16 October

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat that out of me, you can’t function as a teacher with a fear of standing in front of a crowd. But here’s another way to think about crowds. A crowd isn’t real. There is no crowd watching you. There are a whole lot of individuals out there, thinking and feeling their own individual thing, about you or often about somerthing else entirely, like their day, or their boyfriend etc. You are always only ever playing or speaking to one person. Lots of one person, but just one person. Never to a ‘crowd’. The best performers intuitively know this, they perform the same way to 3 people as they do to 30,000. Why they seem to be ‘speaking to’ you, as a listener, individually.