Feal the fear and… call it something else!

It’s pretty common to be afraid of presenting. Some surveys put it as the most common fear; others as the third most common. But whenever people are asked, presenting is somewhere up at the top, in the company of snakes, bugs, and heights.

I spend a lot of time helping people deal with the fears and I use a lot of different tools for doing so. Different tools work for different people.

In 2014, Alison Wood Brooks, of the Harvard Business School looked into this. The actual experiments themselves were elegant and beautifully crafted – they were also complicated so I’ll not go into them here (hey, if you want the details, by the book! 😉 ). The basics of the situation are surprising simple, however:

• being anxious or nervous is a high energy state (and a bad one at that)
• not being anxious is a low energy state.

Simple enough…  but they key point is that it takes a lot of effort to move from high energy to low energy. Your body and mind ‘know’ that they’re anxious and that they’ve got energy. Your body doesn’t like being liked to – not even by itself, which means that the traditional tools for dealing with nerves all have a problem. They’re all based on the idea of ‘calming down’ which is, when you think about it, instinctively counter-intuitive.

After all, if you could calm down you’d not be in such a state about your presentation in the first place, right?

Wood Brooks’ solution is so simple it’s breathtaking. Instead of trying to get rid of emotional energy and move from high energy to low energy, why not simply try to move from bad-high-energy (nervous and afraid) to good-high-energy (excited and anticipating).

Genius!

The question, of course, is how you do that.

This is where the experiments come in. To cut a long story short, volunteers were split into three groups

1. a group who told themselves they were nervous
2. a group who didn’t talk to themselves at all
3. a group who told themselves they were excited.

[jcolumns inbordercss=”1px dotted gray”] Now, not to labour it too much, but the group who talked to themselves, out loud, telling themselves they were excited, reported that they felt less anxious than group two – who in turn reported themselves as less anxious than the group who behave in the traditional, normal way, of admitting that they were scared.

So what’s the take-away?

Tell yourself – out loud – how excited your presentation makes you. Watch yourself carefully when you’re talking to other people because your likely to be off your guard when you’re chatting to friends over the coffee-break and ‘confess’ to how you really feel.
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[/jcolumns] Yes, I know, it sounds too simple to be true, but the statistics don’t lie. Trust me!