The backstage area before a keynote in Innsbruck was a hallway with a coat rack and a half-eaten bowl of pretzels. I had about eight minutes before I was on. The organizer had just told me that the previous speaker had run over, the room was primed but restless, and could I please keep it tight. And I was looking for my backup envelope, which was not where I had put it.
I found it two minutes later, in the inner pocket of my jacket where I had placed it with the specific intention of being easy to find. I had placed it there and then the anxiety of the morning had filed the information in an area of my brain I couldn’t access under light pressure.
That was the day I built a ritual.
Why Ritual Works
Pre-performance rituals are often discussed in terms that make them sound either mystical or superstitious — the athlete who wears the same socks, the musician who eats the same meal before a concert. The mystical framing misses what’s actually happening.
Ritual works because anxiety is primarily a disruption of attention. When you’re pre-performance anxious, your attention is fragmented: part of it is on what’s about to happen, part of it is scanning for threats, part of it is in a hypothetical future where things have gone wrong. This fragmented attention is what makes you forget where you put the backup envelope. It’s what makes you walk into a performance without having checked your materials. It’s what makes you start talking before you’ve oriented to the room.
A ritual is a sequence of concrete, physical actions that require enough specific attention to occupy the anxious parts of your mind while also, as a byproduct, actually preparing you for the performance. It’s two things at once: a practical checklist and an anxiety interruption.
The ritual doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to be consistent. The consistency is what gives it power — because the body and mind recognize the sequence and begin to associate it with transitioning into performance mode. Over time, starting the ritual is itself a signal: this is the phase before the show. Act accordingly.
The Four Components
My pre-show ritual has four distinct parts, each of which serves a specific function, and none of which takes more than a minute or two.
The first is the tactile prop check. I’ll come back to this in more detail in another post — it deserves its own treatment — but the short version is that I handle every prop by touch before the show, not just by looking at it. The hands are better at catching missing or wrong-positioned items than the eyes are, especially under light anxiety. Running the sequence by touch also activates muscle memory: the hands remember what to do with these objects, and that memory is stored in the body, not in the anxious conscious mind.
The second is the breathing sequence. Two minutes, approximately. Not elaborate breathing exercises — just intentional, deliberate breathing. Slower than my resting rate, lower in the body (belly breathing rather than chest breathing), and focused enough that I’m actually attending to it rather than performing it while thinking about something else. This does something real to the nervous system. Not magic — physiology. Heart rate comes down. The voice settles. The quality of presence in the body shifts from scattered to grounded.
The third is finding one face. Before I’m on, I try to have a genuine brief conversation with at least one person in the audience — someone I can locate in the room once I start performing. This turns an abstract crowd into a space where there is at least one person I know, slightly, already. That specificity changes the opening dynamic. I’m not walking into a room full of strangers. I’m walking into a room with a specific person I’ve already met, surrounded by people I’m about to meet.
The fourth is reviewing the emotional arc. Not the mechanics — not running through which effect comes when or which line leads into which section. The emotional arc: what feeling does this show begin with? What feeling should it end with? What is the journey? This is brief — two or three minutes of quiet thought — but it reorients my attention to the thing that actually matters in the show, which is the audience’s experience, rather than the thing anxiety focuses on, which is whether I’ll execute correctly.
What the Ritual Is Not
The ritual is not a warm-up in the athletic sense — I’m not running through the show in my head or doing effect repetitions. The material is already prepared. The ritual is not preparation of the material; it’s preparation of the person who’s going to deliver it.
The ritual is also not a superstition. I’m not touching things in a specific order for luck. Each element has a clear function, and if one element genuinely couldn’t be done on a given evening — if I had no time before going on, if the venue setup made a quiet moment impossible — the show would still happen. The ritual is an instrument, not a requirement.
What it cannot be is optional in a casual sense. The things I’ve skipped the ritual for are a predictable roster: shows that seemed low-stakes, shows where the pre-performance schedule was compressed, shows where I convinced myself I didn’t need it because I felt fine.
The shows where I felt fine and skipped the ritual were sometimes fine. They were never as fine as the shows where I’d done the ritual and felt fine. Because the ritual doesn’t just check the technical condition of the performance — it checks the human condition of the performer. And the performer being ready is at least as important as the props being in order.
Building Your Own
If you’re working on a regular performance practice of any kind, the question is not whether you should have a pre-performance ritual but what yours should contain.
The components that seem to be nearly universal across different performers and performance contexts are: something physical that prepares the body, something that anchors attention in the present rather than the anticipated future, and something that connects you to the purpose of the performance rather than its mechanics.
Everything else is personal. Some performers need more time. Some need less. Some need movement; some need stillness. The content matters less than the consistency — that you do the same thing, in the same order, before every performance, so that doing it becomes its own signal.
The hallway in Innsbruck with the coat rack and the pretzels is where I started building mine. Somewhere between finding the envelope and straightening my jacket, I decided that disorganized pre-performance anxiety was costing me something every time, and I knew enough about how anxiety and attention work to design something better.
The show starts five minutes before the audience sees you. The ritual is the show starting.