Why You're Afraid of Being Seen (And How It's Holding Your Career Back)

You say you want the spotlight—but does your nervous system agree?

For so many artists, the biggest obstacle isn't a lack of talent. It's the fear of being seen. Whether it's posting your work online, sharing a self-tape, releasing your music, or promoting yourself on social media, visibility can feel incredibly vulnerable. The good news? Confidence isn't something you're born with, it's something you build.

In this episode of The Singer's Path Podcast, Sarah breaks down three practical steps to help you move through the fear of visibility and start showing up as the artist you know you're meant to be. Drawing from her own experience releasing original music and building an online platform, Sarah shares how working with your nervous system—not against it—is the key to expanding your confidence and creating a sustainable creative career.

If you've been waiting until you feel "ready" to put yourself out there, this episode will challenge you to take the next brave step instead.

Most artists don’t struggle because they aren’t talented.
They struggle because they’ve been conditioned to play small, second-guess themselves, and operate from survival instead of certainty.

The Inevitable Artist Activation is a 14-day challenge that’s designed to completely shift that.

This isn’t about surface-level mindset work or forcing yourself to “stay positive.”
It’s about rewiring the patterns in your body and identity that keep you stuck in cycles of inconsistency, undercharging, overthinking, and feeling like things almost happen—but don’t fully land.

Over 14 days, you’ll be guided through a powerful process to:

• Release the need to shrink or apologize for your talent and ambition
• Break out of “just enough” income patterns and open yourself to real overflow
• Understand how your nervous system impacts your ability to receive opportunities and money
• Step into the version of you who no longer waits to be chosen—but moves like it’s already done

This is for the person who knows they’re meant for more…
and is ready to actually become the version of themselves who can hold it.

Click HERE to join the Inevitable Artist Activation 

Click HERE to get the FREE Abundant Artist Audio Series


Click HERE to join the Singers PATH Inner Circle Membership and go ALL IN

Have you loved these episodes? Leave a 5 star written review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot and send it to singerspath@gmail.com to be entered to win a FREE private lesson with Sarah! Winners to be announced at the end of spring! *You MUST email a picture of your screenshot to be entered!***

Reminder, if you HAVE already submitted a review for the podcast or other products from SB Vocal Studio- send an email with a screenshot and let Sarah know so you're eligible to win a FREE lesson!

