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‘I have performance anxiety’: John Cena reveals the one thing scarier than WWE matches and movie stardom

Who knew?

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Larger-than-life professional wrestler and Peacemaker actor John Cena is a superstar for a reason. He’s charismatic, dynamic and… shy? Apparently “Mr. Money in the Bank” is human after all, and has to deal with all those things that us regular humans have to deal with. His problem? He gets performance anxiety. Wrestlers! They really are just like us.

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Cena appeared on a live taping of the Josh Horowitz podcast Happy Sad Confused recently and got really real with the host.

“I’ve heard you talk about [how] you learn more from failure, from missteps, than successes in your life,” Horowitz said.

“I think that’s a pretty good perspective of life,” Cena answered. “I encourage failure; that’s why I played the piano. Not because I can play…. I’m trying to learn to play the piano. And when I say trying to learn … I’m 46, I started when I was 40.”

Cena goes on to explain that “there’s a lot of waiting on movie sets” so he got a keyboard to keep himself occupied in between call times. He really does have a great attitude about things. “Every day I’m a little better than I was yesterday, but still not any good to the standard of people who play on a stage like this.”

“Every time I see a piano in public … I have performance anxiety.” In the middle of telling the audience this he asks to not be taken out of context, because his wife was in the audience. He wants to make it clear, the performance anxiety only refers to his piano playing.

“I have a serious thing about playing in front of people. My hands start to shake. I start to sweat. I can feel my pulse. I can’t slow it down, I can’t find my calm.”

It’s even more surprising because when he practices alone he tells himself, “Man, I’m kind of learning this.” When someone else is around though, “I just freeze up.”

“The reason I started to play the piano, and one of my reach goals, was to sit down with that single malt on the keyboard and be like ‘hey guys, how are you tonight?’ and just play so you can hear me but you can’t hear me and then just be like ‘All right, that’s it see you later.’”

That fear, he said, is something he tries all the time to get over. “That’s me trying to get over that fear,” he said, pointing off stage, presumably to a piano he played off camera.

“That wasn’t perfect,” he said, “I failed. I didn’t play to the standard I see in my head. But I also was better than I was the last time I did that in public.”

He tied up the bow like this: “Of course you learn from failure. You don’t learn much from success. At all.”

It’s really hard not to like this man. He’s rich, handsome, smart, strong and maybe the most important of all, he’s humble. He has the face of a Chad but the personality of a Buddhist. Cena 2028? We’ve had worse presidents.

Take a look at the whole interview below. The failure talk starts around the 25 minute mark.