Many of us have been there already. You can hear an overly reverberating amplified voice of someone who seems to ooze confidence introducing you to a waiting audience. Your heart feels as though it is going to jump out of your chest and your tongue has taken up residence welded to the roof of your mouth. Your name and title echo around the room and in the ultimate act of betrayal, your trembling legs start carrying you toward a lectern and microphone…why did you agree to this?!
In our roles as leaders, we often find ourselves needing to present to audiences, boards or even just our own teams and honestly, I’m speaking from experience here, the resulting heightened anxiety can be crippling! In this article, I am going to look at proven methods of anxiety reduction techniques that work like a charm. I am going help you deal with these panic attacks and make them a thing of the past!
Calamity Jane
The opposite of being anxious is what? Well, being relaxed obviously. Imagine being so relaxed that you aren’t dreading your moment in the spotlight coming… but you are willing the person doing the introductions to get out the way so you can get up there and shine! Relaxation is the antidote to heightened fear and stress.
A key destructive element to anxiety is the catastrophic thinking that accompanies it. “what if I freeze up?! What if I wet myself?! They’ll know I’m a fraud!!”
Alright, let’s get to dealing with all this, with some very simple behavioural alterations that will help you no end.
Take control of the loop
When we are feeling anxious or inferior, we behave in a certain way. Head down, shoulders rounded, closed body language avoidance of eye contact. Why is that?
It all goes back to that part of our brain which is responsible for keeping us alive, it’s where we can be said to be operating from when our behaviours are ‘instinctive’, the amygdala. These responses are extremely useful to us, which is why we can’t do away with them all together, but something often overlooked is that our fight, flight and freeze functions are blind.
We exist in what is known in psychology as ‘feedback loops’ and because of this, just as much as how we feel effects our behaviours, our behaviours effect how we feel!
We aren’t trying to remove anxiety from our range of emotions, we are going to tune it so that it is only there when it needs to be, when we need to react instinctively to an actual physical threat. So, what are the behaviours we need to master to gain control of this feedback loop process?
Slam down flip it and reverse it!
If we look closely at the physical changes that occur in our bodies when we are feeling acute anxiety, we can start to hack the system. Remember at the top of this article when you were imagining being stood in the wings waiting to go on stage? Remember how your tongue was stuck fast to the roof of your mouth because there was no saliva in there?
Well, the fear that you are feeling is a survival instinct that is trying to protect you from a physical threat. Because our instincts are pretty much blind to the real world, they take their lead from what we are experiencing and doing. Through years of training (or perhaps one negative experience), our fear instinct has ‘learned’ to see public speaking as a situation that needs us to engage our survival instincts.
We can perform deliberate and simple behaviours that will recalibrate our fear instinct into backing down and allow us to start to relax. Our subconscious mind is looking for any reason at all to stand the fear response down, as the fear response is a huge investment of energy which should be conserved. (That is why you are always exhausted after having survived a public speaking event and the elation of not dying has passed).
One of the first things that will be switched off when facing a life or death experience is salivation, as your body is diverting all resources to your limbs, ready for fight or flight. Here is our first hack. Chew gum before the presentation.
This simple action forces our body to produce saliva and triggers the feedback loop in reverse, our fear instinct starts to believe all must be well, as otherwise, why would we be eating?! As your fear response starts to stand down, normal physical responses start to return and this snowball effect creates further relaxation signals.
This works for other ‘normalised’ behaviours too, so, think back to the things that you experience on the lead up to an event which gives you anxiety. Analyse what physical responses occur in your body, and plan out deliberate behaviours (like chewing gum) which will force your body to accept things must be less dangerous. These behaviours, as they trigger a domino affect, will allow you to calm down quickly.
Buy David Eagleman’s book on how the brain works at Amazon
In the mind’s eye
Have you ever jumped out of a plane? I have. During the registration process, the on-ground training and the plane ride up to the jump height, all us first timers were panicking, big time. But, sat at the back of the plane, wearing all their own gear and rigging, were two guys who were chilled right out. Laughing and joking and revelling in how petrified everyone else was.
How on earth could they be so relaxed about what was about to happen? Easy… they had trained their fear responses. By repeatedly doing parachute jumps they are voluntarily going towards the experience, their fear response gets the message that parachute jumping is not life threatening.
By repeating an action, and literally surviving, we can harness our fear response to work for us, again taking control of the situation. It is important to realise though that it is necessary to ‘go towards’ the experience voluntarily, training our fear responses not to view the experience with trepidation. You see, the quickest way to train your fear instinct that something is dangerous is to simply to avoid it whenever you come across it.
