Now, I talk on YouTube to millions of people every month, but stage fright is a whole different thing. I have almost no experience public speaking outside of church settings. Even then I sometimes get shaky, sweaty, and emotional. I’ve really only done professional public speaking one previous time, and I won’t go into too many details about that experience, but to put it shortly, it didn’t go very well.
So I was quite anxious about my conference presentation and I really wanted to do a good job. But something was different this time.
I gave a good enough speech, but what I was most proud of was that I saw my growth in how I handled my performance anxiety. I still felt a little anxious, but it was also really fun.
I have gotten so much better at doing scary stuff like this. Yes, I’m a therapist with expertise in anxiety, but I’m also a moderately anxious human being. So today I want to share with you 7 strategies that I used to manage performance anxiety. Let’s go.
1. Preparation V. Perfection with Performance Anxiety
For my speech, I put a lot of time into preparation. I worked hard on my presentation and practiced it carefully, over and over. I recorded myself giving it, I read it in front of people, I had other experts review it for accuracy.
I spent hours and hours preparing. We even practiced where to stand, how to manage the lights, how to greet the emcee, etc. But here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t try to make it perfect. I stopped when it was about 96% perfect. Why? Because I knew that with my brain I would never reach 100% perfect.
I knew that I could spend infinite hours on it and make an infinite number of tweaks, and I would never ever feel like it was 100% perfect. If I’d been aiming for perfection, I would have been more uptight, more stressed, and that wouldn’t have made a measurably better presentation. So instead I chose good enough.
Good enough is better than perfect. Plus, to be honest, you’re more relatable and relaxed when you’re real. So, being prepared gave me confidence, and letting go of perfectionism helped me perform better.
2. Combat Stage Fright with Intentional Self-Talk
Old me would have used some pretty negative self-talk: “I’m so bad at this. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done this. It’s going to be terrible.” If you look carefully, this negative self-talk is a form of emotional avoidance. It’s how we try to protect ourselves from disappointment by lowering the bar, by lowering your expectations and energy. It might feel safer, but it’s not actually helping you perform.
Instead of this negative self-talk, I was very careful to speak about my upcoming performance in positive terms: “This is going to be great. This is an adventure.”
Notice how I didn’t just use vain praise: “I am amazing. I am the world’s best public speaker.” That would have felt really fake to me, I had to choose intentional phrasing that worked for me. “I’m going to give it my all. It’s going to be fun. This is a chance to help people.” I remembered my purpose and mission, instead of fretting about perfectionism.
So when I’m doing a sports event or a hard rock climb, instead of saying, “I’m going to win,” I’d be more likely to say, “I’m going to focus super hard. I’m going to give my all.” And I visualize myself playing my best.
Running my race, feeling the burn, and pushing through. I like to focus on what I can control, not outcomes that I can’t control. And then use my self-talk to keep energy high and positive.
3. Lessen Stage Fright with a Growth Mindset
You’ll notice with my self-talk I was focusing on effort instead of outcome. In the long run, we can only control our effort and growth. So instead of worrying about whether my speech would be perfect or not, I kept telling myself, “This is going to be a good opportunity to learn and practice.
Progress is more important than perfection. No matter what, after this speech is done, I will have more experience than I did before. No matter what, I will have learned something from this.”
Every experience—whether it feels like a success or failure—helps us grow as human beings. When you take the long view, that’s more important than winning a single event. And for the performance, focusing on effort and growth are more likely to help you settle in and perform well, than pressuring yourself to not mess up.
And that takes me to #4
4. Performance Anxiety’s Struggle Switch
With performance anxiety, it’s really normal to have physical sensations like sweaty hands, shaky voice, or tense muscles. Maybe your mind goes blank or you freeze up.
There really are some cool things you can do to calm your body down, and I teach these all the time—things like slow breathing, vagus nerve stimulation, raising the soft palate, softening the gaze, etc. But when I’ve asked people, “Have you ever tried to calm yourself down and accidentally made yourself more anxious?” almost everyone says “yes”.
When we see anxiety as the problem, or when you think “I have to make this go away”, then we accidentally tell our brain that a feeling is dangerous, and it makes us MORE anxious. I call this the struggle switch. The more you struggle against anxiety, the more anxious most people feel.
So what can we do instead?
Turn off the struggle switch.
When I felt anxious I didn’t struggle against it, I didn’t try to force myself to calm down. Instead I used acceptance, self-compassion and validating: “It’s normal to feel anxious.” I told myself, “Anxiety is the same physiologically as excitement. Feeling anxious just means I care. This activated energy can help me perform better.” Instead of trying to force myself to calm down, I basically leaned into the anxiety and allowed it to be there.
You’ll see the struggle switch show up a lot with sleep. The night before a big performance a lot of people struggle to sleep, and when they find that they aren’t falling asleep, they start to struggle: “I have to sleep well or else I won’t perform! This is so frustrating! I’ve got to make myself sleep!” And they try to force it, maybe with breathing techniques, or meditations, or sleep stories.
