“I’m so bad at this!” What social anxiety research can teach us about our negative self-talk
“the primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
-ECKHART TOLLE
High achievers tend to be especially self-critical in moments where they don’t feel like they measure up. However, this kind of self-criticism is exactly what prevents us from performing well.
Anxiety around public speaking can make many people feel intensely self aware. Whether it’s getting in front of the room, being interviewed for a job, or sharing your opinion in a meeting, speaking up in front of others can send you into spirals of thoughts like:
“I’m so bad at this.”
“Can the interviewer see my hands shake?”
“Doing presentations makes me feel sick.”
“Is my boss annoyed with me?”
“I’m sounding so stupid!”
High achievers motivated by impressing bosses, colleagues, and peers tend to be especially self-critical in moments where they don’t feel they measure up. However, this kind of self-criticism is exactly what prevents us from performing well.
How can you show up as your best, most enthusiastic self when you’re focused on how nervous you are or how badly you think you’ll perform?
How can you read the room when your mind is busy conjuring up negative thoughts?
How can you enjoy connecting with the people around you when you’re hyper-focused on how you’re being perceived?
Having some negative thoughts is normal: researchers at Queen’s University suggest that we have around 6,200 thoughts per day. With so much mental activity, our thinking is bound to veer towards pessimism on occasion, especially if we’re in a situation we don’t love. However, public speaking situations have a way of putting this self-awareness on overdrive. Being hyper-focused on ourselves and how we look leads to negative thinking and excessive worry around what others think. While some self-awareness is a good thing, too much of it can leave us anxious, stressed, and unable to concentrate on what we’re trying to do.
For perfectionists or high achievers, this is especially true. High achievers are more likely to associate their fear of public speaking with a deficit, personality flaw, or something they need to conceal. This leads to shame. According to psychologist Brené Brown,
“When we are in shame we are often overcome with the need to hide or protect ourselves by any means possible.”
When we feel shame, our body's first line of defense is involuntary: the primal responses of fight, flight, or freeze. This leads to physical symptoms like a racing heart or sweaty palms—a burst of nervous energy that takes us out of the moment and pulls our attention away from the task at hand.
The self-fulfilling prophecy of negative self-talk
When our body is busy fending off panic and adrenaline, our thinking is less clear. It’s harder to concentrate, and we’re less likely to perform at our best. Research on social anxiety suggests that this is exactly what ends up happening: when we’re anxious, we perform poorly compared to our non-anxious peers.
Being so busy focusing on how anxious we look (and how to hide it), leaves us distracted and unable to engage in the task—which can result in significant impairment or distress.
So what can we do instead? Breaking the cycle starts when we can redirect our thoughts outside of ourselves, from our internal anxiety to the external environment and goal:
How am I adding value?
What do I want to share?
What excites me about what I’m doing?
How can I teach my audience something new?
Taking the focus off of the anxiety and onto what we’re doing, showing, or sharing helps create space between us and the situation. It interrupts the cycle of negative thoughts and physical sensations related to anxiety, which in turn enables us to be more present, more engaged, and more successful in the task.
Over-focusing on what we look like takes us out of the present moment and prevents us from accomplishing our public speaking goals.
Redirecting negative thoughts gives us more opportunities to shine, and makes public speaking situations a lot more fun.
Over-focusing on what we look like takes us out of the present moment and prevents us from accomplishing our public speaking goals. However, redirecting negative thoughts gives us more opportunities to shine—not to mention making public speaking situations a lot less scary (and a lot more fun!).
Want to learn more strategies for tackling your fear around public speaking? Check out some of the other resources available on my blog!
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