Now there are two ways of achieving this, and I’m sure you have already worked out that one of them is by seeking out public speaking engagements, over and over again. The thing is, doing that is difficult to arrange and probably the last thing in the world that you want to do.
Enter cognitive re-framing. This is a practice that therapists use to great effect with clients who have PTSD, depression, or phobias. Whilst in a very relaxed state, the feared activity is experienced in the client’s mind. Whilst you can obviously tell reality apart from imagination on a cognitive level, your amygdala generated fear response will be experiencing the activity for real.
By re-framing the experience as a positive one, repeatedly, you can fast track the retraining of your fear response. This process works best when you are being guided by a therapist, but the need for repetition can make for a costly therapy bill. For this reason, it is a great idea to use audio guided sessions which take you through the process, which you can use repeatedly. Over at the Letsworkhealthy.com shop page, you can find an inexpensive three-part hypnotherapy session which will facilitate you mastering retraining your fear response in the comfort of your own home.
When is exercising not exercising?
Imagine you are 25 minutes deep in a high intensity session on a treadmill. Your heart is pounding, you are sweating, and your breathing is shallow and rapid. Feels great doesn’t it? This is exercise.
What about though if your heart is pounding, you are sweating and your breathing is shallow and fast, and you are sat waiting for your turn to speak in a meeting of your piers? This is not exercise, this is an anxiety response. This is your body readying itself to get the hell out of there, closely mimicking exercise as a physical response to threat.
Because of the heavy resource investment, we talked about earlier, your body is looking for triggers to rebalance your physical condition to one of homeostasis. It wants to calm down. So now we are going to let it. Time to breathe.
When you step off the treadmill, you set about returning your body to normal in a very deliberate way. You can’t intentionally slow your heart down, or close off your sweat glands, but you can (and do) intentionally regulate your breathing. This action triggers the feedback loop again and your sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system subconsciously takes care of the rest.
When we are panicking, we gulp down air in deep rasping breaths to fuel our muscles with the required oxygen for our fight or flight response. Each in breath activates the sympathetic nervous system effectively firing us up for action. Conversely, each outward breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for de-escalating and calming us.
A characteristic of someone who is suffering from heightened anxiety is that they sigh a lot. We can learn something here, sighing is basically a long, exaggerated breathing out, and is their body trying to balance their arousal level.
Let’s visit the safety 7/11
As soon as you start to feel anxiety building inside you, employ this technique that is taught to members of the military. Close your eyes (if it is possible in your surroundings) and focus your attention on the area of your skull immediately behind the bridge of your nose. You may feel your eyeballs rotate inward slightly. This is going to be your calming mental location.
Now, breathe in for a quick count of seven beats, then pause for just a moment and then breathe out for another quick count of eleven beats. Pause, then repeat. Focus on the inner bridge of your nose while you are doing this initially. Ensure the outward breath is longer and slower than the inward one.
This technique is designed to serve a few different purposes. Remember we are training our fear response here. We are distracting ourselves from our surroundings, which is the absolute last thing we would be doing if our lives really were in danger. And our fear response is a slow learner, but a learner none the less. It is receiving the message that we are safe.
This method can be used proactively too. When used in conjunction with the re-framing step described above repeatedly, we are training ourselves to remap the physiological response associated with the trigger we are focussed on.
The Filofax of fear
In November 2014 at the University of California, Andrea Niles and her colleagues evidenced something about anxiety which is remarkable. They discovered that the process of giving something a label, a description and a written presence de-escalates an anxiety. This is something I have had personal experience with as it is a key process in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for insomnia. I was cynical in the extreme, as the concept was sold to me as a ‘worry diary’ which I immediately labelled as new age mumbo jumbo.
After reluctantly employing the technique, I was astonished to find that it worked. In psychology speak the phenomenon is known as ‘Affect Labelling’. The principle behind the process is simple, as Niles et al discovered. They randomised their subjects and exposed them to public speaking engagements, assessing their levels of anxiety arousal in each case. Those subjects who had participated in Affect Labelling practices showed greater reduction in physiological responses than those who hadn’t. These results were in spite of the fact that the participants all felt that the process would make absolutely no difference!
So, how do we do it?
Buy a small dedicated notebook which you will keep confidential from anyone else. Then, before bed each night or during the lead up to an event that is causing you anxiety, set aside 10 minutes to write down how the anxiety actually makes you feel. Go into as much detail as possible here, the greater the detail the more impressive the results. Go nuts! Catastrophise as much as you can, use exaggerated terms to describe the fear, as this helps de-escalate your thinking.
