stage fright

On the Screen: I Am Nervous (Updated)

Posted on by Nick Enge

On the finale of America’s Next Top Model, Cycle 11, Tyra Banks gives a useful piece of advice about nervousness to finalists McKey and Samantha before their runway show:

How are we feeling? A little nervous? It’s okay to say “I am nervous.” Because when you do the “I’m not nervous [freaking out], I’m not nervous [freaking out more]!” When you say “I am nervous,” it just relaxes it, it gets it out.

As the popular saying (attributed to Carl Jung) goes, that which you resist persists. Therefore, by saying you’re not nervous, you’ll only make yourself more nervous. But if you start out by admitting that you are nervous, you can actually make progress toward feeling less nervous by using one of the many techniques that I’ve shared on this blog or in the Nervousness chapter of The Science of Speaking.

Update (6/29/17): Here’s a relevant article on accepting social anxiety, published a few days ago in Psychology Today.

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From the Lab: You Can Do It!

Posted on by Nick Enge

In a 2014 study by Sandra Dolcos and Dolores Albarracin, reported by BPS Research Digest’s Christian Jarrett, they found that when it comes to motivating yourself, saying “you can do it” is better than “I can do it.” Participants who were instructed to tell themselves “you can do it” reported greater motivation to solve a set of puzzles and actually succeeded in solving more puzzles than participants who told themselves “I can do it.” This effect also held true for exercising: participants who told themselves “you can do it” reported more positive attitudes toward exercising and expressed greater intentions to exercise in the coming week than those who told themselves “I can do it.”

As for why this might be, the researchers “speculate that second-person self-talk may have this beneficial effect because it cues memories of receiving support and encouragement from others,” which, as we’ve seen before, can be an effective method for calming your nerves. This study goes one step further to suggest that we might be able to provide this for ourselves, simply by speaking to ourselves in the second person.

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From the Lab: Three New Techniques for Easing Your Nerves

Posted on by Nick Enge

I’m always looking for new ways to help nervous speakers, and yesterday, Sara Seamons of GoReact delivered in a great article at Presentation Guru. The whole article is worth a read, but here’s an executive summary of the findings.

  1. In a recent study, researchers found that how nervous you feel is directly correlated to how prepared you feel, which supports my advice in The Science of Speaking to know your content, your audience, and your setting. The less uncertainty there is surrounding your speech, the less nervous you will feel about it.
  2. In the same study, researchers found that making positive associations about speaking can also significantly reduce your speaking anxiety. While in The Science of Speaking, I show how visualization can help you do this, this study revealed another way: to receive positive feedback on your speech. Whether it’s positive feedback from your instructor and peers in a public speaking class, or simply positive feedback that you solicit from a friend, being told that you’re actually pretty awesome at speaking can significantly reduce your speaking anxiety.
  3. According to several other studies, recording your presentations and watching them afterwards can significantly reduce your speaking anxiety as well. While it’s not always the easiest thing for us to do, watching ourselves on video is a great way of get a realistic view of how we’re doing, which feeds straight back into strategy #2. (Seamons’ company, GoReact, provides an easy way to do this—more on this in a future post.)

While it can often seem like there’s nothing we can do about our stage fright, science shows that this belief is unfounded. There are many different strategies that have been found effective, you just have to know where to look.

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From the Lab: The Power of Rituals

Posted on by Nick Enge

In a recent study at Harvard Business School, reported by BPS Research Digest, participants were asked to engage in an anxiety-inducing task: singing a song in front of a stranger. Before singing the song, some participants were asked to conduct a ritual: they drew a picture of their feelings, sprinkled salt on it, and counted to five before crumpling up the paper and throwing it in the trash.

As silly as this ritual sounds, the participants who engaged in it reported significantly less anxiety about singing and had lower heart rates than those who didn’t. And that’s not all: the ritual made them perform better too!

Interestingly, it didn’t matter what the ritual was—an alternative ritual that involved writing down a sequence of numbers was also effective. What did matter, however, was that is was called a “ritual.” When the ritual was called what it really was, “a few random behaviors,” the effect disappeared.

As the authors of the study conclude, “although some may dismiss rituals as irrational, those who enact rituals may well outperform the skeptics who forgo them.” So whether it’s salting your feelings, writing down numbers, or maybe even a practice that has additional anxiety-reducing effects (like those described in The Science of Speaking), engaging in a ritual before your speech, and explicitly identifying it as such, can be an effective method for overcoming your nerves.

