Curing Performance Anxiety
CURING PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
by Steven Goldsmith, MD
CURING PERFORMANCE ANXIETY
by Steven Goldsmith, MD
Performance anxiety curses many of us, myself included until I deployed three tactics that eliminated it. These tactics—acceptance, externalization of focus, and paradoxical intention—have benefited all—not virtually all or approximately all, but all—my patients who have utilized them.
We prepare to stand up in class. To speak at a podium. To enter stage left in Act I. To bow our violins before a packed house. To pinch hit in the last of the ninth, bases loaded and two outs. Then self-consciousness mugs us and seizes our minds. A sea of gimlet eyes bores into us, judging every pimple, every error, every imperfection in our beings. We will look foolish, say something stupid or offensive. We will not measure up. Fail. They will laugh at us. We will collapse, die, or morph into a babbling idiot, not necessarily in that order.
That’s bad enough. But we unwittingly aggravate the problem. We dig ourselves a deeper hole by trying to hide the anxiety, to act calm and in control. Those efforts backfire because we try. That verb implies the coexistence of an opposing force that can thwart our efforts. It conjures the potential of failure. Consequently, whenever we try something instead of doing it, we strengthen our own psychological opposition to the successful achievement of the task at hand.
Moreover, we are anxious for a reason; psychological forces, often outside our awareness, maintain it. So when we try to suppress anxiety it fights back, digging in its heels, and intensifies. We fight ourselves. This inner conflict strangles us so we cannot speak, tightens our chests so we cannot breathe, wobbles our legs, and dries our saliva. The stuff of nightmares.
What to do? The first rule for this and any other anxiety-related symptom is, ACCEPT IT. It is. Do not fight it. The Gestalt therapist Arnold Beisser articulated this paradox well. “Change,” he wrote, “occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not.” The psychotherapist Carl Rogers stated, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
And how, pray tell, can we accept an experience as terrifying as performance anxiety?
First, if it seems appropriate to the occasion (e.g. fine before a public lecture, but not before your on-stage soliloquy in Hamlet), say something to the audience like, “Folks, I’m terribly anxious , so please bear with me.” Or, “If you notice my voice and my hands are shaky and sweat is pouring off my face, that is because I am so nervous I’m afraid I might faint.”
When we say such words our anxiety will diminish, guaranteed. Because we will no longer be empowering it by fighting it. As a collateral benefit, the audience will now sympathize with us. They will be on our side because most of them know or can imagine how nerve-racking such a situation can be. Moreover, our honesty will endear them to us. Those gimlet eyes will morph into kind smiles.
Or we can approach anxiety as seasoned actors and athletes do. They accept it, consider pre-performance anxiety to be their friend. It reassures them, guarantees they will bring sufficient energy, focus, and motivation to their performance, making them more likely to succeed. Actors know that the converse experience of zero pre-performance butterflies often presages a flat performance.
On the TV program Inside the Actors Studio, a student asked the actor Harvey Keitel whether with continued professional experience it has become easier for him to face his fears. Keitel replied he still faces fears but “that energy that goes into the fear begins to inform you. It becomes an energy you can harness and use creatively, not one you hide from.”
I used to suffer terrible performance anxiety before delivering talks. UntiI I utilized a concept I learned from my Gestalt therapy training years ago. Gestalt theory says that much anxiety is really excitement we turn in against ourselves. And so, as my anxiety escalated prior to each talk and I started quaking, I would tell myself that what I labeled anxiety was really passion for the subject I was to present, excitement about the opportunity to share the fascinating (at least to me) material with an audience for their enjoyment and edification. Following this reframing, my anxiety always markedly diminished.
In addition to such an embrace of their anxiety, many of my patients have found relief through a second tactic, an externalization of their focus. Performance anxiety stems from self-consciousness, that is, a dysfunctional focus upon ourselves—how we look, sound, and perform in others’ eyes. This inward focus creates in us a sense that we are passive recipients of others’ judgments, not a healthy way to go through life. The antidote is to empower ourselves by focusing instead upon the audience/spectators, to redefine ourselves as active agents and them as passive. To study them like detectives, assessing their clothes, hair styles, degree of attractiveness. To wonder about their jobs, their home lives. To see how we can manipulate their experience, change their expressions and postures, cause them to shift in their seats, look surprised or interested, pick their noses.
A third tactic is the use of paradoxical intention. The late actor Alan Arkin wrote about this solution to a form of performance anxiety. For years he conducted workshops for the public in improvisational acting. He noted that many attendees suffered from one of two difficulties that hampered their ability to creatively improvise. Some were too tense, too inhibited to be spontaneous. Others tried to be clever instead of spontaneous; consequently, they too failed to improvise in a truly creative manner. (One can assume that both the inhibited and the clever attendees experienced inner prohibitions against spontaneity, with resulting anxiety about revealing themselves to other participants and perhaps to themselves. So they tried to suppress this anxiety by being either silent or clever.) Arkin, noting these impediments, decided at the start of his workshops to direct participants not to be spontaneous, not to be creative. In essence, he encouraged them to accept the problem they feared and even to intensify it. This direction improved the quality of participation in his workshops, freeing attendees, he reported, to be more spontaneously creative in interesting and fun ways. After all, how can you be anxious that you may perform poorly when you are trying deliberately to do so?
Examples abound in the psychotherapeutic literature of the remarkable power of paradoxical intention (a term coined by the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl), the exaggeration of symptoms to resolve performance anxiety. I have had patients terrified they would make verbal mistakes during presentations at work or in class, during sales pitches to clients and even recitations of marriage vows. I directed them to deliberately misspeak twice on these occasions, during which they were to employ incorrect grammar or pronunciation, misstate a fact, or utter a malapropism. One of these errors would be obvious to the audience but the other would be so subtle that no one but themselves could detect it. Their performance anxieties resolved upon implementing these directions. I advised a couple of public speakers terrified they would stutter mid-speech to deliberately stutter; after they did so once or twice, their fear vanished and they performed well. Other patients complained of an inability to send emails or write proposals for work because of analogous fears of written mistakes. These fears lessened after my paradoxical prescriptions so they no longer felt paralyzed. My book The Healing Paradox explores in more detail and depth the essential role of paradox in healing.
So ally with your performance anxiety, work with it and not against it, and you can discover it is your hidden friend.
For those terrified of public speaking in particular, Toastmasters International is an excellent additional resource that helps members gain confidence and competence.
I welcome readers’ comments about their experiences with this problem.
Steven Goldsmith, The Healing Paradox (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2013)