The Fear Controller
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A great process for confronting and managing your fear of public speaking.
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“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear,”
– Mark Twain
There are 3 strategies that, if you use them consistently, will help you to confront and overcome your performance anxiety and in turn, to start enjoying the process!
1. Self-Talk
We all talk to ourselves; it’s a perfectly natural process and part of our thinking process. What we do not realise is that we spend much of our daily lives having an inner conversation. The challenge can often be that what we are saying to ourselves without realising it is perhaps not as helpful as we would like.
Picture the scene; you are about to step onto a stage to give a talk to a large audience – what’s going through your head? Typically, we will have prepared well, but it’s still a challenging situation, because statistically, people see this as scarier than dying!
So, phrases like ‘I can’t wait for this to be over’, or ‘I’m terrified’ tend to be the kind of thing that we say to ourselves. Here’s the thing – is this kind of self-talk helping us, or hindering us? The answer is obvious.
And what is more, these self-talk affirmations are beliefs. An important thing to remember is this: –
A belief – or what we feel to be true drives our feelings and emotions. Isn’t that true?
If you say to yourself, ‘I can’, it creates an emotion. If you say ‘I can’t’, it creates an emotion.
Our feelings and emotions affect our behaviour – what we say and what we do. Our behaviour affects our performance and results.
So, in a nutshell, our beliefs drive our performance and results.
Beliefs are either the secret sauce or the recipe for disaster.
The key to great results as far as beliefs are concerned is the knowledge that what we believe is a choice.
It may not feel like a choice, but nonetheless, what you believe can be conscious. The trick is to take a step back and think about the beliefs that you currently hold, helpful and unhelpful and to choose and reinforce the helpful ones consciously and to discard the unhelpful ones consciously.
There is encouraging news in the further statistic that approximately 1% of our beliefs are based in actual fact. The rest come from generalisations, deletions, distortions, what we are told or have read.
Why is this great news?
It means simply that approximately 99% of our limiting beliefs are not actually based in fact and therefore can be challenged. (NB – of course this also applies to our empowering beliefs, but we don’t want to interfere with those!)
How to use Positive Self Talk (affirmations)
a). Self-Awareness
The first thing to become aware of, is what your limiting beliefs ARE – remember, our beliefs tend to run the show subconsciously – we tend not to register what we are believing from moment to moment, but we have an emotional reaction to an event and our behaviour follows accordingly.
Have a think and make a list about any limiting beliefs that you have about: –
- Your ability
- Your potential
- Your intelligence
- Your confidence
- Your knowledge
- Your credibility
- Your communication skills
- Your appearance
When you look at each one of these in turn, you should be able to identify any niggling thoughts (and therefore beliefs) that you have.
b) Remind Yourself of Your Greatness
To counter negative belief patterns, here are some positive alternatives with which to remind yourself whenever you find yourself slipping into old habits:
- Remember times when you overcame serious challenges
- Remember times when you were admired by others
- Remember those times when you overcame your fears
- Remember times when you were proud of yourself
Don’t you think it would make a difference if you made a habit of reminding yourself of your successes instead of the limiting alternatives?
Solution:- A strong recommendation is that you make a note of some consciously empowering self-affirmations, every time you are in a potentially pressured situation. The key is to be consistent with this new strategy until it has become habitual.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1518955151141{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]
2. Body Language
You already use your body language to create emotional states unconsciously. For example, when you feel tired, you adopt ‘tired’ body language, which reinforces the feeling.
However, you can use your body language on purpose to create feelings of emotional certainty, energy and confidence. It’s just a matter of switching off your automatic pilot, asking yourself the question: ‘how do I need to feel in this situation?’ and then adopting the appropriate posture.
So, remember, the fastest way to feel good in a challenging situation is to choose an empowering posture consciously. In other words: – Stand up tall, shoulders back and remember to smile!
Whether you go to the gym, or play a sport, or go for long walks or cycle rides, the effects upon our bodies and minds are the same.
As well as heightened energy, neurotransmitters such as the endorphins dopamine and serotonin are released into the body, which are well recognised as mood enhancers.
So, it’s all good news – you feel energised and you also feel good. The related benefits to the public speaker are clear. You can use movement as a confidence-building mood enhancer.
It’s a great idea (and habit) to get into a series of stretches (if you are in the wings by the side of the stage and out of the audience’s eye line) to loosen the muscles and get the blood flowing.
You can also make sure that you have a little walk to get onto the platform; not enough to look like a show off (no-one likes a show off) from the back of the auditorium, but just enough to use the few steps to energise yourself.
So once again, remember that conscious plans to use movement – just like the other techniques cited here in order to promote and maintain a resourceful state – are the only things that will make this happen, so the advice is to make a note to that effect.
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3. Visualisation
The idea behind visualisation – in other words, seeing a successful outcome in your mind’s eye before it even happens, is that the brain cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is vividly imagined.
In other words, if you imagine a successful outcome really clearly and vividly in your mind, the brain thinks it is really happening, so when you actually get to go through the experience itself, the brain has made sure that as much potential as possible is showing up, because it knows what success looks like already.
Human beings imagine things in pictures. The movies we play in our minds have a gigantic effect on how we feel about something.
The challenge is that most of us play our inner movies a) unconsciously and b) the wrong way around. In other words, we play the disaster movie in our heads – all the things that can go wrong, are going wrong!
So, there is a simple solution and that is to get into the habit of playing helpful movies in our minds of us succeeding consciously.
Whatever your goal may be, the key here is to visualise your achieving it so clearly that it appears real. With clear imagination and visualisation, come the same beliefs, emotions and behaviours that will drive you towards the outcome you want.
Of course, there is nothing as important, nor as effective as real practice. It’s not enough to know the steps – you have to take action.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row id=”cta-habit-spy-row”][vc_column][mk_fancy_title color=”#512582″ size=”39″ font_weight=”bold” txt_transform=”uppercase” letter_spacing=”1″ margin_top=”30″ margin_bottom=”0″ font_family=”none” align=”center”]Get The Free Habit Spy[/mk_fancy_title][vc_column_text css=”.vc_custom_1518955251325{margin-bottom: 0px !important;}”]
Raising awareness of your behaviours and the results you get is the hallmark of a peak performer. It gives you control over your life. Without an awareness of your habits, you’re flying blind because you don’t know what you do well, and critically, you also don’t know what you’re doing badly. If you’d like a methodology for gaining control over your bad habits and enhancing your good ones, why not grab my free ‘Habit Spy’?
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