DO YOU DREAD FACING AN AUDIENCE? Yet your job or some other responsibility requires public speaking? Or you have a musical, speaking or acting talent that you long to share with others, but fear holds you back?

The fear of speaking or performing in front of a crowd is the most common and debilitating fear Americans experience today. And so you’re not alone!

In this warm and practical book, veteran speaker and musician Blaine Smith explains how to grow comfortable in the spotlight. Drawing on a lifetime of experience, and a keen interest in the topic, he offers extensive counsel for managing performance anxiety and successfully facing an audience. Phobic about the spotlight himself, Smith empathizes deeply with the struggles so many experience. Yet he is strongly optimistic that you can move beyond your fears and become effective with an audience, and he carefully explains how.

This book will help you to:

• Manage performance anxiety and subdue it

• Handle its physical effects

• Let nervousness on stage work for you, not against you

• Prepare and deliver an effective talk

• Overcome impostor fears that can trouble you when you speak or perform

• Understand why the first minutes on stage are often difficult when you perform music, and what to do about it

• Convert mishaps on stage into successes

• Determine if medicine is right for your performance anxiety, and find how to obtain it

• Decide if a support group for performers or speakers, such as Toastmasters, is right for you

• Converse effectively with people at events where you speak or perform

• Understand how to draw on God’s help to overcome your anxiety and face an audience confidently and effectively

Beyond Stage Fright and into the Spotlight gives you the insights you need to reinvent your experience on stage! And it’s available now through Amazon in paperback and Kindle, and from other online retailers.

Note from Blaine Smith about the book’s content: This book began with the idea of taking some material from my Overcoming Shyness on facing an audience confidently and reworking it into a small book. Many who aren’t at all shy with people individually, dread facing a crowd, but they aren’t likely to look to a book on shyness for help. But as I began working on this project, it quickly morphed into a labor of love. I found myself adding new topics and lots of fresh counsel, and writing a book much longer than what I first envisioned. And so while perhaps 20% of Beyond Stage Fright is reworked from Overcoming Shyness, most of its material is fresh and not previously published.

M. Blaine Smith, a Presbyterian pastor, is author of ten books, including Knowing God’s Will, The Yes Anxiety, and Should I Get Married. He is director of Nehemiah Ministries in the Washington , D.C. area.