Nervousness: what it really is, and three ways to beat it

Think of the last time your card refused to work in the supermarket queue, with a line of people building up behind you. Or the moment on the phone when the silence stretches out and you are suddenly certain you are boring the person on the other end. That little flush of discomfort has a name, and it is exactly the same thing you feel before you stand up to present. Nervousness is a form of social anxiety, and once you understand where yours comes from, you can start to do something about it.

Social anxiety and where it begins

A large part of your particular flavour of social anxiety was shaped by your parents. If they were overly critical of you, the odds are that you now want your presentations to be as perfect as humanly possible. You pour enormous amounts of time into preparing, you are rarely satisfied with the result, and more often than not you are nervous that what you deliver simply is not good enough. If, on the other hand, your parents were overly protective, the odds are that you now do everything you can to avoid conflict, and you become especially nervous in exactly the moments where a question or a disagreement might arise.

But your upbringing is not the only source. Social anxiety can also arrive from two other directions.

Social learning

The first is social learning. In one study, chimpanzees were taught to fear snakes by being shown a snake and given a small electric shock at the same moment. The fascinating part is what happened next. The chimpanzees who were not in the study learned from the others that snakes are deadly, simply by watching them. You have been on the receiving end of the same process your whole life. Since you were small, friends, family and the media have quietly taught you that presenting is frightening. How many times have you heard someone in your world say, "Yes! Tomorrow I get to present to the whole class, it is going to be sooo good"? Almost never, I would guess. The opposite is far more common, and that is the definition of social learning.

Learned association

The second is learned association. At some point you gave a presentation, or found yourself in a similar situation, and someone laughed, or gave you a grudging, perhaps misread look. Your brain took a jolt of stress and fear and quietly concluded, "When I do this, pain follows. Best to avoid it." Through a small masterpiece of circular logic, your brain then short-circuits itself. The mere thought of presenting is now enough to trigger a clinical fear response: your heart speeds up, your pupils dilate, your mouth goes dry. And your brain, watching all of this, thinks, "Well, if just thinking about the presentation sends my whole system bananas, it really must be dangerous." The memory is written back, usually stronger than before.

So what can we do about it?

Pavlov showed us with his dogs how we can both build and remove learned associations. Every time the food arrived, a bell was rung. Eventually the dogs linked the bell with the food and began to salivate the moment it rang. But when the bell was rung without any food, the salivating stopped after ten or twenty repetitions, and the association was wiped out completely. Here are three techniques I use in my coaching to remove negative nervousness for good. Not to medicate it with useless party tricks like "picture the audience naked" or "find a fixed point on the wall", but to remove it.

Tip 1: Stop telling your brain the fear is real

You need to break the pattern ten to twenty times and tell your brain, again and again, that the fear is unfounded. We should be a little nervous, it keeps us sharp, but not so frightened that the neocortex stops finding the words. So from now on, you never again tell yourself or anyone else that you are nervous. Instead you say you are perfectly calm. The moment a worried thought appears, you swap it for a positive thought of your own choosing. Consistently, patiently, you knock the negative thoughts away and replace them with the thought that this is going to go well.

Tip 2: Fall in love with the racing heart

Did you know that tension and excitement are the exact same biological event? Both give you a faster pulse, more cortisol, more adrenaline. The only difference is how we choose to read them. I once had a client who loved being on stage and yet was violently nervous every single time. I explained that he had simply associated the feeling with the wrong thing. When you wheel out the motorbike in spring, or jump out of a plane with a parachute, you want that racing pulse and that flood of adrenaline. We even have a name for it: adrenaline junkie. On stage you have just filed the same feeling under the wrong heading. My advice to him was simple: enjoy it, love the pulse, connect it to every other situation where a high heart rate is a joy. Four weeks later he called to tell me the negative nervousness had vanished, and it changed the course of his career.

Tip 3: Rewrite the rule

We generalise our lives and our feelings in order to be efficient, and those generalisations quietly harden into rules. Which means you have a rule for when you are allowed to feel nervous. Here are some I have met along the way: "I get nervous if I stand in front of fifty people I know and I am not prepared." "I get nervous if the people in the room know more than I do." "I get nervous the moment I stand up." The problem is that these rules are usually far too easy to satisfy. So my advice is to write a new rule that is far harder, or impossible, to meet. One of the stars of the stock market was terrified of being filmed. His rule was, "I get nervous in any situation where there is a camera." We rewrote it to, "I only get nervous if I have to give a presentation while Ingmar Bergman films me, it is a Saturday, and it is raining indoors." A week later the fear was gone. The most effective way to program in a new rule is to take the phrase, "I, [YOUR NAME], see, hear, feel and know that I only get nervous if... [YOUR RULE]," and repeat it with full conviction until it becomes your truth.

In all my years of coaching I have never had a client who failed to shed their negative nervousness using these three methods. So make your decision, pick one, and run it consistently.