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Contact Sarah HERE

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Transcript

Speaker 0:03

If you're tired of not making progress and you're ready to be the artist you know you're meant to be, you're in the right place. You're listening to the Singer's Path Podcast. The Path or Performing Artist Training Hub will cover everything, including singing tips that actually work, advice from top industry professionals, and life-changing mindset tips. Out with the starving artists and in with the thriving artist. I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, professional singer, actor, educator, and entrepreneur. I'm not afraid to speak the truth and stop the gatekeeping of quality information so you can actually become the artist you dream of being. So let's get on the path, shall we? Even though we're all on our own journeys, it always helps to have a guide. Hello, hello, welcome back to the Singer's Path Podcast. It is me, your host, Sarah Bishop. And yes, I am still in my Twilight shirt because I do multiple episodes in one day. Ok? So today we're going to break down uh something else, right? We just ran an inevitable artist activation this spring, um, which you should be able to still be to do the activation if you want to. Um it's usually in my link tree, and it's a it's an ongoing challenge that you can do, which is like 14 days to like absolutely light a fire under your butt and understand what's holding you back. Um, but we had a live call and like the official spring challenge ended. You can still access it, but it's uh the the spring offer is has come to a close. Um so as part of this, uh I was doing a class on this call. It was part of like the live bonus. Um we were talking about like again, ways of embodying and choosing to be the version of you that actually gets the things you want as an artist. And I thought it would be good to break this down in bite-sized pieces because a lot of artists like want to be seen and they want their art to be seen and they want to get like bigger roles, bigger gigs, and have visibility. Um, but let's give you some like actual, actionable steps that we break down more in the inevitable artist activation challenge. But like, let's just give you something tangible that you can work with. Okay. Because yeah, it's uh this is like one of the ways that artists kind of mind F themselves into oblivion. This is the episode where we're gonna talk about three simple ways to stop being afraid of being seen or putting your art out there. Okay. Three simple ways. Three simple ways. Again, I go into this in a lot greater detail, inevitable artist activation, and definitely way more detail in the inner circle membership that really helps you retrain your brain and and be moving out of that place of desperation and more towards that embodied version of you that actually already has the leads, right? We're kind of working with our body and our system to become that. That's what's in there. Um, but this is just a taste. So you give you give you some goods, give you something to hold on to that's not like a paid thing. Like, let's give you something that's actually valuable. Okay. This, this cluster F in artists' brains about like how they want big gigs and such, and yet, like they want to be sitting on Jimmy Kimmel's couch or you know, be a guest on the tonight show, right? Because they want to have that series regular where they're you know, they have that visibility and that fame and that credibility and their work is really good and all of that. And yet they can't even post a self-tape or like promote their project on Instagram, okay. And so many artists think that it's just gonna happen for them without doing any kind of work with their nervous system or any kind of exp uh visibility or growth expansion that it's just gonna happen. So sometimes that's just wishful thinking and we're not actually taking aligned steps. So part of this ability to feel comfortable getting your art out there is working with your nervous system so that you feel comfortable actually being seen and perceived. And because we live in the year of our Lord 2026, we have what's called social media to actually practice and integrate and work on this skill of being perceived so that when it's time for our art to be perceived, we can do that. So let's break down these three simple steps, okay? So that you can actually start taking these action steps now. First thing is acknowledgement. We have to acknowledge that we are afraid of being perceived because we learn somewhere along the way that is unsafe. And yet we signed up for a career in which we need to be perceived constantly. So that's a lovely little perpetuating loop we have going on there. But the first step is like putting yourself out there, even in an audition or in front of people where it doesn't feel safe, or God forbid, putting your art online, which is gonna be where it ends up if you want success. It this is just acknowledging that that's hard. So the first step is acknowledging that like the way your body is reacting is actually kind of normal. Most people don't do this, guys. We have to remember that. If you're saying you want a big following and you're saying you want to be, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you want to be visible and you want to be in these things. Yeah, most people don't actually want that. Okay. So, no, and most people, if they say they want that, they're not willing to do this work to get their body to feel safe to be perceived. Okay. Most people feel this scary feeling that feels like death, and they go, Oh, yeah, never mind. I'm good. Uh, that feels so scary and out of my comfort zone, like I could never. And then they they don't. Okay. So this is just to acknowledge that, like, those fears of visibility and that stuff that's coming up, very normal. Um, and actually probably more normal than you would think. But we want something most people don't want, which is for our art to be seen and perceived. I also want to acknowledge, like, say, like, let's give a specific example. Like, I will say I've been walking through this fire and it is so scary. Okay. So, like, part of this is gentleness and grace with yourself to be like, oh yeah. Okay, I see you. Yeah, I'm this is intense. I'm feeling how intense this is, and I'm learning to be okay with it. But I have to acknowledge it as it's becoming intense. And that experience for me recently has been releasing my own music. Oh my God, that was the scariest thing I could ever do, right? I'm in the process of like waiting for my Spotify artist profile because I uploaded my song to DistroKid. There was a whole bunch of drama that went into producing the song. I don't even, honestly, I don't even like the song that much. It's like fine. But that felt safer to me to release a song that wasn't precious to me because it is so scary and vulnerable. Like it is so scary and vulnerable to release what feels like my insides on the internet. Okay. So, first step, it is okay to be afraid. It's actually more normal than it is not. Okay. But we can do hard things, we can do scary things, especially if it's something that we actually want. Okay. The second step, okay, second clear way to stop being afraid of being seen and allow