Eric Edmeades says nervousness and excitement are the same physical response, just with different expectations. He recommends ten deep breaths, soft eye contact instead of staring, and visualizing your talk going well to shift that energy toward calm.
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What I want to share with you is a really powerful distinction, and that is this nervousness and excitement are effectively the same feeling. They're basically the same thing. Think of it this way. Nervousness is excitement with a negative expectation. Nervousness is excitement with a negative expectation. Conversely, excitement is nervousness with a positive expectation. Excitement is nervousness with a positive expectation. The physiological response are the same. The heart rate, the sweatiness, the vibration, the intensity, the breathing. Everything else is the same except the mental representation of the possible outcome. And so when somebody is nervous about walking up on stage, it's because they've created potentially a negative expectation. But if they could create a positive expectation, if you could think about the great results that you're going to create for people. If you could pre visualize how well your talk goes, if you could pre visualize how enthusiastic people were about your message, about the changes they made. If you can go out into their life and see the impact of the talk you had on them, you might begin to notice feeling better and better. But I want to give you some really physical things that you can do. One is you can recognize that the way the lungs are designed, they're actually designed to trigger emotional response. If you breathe in the top of your lungs, you create nervousness and excitement. But if you breathe into the bottom of your lungs, you create calm and relaxation. If you think of it like this, you and me walking through the bush, we walk a corner, we see a lion. How do you breathe? I mean, I don't think we go, oh, look, a lion, right? You see, the whole point is, is that we breathe up here to create nervousness, we breathe down here to create calm. And so before you walk on the stage, do some deep breathing exercises, really deep, like 10 deep lung filling breaths. And then do one more physical thing that can change the world for you. Another mechanism physically that's designed to create stress is focus. When you really focus on something, when you focus your eyes and you fade out the periphery, you create stress in your body. Again, let's use the lion. If you and I were walking along in Africa and we suddenly see a lion track on the road, are we going to get that relaxed and a gazed view of the world? Are we going to start focusing right now? Right, we're going to be focused. We're going to look down on the lion track and we're going to want to know some things. Which direction was it walking in? That would be a good thing to know, right? Let's walk the other way and how big was it? And how recent is it and then we're going to start scanning the bushes looking for it. Focus is stressful and yet when people get ready to do a presentation they start becoming really focused and they look at people in the audience and they make eye contact with them and they get really, really focused and it creates and generates some fear. And so what I want to offer you is a very simple thing. Obviously there's a lot more I'd love to do with this with you. If you ever come to one of our live workshops I will work with you personally. It's really fun to watch somebody make this transformation. First you create a much better visual movie of how well the whole experience went for you. Secondly, you breath deeply constantly before you walk up on the stage and lastly you do it with soft eyes. You walk up onto the stage and you soften your eyes and you gaze out at the audience because gazing is a naturally relaxed, calm feeling. It.