But the harder you TRY to sleep, the more activated you are and the harder it is to sleep. So when I wasn’t sleeping great the night before, I dropped the struggle: “It’s ok if I don’t sleep great tonight, I’ve gotten through many sleep-deprived days in the past. I’m sure I’ll be ok. I’m just going to enjoy my resting time.” And I watched some quiet, relaxing shows, did a little reading, and was able to fall back asleep too.
Research shows that people who are good at allowing anxiety, sadness, or other feelings to be there, to be in your body and make space for them, are much more resilient, creative, flexible and more likely to take action that lines up with who they want to be. The skill is called willingness.
You allow your feelings to be there in your body, you get curious about them, you don’t judge them. You can practice this with meditation, or body-based strategies.
Turning off the Struggle Switch is really essential to understanding the next two strategies, because they seem to contradict each other.
5. Turning Stage Fright into Excitement
When you feel scared, this is a highly activated energy in your body. Performance anxiety is essentially fear, which triggers a bunch of stress hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol, to rush through your body.
These physiological states prime your body to fight or run away, which dials down the complex thinking and planning part of your brain. Your entire body is buzzing with activation energy. This might be great if you’re about to start a physical event, but not if you’re playing piano or giving a presentation, or about to shoot a game-winning free throw, or where you need concentration.
But what a lot of people try to do with this feeling of fear is to down regulate. It’s easy to tell yourself to “calm down”, but it’s more difficult to do in your body. So instead, you want to shift states on the same activation level.
Instead of trying to shift from scared to calm, shift from scared to excited. There’s a lot of research showing that this can be really helpful with performance anxiety. Try saying, “Thanks body for getting me primed to perform. I’m so pumped up! I’m so excited! Look at all this energy I have. This is a good thing.” Thank your nervous system for being activated. Move your body and channel its energy in the direction you want.
Some of the ways I did this before my speech were by exercising before I spoke. I walked the mile to the event center, and then right before I talked, I did a couple of pushups. I just leaned into the body activation and allowed myself to be excited.
6. Invite a Calm Body to Manage Performance Anxiety
Alright folks, we’re finally to the part that most people talk about with performance anxiety: calming down your body. This can be really powerful, and you can train yourself to regulate your nervous system with practice.
You can learn to lower your heart rate, slow your breathing, and feel centered and calm before a big performance. It’s just important to understand this in the context of the “Struggle Switch”. If you try to force yourself to be calm, you’ll actually feel more threatened. But you can invite your nervous system to feel more safe and calm with body- based skills.
If that sounds like a paradox, let me give you one more example. I think teaching my body to calm down is like hiking with a much slower hiker. If I hike way in front of them and yell at them to hurry up, they’ll just get more discouraged and slow down. But if I hike just barely in front of them, set a careful pace, and talk with them in a friendly way, it helps them match my pace a little more.
Your nervous system is like a slow hiker. You can’t just yell at it to calm down; but you can gently guide and pace it. Here are 6 easy ways to do it: (These are all part of my free grounding skills course)
- Humming
- Slow, long outbreaths
- Yawning
- Tense and relax your muscles
- Use your peripheral vision, look around and notice your environment
- Touching or tapping your face
These are skills that the more you practice them—both when you’re calm, and when you’re stressed—the more you practice them, the better you can train your nervous system to calm down performance anxiety.
7. Train Your Brain to Move Past Performance Anxiety
OK, here’s the last one. Your brain is a learning machine. It learns from past experiences. And that sets the tone for how you’ll feel at the next performance. What do you usually do after a big performance? Do you pick it apart? Play close attention to all of your mistakes? Highlight the stuff you got wrong? Beat yourself up?
It’s natural to pay more attention to the negative, but when you do this, you train yourself to feel more scared and stressed next time. It’s ok to learn from your mistakes, but to manage anxiety, you have to intentionally pay attention to your successes too. Let them sink in. Spend time thinking about and talking about the good things you did. The key here is balance. A fearful nervous system wants to only focus on the threats, the mistakes. A healthy nervous system can learn from mistakes, but notices the successes too.
So after my speech, I made sure to take some time to soak it in. I stayed on stage and listened to the applause, instead of running off and hiding. When people thanked me or praised me afterwards, I accepted that praise. I gave myself credit for the work I did. I called my family to celebrate. I was happy and proud of my efforts. I did something that took courage, and I’m proud of that, because this is a skill that I’ve worked to develop, it didn’t come naturally to me.
I also took an hour and napped in a hammock in the sun after it was all over. I stretched and allowed my body to cycle down to a rest state. It’s totally ok to have high levels of fear and stress for short bursts, but it’s also important to relax afterwards.
When you perform, what you do afterwards will help train your brain to either feel more safe, or more scared. Next time you have a big event, take the time to notice how safe and capable you are afterwards. Even if you lose, or mess up, notice how it feels and how good you are at feeling.
Write or talk about your successes, what you learned and how you’re growing. I’m telling you about my wins, this post is literally me reinforcing in my brain that I did something scary and didn’t die.
What about you? What skill have you worked on to improve your mental health?
