower Your Voice, and that is how you can start this journey, how you can move forward making making your changes now. Now it's time. It's time for you to get over your worry, anxiety, fear, blocks, all those negative crap that's holding you back from being the amazing you. Thank you for being here. Have a great one.