yourself being seen fully in your art is to start working with your edge instead of pushing yourself so far that you contract so hard that you never want to do it ever again. Okay. This stuff is a bit extreme. And your body and your system is going to be communicating with you as to what's just a little bit beyond your edge of feeling safe versus what's a lot beyond your edge of feeling safe. So back to that analogy of my friends that want to be, you know, being interviewed on the tonight show. Okay. If it's tickling their edge to even post a TikTok of themselves without micromanaging every detail, there's absolutely no sense of safety to actually be authentic in front of camera. Um, or like they feel a great sense of fear when they send in a self-tape, right? Or even singing in front of someone that they care about or they respect. You're gonna need to tick it back to the thing that's most close and proximity to your life if you want to manifest the big thing like being on Jimmy Kimmel's couch, right? So just starting with, okay, I'm noticing that the thing in my life that actually scares me, that's an actionable step that I could take right now, that is already scary. So that's probably your edge. Okay. We want to push you outside of your comfort zone. Okay. So maybe the first step is you just making a face-to-camera video and posting it, no matter how cringy it is, no matter how bad it is. And that's where you're at. Even if you want to be a series regular and you want to, you know, be at the Oscars making a speech someday, we need to start here because over time you will get better practiced at holding your system through and it and um holding it through being seen by more and more people. But if you can't even be seen by the hundred random people on TikTok, how do you expect to feel okay, you know, being making a speech somewhere? Okay. So little baby steps. Work with little actionable steps where it feels scary, but not so much that you want to die. Okay. Here's the other thing. When everybody will inevitably go viral if you show up enough and you get, you know, you put in the rep, one of these days you're not gonna care. You're gonna get better and better at it because you're working with your edge. Suddenly making a video is not gonna feel like that big of a deal anymore. And then you're gonna get more comfortable, and then you're gonna get more mag more magnetic. And then one day that algorithm's gonna catch hold and you're gonna go viral. Okay. That becomes a new edge for most people. The first time people go viral, they just about lose their shit. Pretty much everybody I know I've known the first time they go viral ends up somehow in the fetal position, myself included. It was so weird because our brains are not actually used to being perceived at that mass, like being seen by like a million people. Like our brains actually can't compute it. Like it doesn't make sense. Okay, so it seems like a really confusing big deal to us at first. So that's what I mean. Like some of you are saying, like, you want to go viral, but then you won't even make a video, right? So your edge is actually just making the video, right? What is the thing that is scary enough that's in your in your control right now? Do that. And then when you press go, this is step three. I kind of combined step three. This is the third simple way is to actually learn how to stop being afraid. After you press go, it is gonna trigger the shit out of you. So the third step is learning to regulate yourself through being absolutely bonkers-leveled triggered. Like I said, when you go viral for the first time, you will absolutely be triggered. I was, most people I know was because our brains aren't wired to be perceived in that way, right? That's what we have to teach ourselves to be like we're safe and we're still alive, even though this happened. So every single time you hit your edge, maybe your first edge again is just making the video at all. You're gonna need to use some kind of technique. I don't know if it's tapping, tapping for you. I don't know if it's breathing. I don't know if it's meditating, I don't know if it's hugging your cat. I don't know what it is, but you're gonna need to figure out a way to self-soothe while your brain is going on the crazy roller coaster of thinking something bad is gonna happen because that because you had something take off. Okay. When our nervous system goes off, it goes into fight, flight, flee, freeze, fawn. Okay, it does all kinds of crazy shit. It starts texting everybody we know, it starts crying uncontrollably, it wants to pull the video down. Okay, it wants to do everything to stop this reaction from happening. Okay. But again, if what you're saying you want is more visibility and to have a big thing, you actually do need to take these little steps to build your capacity to be able to do hard, scary things. Okay. Being regulated and using nervous system regulation techniques is not about never feeling activated. That's quite the opposite. It's about learning to regulate through said activation. Where we're trying to learn, I mean, in the old school ways, to grow a thick skin, right? You have to do some kind of activating thing in order to actually test your capacity, your system's capacity to be able to hold it. And again, so many of you have dreams that are so freaking big, but you don't realize that you can take those steps now to practice holding those things as if it's happening now by showing up in your life like that and working with what you have control over to take action to be seen. I have a lot of voice teachers that listen to this because it is called the Singer's Path podcast. And I know I like fluctuate between like vocal technique and like I talk about auditions and I talk about like artist lifestyle and mindset and all kinds of stuff, okay? Because we're, we're about, we're about making you all embodied, okay? We're not just about like some some bullshit, like we're just gonna sing good and that's it. No, that's not what we're about. I know there's some voice teachers, say you look at me and I'm an expander. I'm like someone that you want to be like, right? You want to have a following like I do. I don't have like a gargantuan following, I have a pretty niche following, but I've I've hot leads, I like to say. I got a good following. People, people like to engage, okay? It's great. Say that's what you want. Again, if you've never gone online to speak about pedagogy, that's maybe your first step. And guess what? You're gonna fuck it up. If you go watch videos of me from like 2022 or 2023 when I was starting to get online, I was so bad at it. And sometimes, like the algorithm, like someone will like a video from like three or four years ago. And I look at it and I'm like, that looks so weird. Like I look so weird and so uncomfortable because I wasn't practiced. My edge was just turning go on the camera. Now, imagine you have like a weird relationship with self-tapes. You're saying you want to book a regional theater role or you want to book, you know, your role on Broadway, but you haven't like actually self-taped. Like every time you self-tape, it's such a big deal, right? Practicing doing something that feels weird and developing a good relationship with it will stop making it such a big freaking