Every Show Needs An Opening Night. And So Do You.

I've been watching a show on HBO called The Rehearsal where Nathan Fielder helps people prepare for difficult moments in their lives by building elaborate, full-scale replicas of the places where those moments will happen and hiring actors to stand in for the real people involved. Want to confess something to a friend? He'll reconstruct the bar where you usually meet, down to the half-deflated balloon in the rafters, and run you through every possible version of that conversation until you've rehearsed your way through dozens of outcomes. It's absurd and uncomfortable, and works as television because it takes something we ALL do and turns the volume up to eleven.

We rehearse constantly. We script the salary negotiation in the shower, we draft the team feedback session on the drive home, we mentally perform the keynote we haven't even been asked to give yet. We lie awake running through what we'll say to our mother, our boss, our teenager, if THAT conversation ever actually happens. And in the moment, this feels productive. It feels like preparation and it feels responsible. But at some point, the rehearsal stops being preparation and becomes protection. You're no longer getting ready, you're hiding, and the difference between those two things is whether or not the curtain ever rises.

I know this because I watched it happen last week at a 5,000-seat track and field stadium on Randall's Island.

My daughter just joined her school's track and field team. This was her first meet. I showed up expecting a modest affair, maybe a chalked track on a field somewhere, a few parents on a hillside. Instead I walked into Icahn Stadium. A legitimate, world-class, internationally certified facility where Usain Bolt set the 100-meter world record in 2008, with the Manhattan skyline and the East River as its backdrop. There was a loudspeaker system with a disembodied voice calling heats and a concession stand selling snacks. Roughly a thousand students from schools across the New York area along with their coaches and their parents, all of us packed into the stands melting in what had to be the first truly hot day of the year.

Her race was the 4x100 relay. She was leg three, which means two handoffs. She receives the baton at full speed and then runs 100 meters and hands it over to another runner at full speed. It's not the position for the fastest runner. It's the position for the one who won't fumble under pressure. You're sprinting and handing off at the same time, staying in your lane while the same exchange is happening all around you at roughly the same moment. It's a trust exercise disguised as a footrace.

Her event was second to last, after three full hours of competition. Three hours of watching kids trip over hurdles and fall on their face, step out of their lane, lose a sneaker mid-sprint. Three hours of false starts and athlete mishaps. Three hours of live, real-time evidence that this thing she was about to attempt could fall apart in a dozen ways she hadn't even considered yet. If Olympic relay teams who have trained their entire lives can drop the baton on the biggest stage in the world, what must a 14-year-old be thinking while she sits in the stands nervously waiting for her turn?

She ran for less than 30 seconds. She did her part well. The baton didn't drop. But what struck me wasn't her performance, it was what she had to survive BEFORE she performed. The waiting, the watching, the slow accumulation of all the ways it could go wrong. And then when the disembodied speaker voice called her, she got up, walked to her position on the track, and did her thing.

In the live entertainment industry we have a term for what happens when you prepare too long without ever facing an audience. We call it overrehearsal (I know, kind of literal, right?)

It sounds like a made-up problem. How could you possibly be TOO prepared? But anyone who has produced a show knows exactly what this looks like. You rehearse for weeks. The performers get sharper, the cues get tighter, everything starts clicking. And then, somewhere around the point where you should have opened, something shifts. Bad habits form because there's no audience to correct for. The cast picks apart the wrong aspects of the performance. Inside jokes develop that pull focus. Perspective gets distorted because the only feedback loop is internal. The work starts decaying inside the safety of the rehearsal space.

Then you lose something harder to name. The thing that makes a live performance feel LIVE. The grit, the sweat, the slight waffle in someone's voice that tells the audience just how hard this actually is. You want it to breathe. You want the audience to see the difficulty because that's where the beauty lives. When everything is over-polished, you don't get authenticity. You get a canned version of something that was supposed to feel human. You only really see the deep difficulty in something when it goes a little sideways. When extremities shake, when the sweat dribbles, and when the performer is so clearly in it that you hold your breath with them.

You need an audience because the audience is the data. They tell you what's working and what isn't. They react in ways you can't predict. They give you something to respond to, adjust for, build on. Without them, you're just polishing a thing in a vacuum and calling it progress.

Something most people outside the showbiz industry don't realize is that we set the opening night, put tickets on sale, and route the entire tour BEFORE the show even begins rehearsal. The date is locked and the seats are sold. No matter what happens in the weeks leading up to that first performance, there is going to be butts in seats on that day and at that time. The deadline isn’t negotiable because someone has already bought a ticket. 

Every show needs an opening night and every pivot needs a first day. Every difficult conversation needs the moment where you stop rehearsing what you'll say and actually say it.

I think about this when I talk to women who are building something new. A business, a career shift, a creative project, a life that looks different from the one they were trained to want. So many of them are brilliant, prepared, and deeply thoughtful about their next move. And so many of them are stuck in rehearsal. One more certification, one more draft of the business plan, one more conversation with a mentor before they make the call, and one more month of savings before they feel "ready." The preparation is real and the expertise is real, but the opening night keeps getting pushed.

The painful irony is that the longer you rehearse without performing, the HARDER it gets to start, not easier. The stakes feel higher because you've invested more time. The gap between the version of it that exists in your head and the messy reality of a first attempt grows wider. You start believing that if it's not perfect on opening night, the whole thing was a mistake.

It won't be perfect on opening night. I have never in my career seen a show that was perfect on opening night. That is literally what previews are for. You open, you learn, you adjust, you get better. The show on closing night is almost always better than the show on opening night. But the show on opening night is infinitely better than the show that never opened at all.

My daughter didn't know any of this. She doesn't know anything about production timelines or preview periods or the professional terminology for rehearsing too long. She just knew she had never done this before, in a stadium with spectators, and it was terrifying, and she did it anyway.

That's the whole thing. That's the entire framework.

I have survived one hundred percent of the hard things I have ever had to do. So have you. I might not have known how I was going to get through them. I might not have had a plan. I might have stumbled, or lost a shoe, or knocked over a hurdle on the way. But I am here and the fact that I am here is the only proof I need that I will figure out the next one too.

Nathan Fielder can build you a replica of the bar. He can hire actors to play your friends. He can map out every possible version of the conversation on a flowchart and rehearse you through each section until you've memorized the script for every scenario.

But eventually you have to walk into the real bar, with the real person, and say the real thing.

So if you've been circling something, preparing for something, almost-starting something, let me ask you this. What would happen if you just let the curtain rise?

Not when it's perfect. Not when you feel ready. Not after one more draft or one more week or one more round of feedback from people who aren't your audience.

Now.

Because the rehearsal was never the point. The rehearsal was just practice for the moment when you stop practicing and start living.

And that moment is available to you today.

From Your Biggest Champion,

Nicole