In one of my past lives, I was an actress (okay, I did high school theatre). The four years I did theatre have helped me enormously with my pole routines. I learned to be comfortable onstage and how to be expressive in a way that translates to the audience and tells a story.

Best of all, theatre has helped me learn to handle those times when things don’t go the way you expect them to.

Memorable moments include repeating 30 seconds of a scene and failing to open a set door to enter on my cue.

The answer is always to just keep going.

There are plenty of things that can go wrong in a pole routine. Maybe you have a wardrobe malfunction, you forget your place like I did during a competition, or—worst of all—you fall.

When you’re performing and you make a mistake, you might want to let out an expletive or stop or even get up and run off the stage – but, as they say in theatre, the show must go on!

Here are my top five tips for handling mistakes onstage: