Thoughts on awareness— the skill that makes everything else possible.
Have you ever watched a comedian deliver a perfectly competent set that somehow felt completely disconnected from the room? The jokes were structured. The timing was rehearsed. The punchlines were technically punchlining. And yet, something was missing.
Or maybe you've been that comedian. (I have! Hi!) You're onstage, delivering material you've worked on for months, but your brain is running a completely separate performance review.
Did they laugh enough?
Why didn't that joke work?
Am I going too fast?
Do they like me?
Should I skip ahead?
Am I bombing?
OMG AM I BOMBING??
Meanwhile, there are actual human beings sitting three feet away from you & you've barely noticed them.
This is one of the great paradoxes of performance: The harder we try to make an audience like us, the less available we can become to actually connect with them.
And the skill that helps us interrupt that cycle?
Awareness.
The Difference Between Approval and Connection
Most comedians are taught, explicitly or implicitly, to perform for approval: Get the laugh. Keep the momentum. Don't lose the room. Make every second count.
None of this is inherently bad advice. Laughs matter! We're comedians! If I wanted to spend ten minutes talking to a room full of silent people, I'd attend a condo association meeting.
But when approval becomes our primary objective, our attention gets pulled toward outcomes we can't entirely control.
Are they laughing? Do they think I'm funny? Am I doing well?
Connection asks different questions: Are they following me? Am I communicating clearly? What's happening between us? It's a subtle but profound shift!
Approval keeps your attention on the outcome. Connection keeps your attention on the relationship.
The goal of performance isn't to convince an audience you're good. It's to create an experience with them.
Because performance isn't something you do to an audience. It's something you create with them.
You can't stay in relationship with an audience if you're consumed by monitoring yourself. That's where awareness comes in!
Awareness Is More Than Self-Awareness
When I teach awareness, I'm not just talking about recognizing your feelings or noticing that you're nervous. I'm talking about the ability to track three things simultaneously:
What's happening within you.
What's happening around you.
What's happening between you and the audience.
And then using that info to make intentional choices! Without awareness, we tend to default to habits.
ie// A joke doesn't land, so we speed up. The audience gets quiet, so we get louder. We feel insecure, so we add another tag, explain the premise, or start apologizing for material that was perfectly fine thirty seconds ago…
Sometimes we respond to a room that isn't even doing what we think it's doing.
A quiet audience becomes a hostile audience. A thoughtful pause becomes a rejection. One person looking at their phone becomes proof that our career is over.
(Perhaps they're checking the time, or texting their babysitter or reading an email from their dermatologist. We don't know! And yet we've decided they're personally disgusted by our artistic choices.)
Awareness creates a little space between what happens & how we respond. And that space is where our choices live.
The Four Elements of Awareness
I've developed a framework for helping performers understand what awareness actually looks like in practice.
I break it down into four interconnected elements: Attention, Interference, Presence, & Relationship.
1. Attention: Where Is My Attention?
Attention is one of the performer's most valuable resources. And you only have so much of it.
If your attention is consumed by remembering your next joke, predicting the audience's reaction, or evaluating your performance in real time, there's less available for actual communication.
Think about the difference between telling a funny story to a friend & telling that same story onstage. With your friend, you're usually not thinking about your posture, laugh placement, facial expressions, or whether the story is establishing your comedic persona. You're communicating! You're noticing their reactions. Adjusting naturally. Allowing yourself to be surprised.
Then you get onstage, & suddenly you're operating a tiny comedy corporation inside your skull. The CEO wants bigger laughs. Marketing is worried about audience retention. Legal says you shouldn't try that new joke. And the person who's supposed to be telling the story has left the building.
The first step toward greater presence is simply noticing where your attention has gone. Not judging it. Not demanding perfect concentration. Just noticing!!
2. Interference: What's Getting Between Me and the Audience?
Interference is anything that disrupts clear communication.
Sometimes it's physical: shallow breathing, a clenched jaw, unconscious pacing, fidgeting, or rushing.
Sometimes it's mental: self-criticism, perfectionism, trying to remember the next line, or wondering whether everyone in the front row hates you.
And sometimes it's the effort of trying to be funny. (Yes, the effort of trying to be funny can actually interfere with being funny!)
One of the things I see frequently in coaching is a performer who's so invested in delivering a joke correctly that they stop communicating it naturally. They hit every word. Every pause. Every rehearsed gesture. But there's no room for discovery.
I'm not suggesting we abandon technique. Technique is essential!
But eventually, we want our technique to support expression, not compete with it.
The important thing to remember is that interference is information, not evidence of failure.
Instead of asking, What's wrong with me? Try asking, What's getting between me and the audience?
One question invites judgment. The other invites curiosity!
3. Presence: Can I Stay Available?
Presence is one of those words we throw around in performance conversations without always defining.
