Curious about what goes on in the mind of a performer after they publicly fail and fall flat on their face, literally or figuratively? I'm sure you're at least aware of Ingrid Andress's recent unpopular rendition of the US national anthem. It was one of those what in the actual crap is happening moments, but what do you do as a performer after you've been at the center of something like this?
Sometimes, you'll do something amazing and people won't appreciate or like it. Sometimes, you might do something objectively bad and people have a lot to say about it. When this happens, there's a transition that needs to happen, and how you handle it will have a massive impact on the future of your career.
As a performer, you make a commitment every time you work on a project. There's always a chance you might fall short of what's expected, so tune in this week to discover how to recover from a setback like this. I discuss how to take responsibility for what went wrong, and I give you my tips for transitioning to the next phase of your career after cleaning up your mess.
If you enjoyed today's show and don't want to worry about missing an episode, be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. Click here for step-by-step instructions to leave a rating and review, and don't forget to share with other people who might benefit!
• The mindset you need to have after a tough performance.
• How to deal with people's negative noise and opinions about something you've put out into the world.
• The process of coaching a performer through loud negative feedback.
• How I would coach Ingrid through something many people think she can't recover from.
• The foundation of redeeming yourself in the eyes of others after you've messed up.
• Why I recommend always fully acknowledging when you've made a mistake.
• My tips for redeeming yourself after you've messed up.
Always so curious about the mind of the performer after they publicly fall. Stay tuned for more on that in episode 29.
Welcome to The Confident Performer, the only podcast that guides ambitious, driven performers and entrepreneurs to show up authentically and confidently both on and off stage. If you are ready to make an impact in your life and community and start living your most amazing, empowered life, you are in the right place. You already have what it takes to make it, you just need to see it. And I’m here to show you how. You ready? Let’s go.
This episode is something that I came upon, I was talking to one of my friends and she is just the sweetest lady. And she was like, “I have a heart for that girl that had a rough go about the national anthem.” Obviously, those big things are happening. So, Ingrid Andress in front of the nation and potentially other places watching was singing the national anthem and did not do a very good job and had a very apparent what in the actual crap is happening.
So, anybody that knows the song, which is very interesting, the national anthem is one of those songs that everyone can say. It’s supposed to sound like this, or you can hear, I think they messed up the words or you think I know they messed up the words. But most people cannot sing it all the way through. Now, the national anthem is one of those singers, I don’t know what is kind of like a thorn in our side sometimes where anybody that knows that we sing. People will say, “Well, can you sing the national anthem for this or that?”
And I tell you, after American Idol even sometimes people will call me with an opportunity of a lifetime. And I have a really big opportunity for you to be seen and share and show your music. And it’s for my nephew’s little league team and he has a really big game kicking off the season. And I really think this would be a good chance for you to get out there and get your music heard. But back to Ingrid Andress and the national anthem error, that was and later, she says, “I apologize. I was drunk.” Well, what does the world think now?
Well, my friend, when she told me about it she said, “Hey, take a look at this. I feel so sad for this girl. This is such a rough place to be in.” And it absolutely is a rough place to be in. Then she does her apology, references that she was drunk. And that she is going to go into rehab and get the help that she needs because she hears that it’s fun, xo Ingrid.
And it’s very interesting because there are so many of our apologies that are publicly induced. They’re induced by the team, and I say the team, sometimes that we are on. And there are sometimes that apologies are absolutely very, very genuine. They are drafted from the heart. They are, “I am so sorry I showed up for the people this way. I’m so sorry I even opted to take the microphone and do this thing that I committed to doing when I was not in the position that I should have had a microphone in my hand by any means.” Then you have a lot of considerations on your side.
I’m a singer. I have never been that drunk where I sound that bad. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t know if I’m actually bragging or not, but I think to myself, I’m going to get to the point, I promise you. I think to myself, now is the time where something great has to happen, that there’s either a great turning point, there’s a great realization or she and her team both know no more from you. There’s no more of this. There’s no more of this, whatever this is, needed.
