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Reset Your Mindset to Reduce Stress: Harness Anxiety for High-Stakes Performances, with Kelly Mcgonigal, Author, The Upside of Stress
Most people think that the key to giving a great presentation or making a speech, or any kind of high-stakes performance, most people think that the key is to calm down. That they need to be physiologically calm. And what’s funny is that the research shows exactly the opposite. That people who give the best talks, who make the best impression on other people, are the ones who are physiologically really aroused. And that’s true, even when you experience that energy as anxiety. And a lot of research now is suggesting that rather than try to calm down when we feel butterflies in our stomach or when we’re experiencing the nerves or the jitters before something important, we should really embrace that anxiety as energy and think of ourselves more like athletes who are about to go out and really compete or really perform.
Actually, it was a study that was done at Harvard that asked people to, before they gave a speech, just say, “I’m excited!” People who were anxious, to say, “Oh, my heart’s pounding, I’m sweating, I must be excited.” They ended up giving better speeches, they ended up being more confident about their speeches, and other people were more impressed by the talks that they gave even though they didn’t report feeling less anxious. They simply said, ok, I’m going to embrace this anxiety as energy. And really the only way that stress can get in your way when you have to perform is if it becomes paralysis. And that sometimes happens where people actually go into what’s called a freeze response, where the heart slows down rather than speeds up. And you can actually feel literally frozen in fear. And the best thing to do in those cases is exactly the same thing as if you’re experiencing heart-pounding anxiety. You need to actually get your energy up rather than calm down, and to think of yourself as someone who needs to experience an adrenaline surge to go out and do your best.
And some of the strategies that folks I’ve worked with use include listening to music that’s really empowering and uplifting, in the same way that before a big athletic competition you might in the locker room be listening to Jock Jams. So really think, what’s going to be my psych-up song, and listen to that. To do physical movement. A lot of people will do push-ups before they go on to give a talk, and it’s not just because they want to look good underneath their suit. But doing those push-ups, doing that movement, actually puts us into a physiological state that makes us approach-oriented, right, we’re ready for action. And that’s especially important for people who might experience that kind of freeze response under pressure. And I think if you think of yourself more like an athlete and less like someone who has to go out and control yourself in a situation, you’re going to have access to all of the energy your body and brain want to give you to help you rise to this challenge.