Backstage Mindsets

The preparation for optimum performance takes many forms.

There are numerous examples of “superstitious” rituals from athletes.

Deion Sanders (pictured above) laid out his uniform on the floor like a crime scene and obsessively studied game film before every terrorizing performance as a cornerback.

Method actors show up to filming process already deep in character.

His name wasn’t Daniel Day Lewis anymore, it was Daniel Plainview.

For those who are still able to perform on stage (Daniel Day Lewis stopped stage acting in 1992 due to being so deep in his method that he had a panic attack after truly believing he saw his own father’s ghost while playing Hamlet at the Old Vic), the method of harnessing energies before stepping on stage is highly effective.

For incendiary scenes of percussive energy, the preparation is doing whatever it takes to summon the correct energy in that instance. I’ve personally listened to “Triad” by Tool on repeat while performing a Haka before playing Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar. It wasn’t too far off from Zubin Varla crawling on the floor back stage in the 1996 West End revival of the musical when he was embodying the storied antagonist.

Henry Rollins on the other hand, will run 8-10 miles on the treadmill before his talking shows in order to empty his mind of everything that isn’t the show at hand.

Current UFC Welterweight champion, Kamaru Usman has had the same rigid discipline for a set of rituals that involves doing a hard workout and using the same stall in the bathroom every day before a fight.

Many rockstars relied on substance abuse to get their minds where they needed to go, but this is clearly not sustainable. Pictured above is Trent Reznor who started his career as the mind behind Nine Inch Nails as a chronic drug-abuser who reached a breaking point in his addictions and decided to go to rehab. Reznor was deeply concerned that his creative process would be crippled without the drugs and alcohol, but upon becoming sober, his backstage mindsets grew healthier and stronger, allowing him to put out his best work off of albums “With Teeth,” and “Bad Witch,” and on Oscar-winning film scores for “The Social Network” and “Soul.”

The best backstage mindsets are not reliant on coping mechanisms and addictions but are based on the will to find whatever oneneeds within his own mind and overall being.

Some performers’ preparations involve summoning something to integrate with their being, and some performers’ preparations involve removing something from their being as opposed to putting something in.

Some like it hot, and some like Kevin Ross, the greatest American Nak Muay of all time like a cold, assassin’s mindset that unnerves those around him.

However, Kevin Ross often exclaims “I don’t know,” when aspiring fighters ask him how they should mentally prepare for a fight, essentially saying every individual needs to figure out their own mind and prepare it in their own way.

Personally, my backstage mindsets for both acting and fighting are the surprisingly the same.

I need a balance of rousing something within me and emptying the self of what is unnecessary.

I need to be as violently decisive and surgically precise as possible, and it begins in the mind with the body doing whatever it needs to reach that stage of clinical, surgical flow.

Regardless, what is not permitted to happen are any lapses in focus that would throw my mind off course, and so, I feel a tight, wringing grip on that balance that remains right until that ultimate, bold breath before performance.

Upon arriving there, that momentum overtakes any obstacle in the way of victory.

Why be anything but victorious?

In art and in combat.