they lose the power of strong consecutive thought and helpful
brevity.

If self-consciousness causes us to wriggle, and strain, and stammer,
and we do not recognize the root of the trouble and shun it, and
learn to yield and quietly relax our nerves and muscles, of course
the strain becomes worse. Then, rather than suffer from it any
longer, we keep away from people, just as the blushing man is
tempted to do. In that case, the strain is still in us, in the back
of our brains, so to speak--because we have not faced and overcome
it.

Stage fright is an intense form of self-consciousness, but the man
who is incapable of stage fright lacks the sensitive temperament
required to achieve great power as an artist. The man who overcomes
stage fright by getting out of his own way, and by letting the
character he is playing, or the music he is interpreting, work
through him as a clear, unselfish channel receives new power for his
work in the proportion that he shuns his own interfering
selfishness.

But it is with the self-consciousness of everyday life that we have
especially to do now, and with the practical wisdom necessary to
gain freedom from all its various discomforts; and, even more than
that, to gain the new power for useful service which comes from the
possession of that freedom.

The remedy is to be found in obedience to the law of unselfishness,
carried out into the field of nervous suffering.