Transform Fear Into Excitement
Photo by Sammie Chaffin on Unsplash
What causes you fear?
For many people in a professional setting, there’s a fear of public speaking and expressing your opinion. It can be on a large stage, perhaps TEDx in front of tens of thousands of people, fully mic-ed and camera-ready. It can be in a leadership meeting where you feel like you don’t quite belong, yet you have something to say. You see that something isn’t right in the work being presented, or the consensus of sameness in the room and you want to speak up and voice your opinion. It can be in a 1–1 conversation where you have to tell someone how you really feel about their performance, or communication style, and its impact on you, but you really hate these confrontations.
When I feel this fear of public speaking, there are hundreds of butterflies in my stomach, flapping their wings against each other in the confined space and pushing and fighting to be released. It’s a feeling of palpitation and agitation. My heart beats faster and I feel a tightness in my chest. The temples of my forehead pulse and I can feel the shadow of a headache starting to form. I’m often flushed, with a pinkish-red tinge rising upwards on my cheeks. My jaw is tense and rigid. The words are choking in my throat. They’re on the tip of my tongue but still unable to come out.
I’m afraid that when I draw attention to myself, everyone will look at me in anticipation and my mind will go blank with nothing to say. When I open my mouth, I think I’m going to sound like an idiot. What comes out will be dumb or obvious. Everyone already knows my point… it’s so simple they’ve already moved far beyond it in the conversation. My presentation is simply stating the obvious and wasting everyone’s time. I fear that I’m an outsider, that I don’t belong here amongst these brilliant people.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist, psychologist and author has done extensive research about emotions. Her TED talk, You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions: Your Brain Creates Them, explains that:
“…emotions are guesses. They are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together, and you have more control over those guesses than you might imagine that you do.”
These emotions come from our brain making sense of all the experiences we’ve had in the world and creating patterns to make meaning from them. We can practice to influence and exert control over how we reframe these emotions.
Think about the emotion of excitement. It might be the anticipation of a child the night before Christmas, or the feeling when you’re on a rollercoaster going up, up, up, and getting ready for that whoosh when the car rushes down over the first peak. My physical feelings of excitement are of butterflies in my stomach, my heart beating faster, and a jittery palpitation all around my body. The physical sensations of excitement are almost identical to that of fear.
Instead of surrendering to the fear and the anxiety, we can remind ourselves that we have control over the emotion. We can call it fear, or we can reframe it to be excitement.
The first time I was backstage in the green room, ready to give a keynote talk to tens of thousands of people, I felt ready to throw up. Outwardly I was prepared—hair and makeup, mic-on, and had my content practiced down to the second—but inside, I was terrified. An experienced speaker waiting in the room looked at me and gave me this advice that I’ve never forgotten:
“Listen, right now imagine that you’re a dog. You see the dog park in front of you. On the other side of the gate is this wonderful space filled with other dogs. They’re all excited to see you. They want to play with you. And you know it’s the most fun you’ll ever have in the world. When that gate opens, you’re going to bounce out like a dog feeling the excitement, anticipation, and electric energy.”
With that one simple message, she shifted my perspective. Rather than fear, the palpitations turned into a fierce lightning bolt of energy that charged me up and propelled me out of the greenroom on to the stage and into the spotlight.
I nailed the keynote talk.
As Dr. Barrett’s research shows, our brains have influence over our emotions. With some practice, we can try reframing emotions to switch our perspectives from fear to excitement.
So the next time you’re feeling some fear, whether it’s of giving a big talk, expressing your opinion in a leadership meeting, or giving someone difficult feedback in a 1–1 conversation, take charge of and reframe the fear. Let the physical feelings move into an energy change that builds up excitement. This switch elevates your energy. It makes you glow. It turns you magnetic. And with this small practice, you can try an experiment to play with how you move between fear and excitement.