People gave Fergie a tough time for her rendition. And Fergie had a career that was going strong and a great career and people knew her style, they knew her stylistically. And so, she presented a different style, I actually had tickets to that. I showed up late so I didn’t get to enjoy the beautiful rendition that she did for the players there. But it was one of those things where people did not like her take, they absolutely were like, “What is going on here”, and not in a good way.
So, the comparison to that with what Ingrid did there, it was a lot. It was so much if you’re watching it, it was so much, again as a singer, as a performer, when you’re like, “Why did she do that? Why is she doing that?” And it kind of brought to mind the Simone Biles, case of the twisties and Simone rising. And watching her take on what the twisties is and the equivalent of what a performer experiences in the sense of the twisties, is that mental kind of block, that mental capacity where the noise seeps in and it’s all too much.
And the coping mechanisms that are selected, whether that is, we’re going to switch to that Ingrid example, whether she is opting to drink every day and that’s her style. She does have a few songs written around that. Maybe that’s a thematic presentation on her line. She’s a Grammy nominated, four time Grammy nominated artist. So, your brain says, well, she should know better. And does she know better? Absolutely, anybody in that position in the industry knows better. And sometimes we are absolutely not our best friends.
And sometimes our brain and the pressure that is placed on us and however we choose to navigate that becomes heavy. And some people opted to buffer that out in different manners. And so, I think about the mental position that you have to be in to either kind of make that turning point change where you say, “Okay, I’m not going to show up like this in my life anymore if I want to continue to have the same career.” Or if I want my career to have a different trajectory than it’s currently on, then you know something has to give, something has to change.
So, watching the Simone Biles documentary, it was very intriguing to watch her understand, my mental capacity of noise basically hit a wall. And the stuff that you take in, it’s always for me a catch 22 when you have artists or athletes reading information and really in my opinion, high performers, high achieving performers, elite performers. Any time you have them reading, what is wrong with her hair? She is on the world stage, why does her hair look like that or just absolute freaking noise?
And I say that from the point of, she kind of referenced, you are sitting there on the couch judging me from your couch. And it’s so true. It’s straight up noise. The catch 22 is if you believe the bad, do you believe the good? And the counter to that, there has to be 10 good to every one bad so that neutralizes how it feels in your brain and your body. And becoming the person that I have coached myself through to today and gotten to the place where I am mentally, does the challenging comments or people’s negativity ever get to me? It’s one of those things where in my opinion, it’s all relative.
I think the majority of what we are doing and we’re experiencing in this world is an observation of people’s coping mechanisms and what they’re going through in their time. I have never once sat on my couch and thought I was going to judge Simone Biles’ ability to achieve or not achieve based upon my own feelings and how I felt about my life. So, I watched her and I watched her journey and I felt for her absolutely because I knew that amount of noise can absolutely get to a person. It’s intriguing to me. It’s the management of what we allow our minds to rule and run as performers. It’s very intriguing to me.
And I coach a lot of performers through and out of that. It’s crazy, I have a young artist I’m working with now. She’s doing one of my workshops and she references that she has 80,000 followers. And we had a conversation with the group, “What do you do when you experience just straight up noise, people saying bad things about you, saying that you suck or saying that you’re lame or whatever?” She gave me a handful of comments, “Well, people say this about you or they say that or they say that you’re ugly or they say you can’t do makeup.”
And I have never once thought of writing that or typing that or doing that to anybody trying to do a thing. So, for me, it’s one of those, what is going on out there other than people not living their lives, not living their dreams and deciding to sit back and idly judge someone who’s brave enough to do so? So again, you know, my foundation is I take advice from happy people. I take advice from people’s lives that I look up to or admire. I do not take advice from people who have never had the experience in the avenue that I’m asking for the advice from.
