How leaders can conquer performance anxiety

Performance anxiety can truly debilitate the best of us. Whether we experience this in ourselves as leaders, or we see it in our team, navigating any form of anxiety can be difficult. Anxiety is a complex issue and is experienced uniquely by everyone.  



It is important to realize that we all need a certain level of anxiety for a heightened level of performance. Whenever we embrace something we care about, which requires a focused effort, we will feel the butterflies or nerves, an indicator of anxiety playing a perfect role in preparing us for the task at hand.



Conquering the core ingredient of performance anxiety



It is when this form of tension turns into worry that anxiety can become a problem. Worry seems to be the core ingredient needed to begin negatively experiencing anxiety. According to Vasey, Crnic, and Carter , worry can be defined as “an anticipatory cognitive process involving repetitive thoughts related to possible threatening outcomes and their potential consequences.”



The keywords to take note of here are “repetitive thoughts,” “possible,” and “potential.” Worry in and of itself is not the problem, we all worry occasionally. The excessive nature of worry is the real problem. This excessive worry negatively impacts performance and impairs social and personal functioning.



Excessive worry can breed feelings of depression as well. The word excessive will have different meanings for different people. Our dialing up and dialing down of anxiety will determine what excessive means to us as individuals.



The key question must be: How do we reduce, minimize, or even eliminate excessive worry? The answer is via our understanding of how we generate our emotions. Our emotions, flavor, and color every nook and every cranny of our experience.



Our emotions do not respond to facts, they respond to our interpretation of the facts. “Repetitive thoughts,” what is “possible,” and what will be the “potential” consequences are all fabrications of our minds. In other words, what we deem possible and what has the potential to manifest in our lives and the tendency to have repetitive thoughts, is determined by the meaning (i.e. interpretation) we are giving the situation we are worried about.



Psychologically we are all meaning-making machines. The meaning we give something is what creates our subjective truth about something. Let’s take a simple example of a client or a prospect not returning our calls. How do we experience this? What does it mean? What has just happened? What is the truth here? In other words, the meaning we give to our experiences is always a choice, whether we are aware or not. Our choices lead to the experience of our version of the truth. Let’s take a look at the three levels of truth.



The three levels of truth



Level 1: Imagined truth: This is a complete fabrication, full of drama, inner dialogue, and commentary. Regarding our client or prospect not calling back, our reaction could be: “They don’t want to do business with me, I knew it, they don’t like me.” How do we even know if any of this is true? We don’t.



Level 2: Assumed truth: At this level our response is not as dramatic. Here we tend to temper our response. It could be: “They must be really busy, I’ll work out another way of reaching out to them next week.”



Level 3: Actual truth: Deals with pure facts with zero fabrication. We follow the process of follow-up with zero drama. They have not returned our call. We will just call them again next week.  



We can choose which level of truth we want to operate from. If we are experiencing performance anxiety ourselves or see it in our team, we can explore with them (or ourselves) which level of truth they or we are operating from. Minimizing or eliminating excessive worry is the antidote to performance anxiety.



As a final note, worry is most often based on anticipating something that has not happened yet. In Life’s Amazing Secrets by Gaur Gopal Das, he asks: Do you have a problem in life? If you answered no, then why worry about it? If you answered yes, ask this next question: Can you do something about it? If you answered no, then why worry about it? If you answered yes, then why worry about it?