What is actually happening here? We are forcing our brains to work in a different way. The anxiety that you are experiencing is generated in your amygdala, which although great at motivating us to jump out of the way of a speeding car, is none too bright. While we let the emotions and anxiety languish in our amygdala, we can’t rationalise it. But, by forcing ourselves to write it down using descriptive words we must use the left prefrontal lobe of the brain. This is our rational, intellectual thinking part of the brain, which through reasoning will de-escalate the emotional response to that trigger.
Can I have your number?
Have you noticed, if you begin to feel anxious and you are left to your own devices, the anxiety builds and builds until it is out of control? Preparing to address a large crowd is the perfect setting for that to happen. It’s almost as though you are stood on an escalator which is carrying you off the top of a cliff.
This next trick will prevent that escalation and it works using a similar principle to Affect Labelling. By assigning a number to our anxiety, we can contextualise it in our minds. Using a scale of zero (absolutely no anxiety) to ten (heart attack) is useful immediately prior to public speaking or other stressful events.
Take a moment to stand quietly and rate your feelings on that scale. It is likely, that if you are still stood upright and able to function, but feeling very anxious, you are somewhere between a six and an eight.
You have just re-framed the anxiety, it is no longer an amygdala driven feeling, but a prefrontal cortex driven rational number. We are diluting the anxiety here like a champ. Thinking in terms of definite numbers is less scary and importantly finite. We are no longer dealing with an intangible expanding cloud of fear, just a simple number. Now we need to decide what number would be appropriate for this situation.
Clearly anything like six or eight is not useful, that’s panicking territory. But, a zero is no good either, as some fear keeps us sharp and on our toes. So, we decide on a three as being manageable and appropriate. We have already limited the situation and importantly, taken control of the process.
The act of assessing how we are feeling is tapping into one of the key skills that Daniel Goleman refers to as necessary for us to develop emotional intelligence. Stepping back engages what mindfulness practitioners coin as our ‘observing self’ state. You are no longer embroiled in the anxiety, your observing self is allowing you to ‘watch’ the anxiety from a safe distance.
Buy Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book on Emotional Intelligence at Amazon
Next, employ the seven/eleven breathing technique and breathe yourself down to your desired number three level. Once you get there, you will find you can comfortably walk out in front of the audience and deliver a killer presentation! The feedback loop that has now been triggered exists because obviously, the audience won’t have tried to kill you, and as such, in incremental steps, your fear response will begin to de-escalate.
The next step is enjoying being up there and believe me, it will come. Get into the habit of grading your anxiety and setting a number that you are happy to accept then breathe your way down to that number. This technique is simple and ridiculously effective.
Give it an outlet
As we have discussed the racing heart, rapid breathing and other typical physical manifestations of the anxiety response are your body readying you for fight or flight. In 2011, Michael Otto and Jasper Smits published their research on the effects of exercise as an anxiety reduction technique. They reinforced what many therapists have been advocating for years, that in order to rapidly de-escalate the anxiety response, the simple answer is to give it an outlet.
Perform the exercise that your body is readying you for. By finding somewhere to smash out press-ups or star jumps you are discharging the anxiety. Regular exercise will over time also reduce your general levels of anxiety for the same reason, but for acute anxiety attacks, run them off.
Intensively exercising to the point where we simply can’t exercise anymore signals to our instinctive mind that we have fought or flown and lived. This makes it hard to continue to panic, honestly, give it a try.
You can also do combinations
The techniques I have described above are powerful when used together or separately. They are proven and based on empirical research. Mixing and matching them to your individual circumstances is a great way to approach this, but for ultimate results, use them all.
Anxiety has its uses, but they should be infrequent. For the rest of the time employing de-escalation techniques should go a long way towards making you more relaxed and confident to excel in your role.
Over to you!
Have you got any suggestions for the best ways to reduce presentation anxiety? As you can see from the post, at letsworkhealthy.com I am giving simple practical help to leaders wherever I can. I would love to hear your thoughts on the tips in this article, so it would be great if you could leave some comments below!
See you for the next article!
Greg Bennett is a Public Health Professional and
Leadership Coach
This post contains affiliate links. Please read our disclaimer for more info
If you subscribe in the box below, you’ll get FREE access to the new 32 page E-book, ‘New Leader Quick Start Guide’. If you want to establish yourself as a great leader and develop a creative motivated team, this E-book is for you!
Thank you so much I attended my interview for the very first time knowing that I was Calm and prepared! I listened to your online presentation as I exercised before my appointment and used your link to help calm my nerves. It was the first time that I felt confident walking out of an interview knowing I had answered each question to the best of my ability because I had already practiced my answers beforehand If I don’t get the job it will be because someone else is more qualified than me and not due to “ interview regret” lol… Read more »