It’s one thing to be experienced in it in life through living, it’s another thing to be academically educated on it, and it truly does make a difference. And I really, truly love to take the advice from people who have done the thing. And I think about the performer’s transition any time something like this happens. The performer’s transition and the mindset that you have to wrap your head around going forward now that you’ve done something so publicly challenging and so detrimental potentially to your career. And your ability to be able to do the thing that you are technically considered this is what you do.
Ingrid is a recording artist and a professional performer and watching that even again, as a performer and as a performance coach, it would absolutely appear to me that no, she’s not. And at the end of the day, she still is. She is still called to do the thing, she did the thing and it ended up the way it ended. And wrapped around that I like to talk about what does the artist do now? Now, if I was her coach, I’m not her coach, but if I was her coach, I would absolutely coach her through this in a lot of different ways.
And coaching her through it first and foremost, I would get clear with where she is as a person. I would get clear with where she is on her journey. If she is in the midst of absolutely battling something like alcoholism on a regular basis, we’d start there. That’d be the starting point. Sometimes when you’re in the industry, some people around you, you’ve been alienated to a point where you get a team but sometimes your team does not always work in your best interest. They actually do, I don’t want to say do more harm than good.
But sometimes the people that you surround yourself with in your entourage or the people that end up saying, “That’s not even a big deal or just shake it off or another day, another dollar.” Or stuff that you absolutely have to get real with yourself and say, “This is not the way I wish to show up.” I would absolutely coach her through that. And if she was a friend of mine, I’d love her through it all the way, of course. But at the end of the day, it’s very important to get real about the human parts of a person and then explain that showing up now, you just show up and do your best.
You just show up and whatever opportunity you potentially are provided again, you redeem yourself. You opt to redeem yourself. And I have a tendency to practice redemption with my clients. And they’ll perform a song, and sometimes they’ll feel not happy or not proud with their performance. And then we’ll say, “Okay, great, that’s fine, that’s no problem. So, let’s go into the studio and redeem yourself on that performance. Let’s go in and we’ll do this performance in a week or two weeks and let’s redeem ourselves on that performance.”
Because showing up to do the thing, the hard thing, the pressurized thing, the more you get to do it, the more you get to walk into the harder thing, the easier the hard thing becomes, the easier the platform to show up to do the hard thing. It’s something that obviously happens when you’re watching these elite individuals perform.
Ashlee Simpson on SNL, when she goes and has her lip syncing mishap and they were doing a behind the scenes edition there, kind of focusing on everything being live. And there was something that that week they were able to get more information on Lorne Michaels and what he thought about the behind the scenes aspect of the live show and what happens if this happens or what happens if this goes wrong or something goes wrong? And she opted to do a lip syncing bit, which obviously I wouldn’t imagine he would have approved.
Even facing it and running into it and saying, “I tried to take the easy way out for myself emotionally instead of having my band play the wrong song. But finding those times of embracing what was actually going on. You know what? I was in this place where my voice wasn’t working for a substantial amount of time. I am in this place emotionally. I was afraid to sing and so I opted to make a choice that probably obviously was not the best choice for me to make, and this is what happened. And is this something I regret? Absolutely. I regret trying to lip sync on Saturday Night Live.”
Saying something like that, taking true ownership of what was, allows the redemption for yourself and for the real human part of you to be much easier and much received, not only for yourself, but for the public. We as people know that if people opted to not take that real live answer and say, “That’s a true answer.” That was an honest, genuine explanation of what was going on in their mind. That’s what they opted to do. So, they made a wrong choice. We all at some point will make wrong choices in our life.
Any human will be able to understand that and that’s the fun and cool part. Because any person that doesn’t understand that, doesn’t have to be in your group, doesn’t have to be in your tribe, doesn’t have to be part of your friends. That is no problem. That’s great information. But as a performer, if you are ever faced with something so big and so much bigger than you, one of my best recommendations is you just acknowledge what you did, what you did wrong, what you will absolutely alter in the future. And what you will absolutely make sure that never happens again when you are on someone else’s dime or on someone else’s clock.