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From the Lab: The Button

Posted on by Nick Enge

In The Science of Speaking, I give you many different techniques for managing your nerves. And when you put them to use, each of these techniques can be quite effective. But what if, in addition to these techniques being effective, simply knowing they exist also had an effect?

While this may sound a bit out there, in Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy, Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant cite the results of several studies to this effect:

In classic experiments on stress, people performed tasks that required concentration, like solving puzzles, while being blasted at random intervals with uncomfortably loud sounds. They started sweating and their heart rates and blood pressure climbed. They struggled to focus and made mistakes. Many got so frustrated that they gave up. Searching for a way to reduce anxiety, researchers gave some of the participants an escape. If the noise became too unpleasant, they could press a button and make it stop. Sure enough, the button allowed them to stay calmer, make fewer mistakes, and show less irritation. That’s not surprising. But here’s what is: none of the participants actually pressed the button. Stopping the noise didn’t make the difference … knowing they could stop the noise did. The button gave them a sense of control and allowed them to endure the stress.

Based on my own experience, and the experience of my students, I think that it’s quite likely that having a toolbox of strategies for nervousness can—even without using them—help to mitigate nervousness in a similar way. In other words, knowing that you have the power to control your nerves can, by itself, go a long way toward soothing them.

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From the Lab: You’ll Probably Like Speaking

Posted on by Nick Enge

Yesterday, we saw that the name we give to our feelings of stage fright can have a major impact on how much they affects us. Today, I want to explore a related concept: that how we expect to feel can strongly influence how we feel.

In a recent study led by Bethany Kwan, subsequently reported by Christian Jarrett and Drake Baer, participants went for a run on a treadmill. Before the run, some participants were told that “most people exercising at this intensity feel good and energised, and then relaxed afterward” while others were told that “most people find this intensity of exercise negative and unpleasant, and then they feel tired afterward.” Control participants were given no expectations.

As Jarrett explains, “participants manipulated to expect the lab run to be more enjoyable showed greater increases in positive feelings through the run compared to the negatively manipulated participants; moreover, compared with control participants, they remembered the run as less fatiguing.”

Translating this into the realm of public speaking, this suggests that perhaps we (as a society, and in particular, as public speaking coaches) should be a bit more careful about how we present stage fright. If we treat it as gospel that public speaking is a terrifying experience, is it possible that we’re unwittingly creating negative expectations that wouldn’t necessarily be there (or at least wouldn’t necessarily be as bad) otherwise? While it would certainly be disingenuous to say that everyone loves public speaking, is it possible that setting more positive expectations would, as in the running study, result in more positive experiences? What might happen if, instead of telling people that they’ll likely (or certainly) be nervous, we tell them that they’ll probably like speaking? While I don’t have the data to answer that question at the moment, it’s something I’ll be thinking about a lot more in the near future.

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In the News: By Any Other Name

Posted on by Nick Enge

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

 

—Juliet, Romeo and Juliet II.ii (William Shakespeare)

Or would it? In a recent post on Science of Us, Melissa Dahl wrote about a recent column in The Guardian by Oliver Burkeman, who cited comments by Paul Silvia on writer’s block. Complex chain of citation notwithstanding, the idea being discussed is quite interesting. Here it is, in the words of Dahl:

“Naming something gives it object power,” Burkeman quotes Silvia as saying. “People can overthink themselves into deep dark corners, and writer’s block is a good example.” It’s best, then, if you don’t dwell on or “diagnose” yourself with the problem; instead of calling it “writer’s block,” call it what it is, or rather, what it isn’t — “not writing.”

The same thing, I think, can be true of “stage fright,” “speech anxiety,” or “glossophobia.” It’s possible that by giving our (perfectly normal) feelings these scary sounding names, we’re giving them more power over us than they deserve. If we simply describe how we’re feeling, i.e., “a bit jittery before giving my speech,” we may be able to take away some of the power of our fear and more easily find ways to overcome it.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the opposite could be true. Others have suggested that you can actually take away the power of your fears by naming them. In fact, there’s a whole genre of literature based on this concept, that when you know the true name of something, you can take away its power.

In The Science of Speaking, I explore yet another option: that perhaps we should give our feelings a positive name, such as “stage excitement” or “stage enthusiasm,” which explain the symptoms in a more inspiring way.

In the end, it really depends on what works best for you. If naming your fear is making you feel worse, by all means, call it something less serious. But if naming your fear makes you feel better, by all means, go ahead and name it. And if what works best for you is to give it a different name, then that’s the strategy that you should employ.

To bring it back to Juliet’s question, there’s probably something more to a name than she claims—but what really matters in the end is that we should call the rose by the name that makes it smell the sweetest.

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