She's got incredible stage presence.
He really commands a room.
You just need to be more present!
Okay! Great! Should I purchase some presence? Is it available at CVS? Here's how I think about it:
Presence is the ability to remain available to what's actually happening.
Not just when everything is going well. But when you’re nervous or a joke doesn’t land. When you forget a line or when a moment becomes unexpectedly wonderful & you feel the urge to immediately rush past it.
A present performer can experience all of those things without completely abandoning themselves or the audience.
This doesn't mean never feeling uncomfortable. It means developing the capacity to stay engaged while discomfort is present.
Your nervous system doesn't have to be perfectly calm for you to be connected.
And that's an important distinction, because if we wait until we're completely fearless to become fully present, most of us will be waiting forever!
4. Relationship: What's Happening Between Us?
This is where awareness becomes connection.
An audience isn't a passive collection of people waiting to determine your worth. They're actively participating in the experience. They're listening, interpreting, predicting, responding, adjusting, remembering, and bringing their own energy into the room. Your job isn't to control all of that.
It's to remain in relationship with it.
Ask yourself:
Are they following? Are they curious? Are they tense? Have I established trust? Am I making room for a response?
And perhaps most importantly: Am I speaking to these people, or am I performing in their general direction?
Those are very different experiences.
Some of the most compelling moments in comedy happen when a performer notices something unexpected and allows it to influence what happens next. A pause. A facial expression. A surprising laugh. A moment of genuine vulnerability.
Something that wasn't planned but becomes possible because the performer is paying attention.
Stop Treating the Audience Like a Scoreboard
Here's a practice I teach that I call Notice → Reflect → Respond. It's designed to help performers read the room without immediately judging the room.
Step 1: Notice
Collect information without assigning meaning.
The room got quieter.
Someone leaned forward.
A few people laughed while others remained silent.
You felt yourself speed up.
These are observations. "They hate me" is not an observation. It's a story your brain has written, produced, & distributed without consulting the audience.
Step 2: Reflect
Ask yourself what the information might mean.
Silence, for example, doesn't have one meaning. There's attentive silence. Reflective silence. Confused silence. Uncomfortable silence.
And sometimes there's just silence because the audience is listening.
Not every quiet moment requires immediate intervention.
Step 3: Respond
Make an intentional choice based on what's actually happening.
Maybe you pause.
Maybe you acknowledge the moment.
Maybe you slow down.
Maybe you simply continue.
The point isn't to become a master of clever comebacks. It's to become comfortable enough with uncertainty that you don't automatically panic. Because when a room gets quiet, many comedians immediately reach for the same tools.
Talk faster! Get louder! Add tags! Explain! Self-deprecate!
And sometimes those choices work. But there's a difference between making a choice & being driven by a reflex.
Awareness gives you access to that difference.
Try This: The Neutral Noticing Exercise
If you're interested in building greater awareness, here's a simple exercise you can practice before your next set.
Take a few moments to notice three things happening in your body and three things happening in the room.
The only rule?
Record observations, not judgments.
ie//
Body:
My shoulders are raised.
My breathing is shallow.
My weight is shifting between my feet.
Room:
The lighting is brighter than I expected.
I can hear people talking near the bar.
Someone in the front row is leaning forward.
That's it. You're not trying to fix anything. You're practicing directing your attention toward information rather than interpretation. Over time, try incorporating brief check-ins during performances.
Notice your feet. Notice your breath. Notice the audience.
Then return to what you're doing.
The goal isn't to become hyperaware of every sensation. That would just be another form of self-monitoring. (no thank you!!) The goal is to develop enough flexibility with your attention that you can move between yourself, your material, & the room without getting trapped in any one place.
You Don't Need to Control the Room to Connect With It
After twenty years of performing stand-up, one of the most important things I've learned is that being good at comedy & feeling connected while doing comedy are not necessarily the same thing.
You can have great jokes and still feel completely alone onstage. You can get enormous laughs and still spend the entire set worrying about whether you're good enough. And you can have a difficult set while remaining grounded, curious, & genuinely connected to the people in front of you.
That last one is a skill worth developing.
Because our work isn't just about learning how to make audiences respond. It's about learning how to remain available when they do. Or when they don't.
Awareness won't guarantee that every joke lands. It won't eliminate nerves or make every audience easy to navigate. But it can help you recognize when you've left the moment and give you a way back.
And sometimes, that return is the most important performance skill of all.
The most compelling performers aren't the ones who never get nervous, never lose the room, or never make mistakes. They're the ones who can notice what's happening and choose what happens next.
The Practice is where I explore the craft of comedy, stage presence, creative development, & what it means to build a sustainable life as a performing artist.
If you're interested in exploring these skills more deeply, I’d love to work with you!