So, what I do in my own time, in my own life, that’s my business. If I failed to show up in a way that I agreed contractually, I said I’m going to show up, I’m going to do a thing and I was unable to fulfill that, I would absolutely come to the table and say, “This was my error. This is how I will fix it. This will never happen again.” And making sure that that is the case. Those are the things I recommend to you.
Beautiful, beautiful performers if you have a long career, if you have a long life in the industry, if you opt to sign on for contracts and long contracts. I’ve done long contracts. I’ve done short contracts. I prefer short contracts, most performers do because there is that human part of you where if I commit my life to somebody else for two months, I can do that. I know exactly what I’m into, what I’m in for, what I’m eating, what my diet is. I’m not drinking alcohol for this amount of time. I’m not doing extracurricular things that I would do with my friends.
If we’re going out or staying out late or different things like that. I don’t do that. I commit to doing the thing that I agreed to do so that I can show up and do the thing, so I can do my job. Now, if you are not capable of that, that is just fine, but acknowledge that that is the limit. And if you have the limit, oftentimes you will not operate at full capacity. And that full capacity could be the difference between professional performer and amateur or leisure or extracurricular performer, which is also totally fine.
But if you are a performer wanting to be at the top of your game, clean it up, get it taken care of. As I would say if I was her coach, I would coach her through transitioning her expectation of herself, transitioning how she shows up in her life, transitioning, let’s maneuver through this. Why do we opt to do this thing when this brings us this result? And sometimes it’s important to second guess and check yourself before you straight up wreck yourself. And that was not meant to be a quote but it is.
So, in closing, if you find yourself at a crossroads where something bad happens and you think, how do I redeem myself from this? Be honest. Be honest first with yourself. If you have something like an alcohol problem, get help. If you have a drug problem, get help. If there is something that’s absolutely standing in your way that you need help for, get help. If you are a performer in the industry and you do not have a mindset management coach, get a coach.
A coach can walk you through the challenges that you will inevitably face at some point in your career. A strategist, a mindset coach can absolutely help you navigate through those challenges. That is one of my favorite things to do with my performers, walking through that, getting them through the other side and then feeling the stronger, better, more capable version of themselves is my goal. I do it all the time. I’ve done it consistently. I have clients with amazing success and track records because of that.
And it is one of those things that I am truly grateful that I get to do every single day in my line of work. But you have to love all parts of you, even the muddy parts, even the gross parts, even the parts that you feel like I want to hide that from the world. You need to love that part up. It is so wonderful to be in the space of truly loving yourself, the good and the bad, where you know that a mistake is potentially going to happen in front of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, potentially billions of people and sometimes that is okay.
That is what needs to happen for you in that moment to be the catalyst to what’s next for you in your career. My beautiful performers, when you are daring greatly, you will absolutely run into a wall. You will absolutely hit a ceiling. If you believe you have the capacity and the bandwidth to break through, you absolutely will. If you do not believe you have the capacity, grow your emotional capacity for greatness. Get a coach, you will be so grateful you decided to get a coach, you will be so grateful that you truly feel like you are able to deal with anything that comes your way.
And at the end of the day, always ask yourself, why are you doing what you are doing? Do what you love to do, show up because you love it. You get one big, beautiful life, but it’s your story to write. Thank you so much. I hope you are all out there living your big dreams. And if you are not, please reach out to me, amy@amyadamscoaching.com. I am here for all of your coaching needs. And I look forward to coaching more individuals to greatness on your journey of being seen. Take care and be well.
If you enjoyed today’s show and don’t want to worry about missing an episode, you can follow the show wherever you listen to your podcast. And if you haven’t already, I would really appreciate it if you could share the podcast with others who you think would benefit from it and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think now. Now, it doesn’t have to be a five star rating, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome podcast that provides tons of value. Visit amyadamscoaching.com/podcastlaunch for step by step instructions on how to follow, rate and review.
Thank you for listening to today’s episode of The Confident Performer. If you want to learn more about living your truth and showing up as your most authentic, beautiful self, visit www.amyadamscoaching.com. See you next week!