deal. Like how I got with my content. It stopped being such a big deal. I had to work with my edge, and then my edge got bigger and bigger and bigger. I started going viral. I was fine, right? I lived to see another day. You know, I got some nasty comments. I had to hold myself on the other side. I had to learn to regulate through the activation and I lived to see another day. And and that's we use these like levels, it's called titration, little bits at a time. Because sometimes if we scare ourselves too far, like say with money is a good example, if like we all know that we need to invest in ourselves, I've talked about that. But if if you're like so severely in debt and you don't have any means of like actually providing portals of which the money could come through to manifest money through, and then you just make like a crazy spend and you don't know how to regulate yourself on the other side. Like taking steps like this can really walk the line of sabotage and like making reckless decisions. So that's why when we're choosing the action, it needs to rub up against it, needs to be uncomfortable for sure. You need to feel slightly uncomfortable, but it needs to be something that you can actively do right now while using other techniques when you get triggered as fuck after pressing play or after pressing post or after pressing send. Working with the nervous system and reprogram your brain so you can actually attract the things you want and actually manifest the things you want or become the embodied artist that you want. Live the fucking life you want. Okay. It is not without being triggered. You're gonna get triggered. That's actually part of the formula. You're being tested in a way. Can you hold this? Can you go to this next level and hold this? Okay. So if you need help understanding ways to regulate, again, doing like box breathing, like in inhale four, hold four, exhale four, things like that. A free meditation on YouTube. Okay. I even have free meditations, the abundant artist audio series you can use that can help. If you really, really want to do the work and really understand what's blocking you and what's stopping you from being visible, you don't know where your edge is, you don't know what the action step is. There's two things for you. There's the inevitable artist activation that I mentioned. It's a challenge. You can't join it. It's pre-recorded. So, like it's self-paced. You could do it. It's technically 14 days. It takes people longer than 14 days, but you could do that. That'll light a fire under your ass and really make some things clear. If you want to do the deeper work, that's what the inner circle's for. Okay. Those are so many things to help you. But those are tools. Like, say you're taking the action. These tools not only show you what action to take, they sh they direct you where you need to go. And then they give you the tools to hold yourself on the other side when you feel like you've jumped off a cliff. They are ways to help your brain and body feel safe doing things like posting things online. Okay. But here's the deal: you can do hard things. You're capable. You can hold yourself. You can learn to be okay on the other side of taking risk. Okay. And that's what honestly learning to feel seen and put your music out there feels like. I will say it has been very uncomfortable to release my music on many levels, but it's, I know it's something I need to do. I know it's something that I want to embody so that I like am walking in integrity. I can't be teaching recording artists without understanding that process. I also have a lot of music that I've written that's really good. And I haven't like released it because I've been too scared. So I can't be talking about this and not be doing the work myself. So if you want someone as an example, someone that's been sitting on their music and not saying yes to it for literally 10 fucking years. And now I am using the tools that exist and all the things I talked about, it's in the Abundant Artist Audio series. That's free. Start with that. It's in the inevitable artist activation. That's cheap. You can also start with that. But the deep work of holding myself through, releasing this song and feeling safe and whole and okay and happy and not freaking out really comes from doing the work that's in the inner circle. Okay. So all those things to say, I really hope that these three steps were helpful for you. Take, you know, take, take them, take them, take the steps, take the fucking steps. Okay. Stop being, don't be the person that it just fucking talks about what you want and never takes action on it. Okay. That's not who you are. That's lame as fuck. Okay. We don't want to end up up the big talker who was never brave enough to take action or learn how to work with themselves so that it worked out for them. Okay. I want your dreams to come true. I want this to work out for you. Okay. So take yourself as seriously and take your dreams fucking seriously and start doing something about it. Okay? I fucking love you. You're awesome. Give this a like or follow if you if you like this podcast, leave us a five-star review. That helps us get it out to more artists because my goal is actually to have the nice artists, like the kind people that are fucking brilliant and talented and have been staying small this whole time because they don't want to be bad people and it's like their identity is like getting all in the way of how their success. My goal is for all the great, talented, really intelligent people who are really kind to actually start taking over. Okay. We're working on the inside. This is my plan to help you learn how to see how fucking great you are so we can get these shitty people out of the power. Okay? This is my way of doing that. And so if you're on board with that mission, okay, you're gonna send this to artists that fucking need it. And you're gonna leave us a five-star written review. (laughter) Oh my god, this like air situation happening. You're gonna leave us a five-star review. And also when we have reviews, we actually um enter people to win free lessons. So if you're a singer, um, we can enter you to win a free lesson with me, which is great. And I haven't done it this, I'm gonna probably have to draw two this summer because we skipped the drawing in the spring, but we're still gonna be doing that. Um, so just know that's coming. We just took that little hiatus away from the podcast because uh I was working on YouTube. So that's what we were doing. All right. So we've anyway, we're pivoting back to the podcast. All of that to say, again, leave us a written review. Oh my god, I keep saying this. You'll be entered to win a free lesson if you do, because I appreciate you. Okay. Um, all that to say, I hope you will have a wonderful rest of your day. If you're on YouTube, huzza. That was me high fiving again. Huzzah! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will talk to you next time. Bye. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star written review on Apple Podcasts. This helps me get this information out to more artists all over the world. Let's work together to spread the joys of music. Until next time, I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, signing off from the Singer's Path Podcast. Thanks for listening.