How to communicate with confidence!

3 steps to overcoming fear of public speaking

Have you ever had trouble sharing your gifts with the world? Like when nerves get the best of you and it’s hard to speak or perform when it counts? We need your creativity and your presence! 

But it can be hard to get up in front of people and share our gifts. Whether you’re presenting at a meeting, performing onstage, or getting up in front of your peers, it can feel like a struggle to remain connected to your strength when you feel vulnerable and exposed.

All you need is a strategy to follow. And in this episode of The Gita Brown Show you’ll learn a strategy to use that will keep you connected to your purpose, calm your nerves, and help you communicate with confidence!

Quick overview of the steps.

Step One

Frame It.

Remember your “WHY.” If you tie your presentation or performance to your mission, then your personal fears become really tiny in comparison. 

Make a list of who you are serving, why you are performing, or how you hope to help the world by sharing your gifts. 

his will keep things in perspective and make it easier for you to share!

Step Two

Breathe It.

Taking deep and slow breaths will calm your body’s “fight or flight” response and help your mind to calm down. You can use your breath to trick your mind to calm down! By taking deep breaths you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which tells the body that blood pressure can lower, racing thoughts can slow down, and heart rate can decrease. It works and it’s free!

Step Three

Be it.

Come up with a catch-phrase or personal mantra that you’ll use to help keep your center. Make it related to your mission and your purpose. Like, “I want to share my music and lift spirits.” 

or “I want to connect and spread this important message to help my community.”

Make it short and clear and repeat it in the hours leading up to the event; especially when you feel a case of nerves coming on. This will keep you connected to your purpose, and elevate your thoughts out of selfishness and into service; then your gifts can shine!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Hey there and welcome to the Gita Brown show, bringing harmony into your everyday life. Get inspired with practical tips for your creativity and spirit. If you're a musician, artist, writer, or creative soul, you have found your source for guidance and inspiration. I am so excited to bring this episode to you today. Obviously I'm Gita. Hello, my friends! Today I want to talk to you about performance anxiety. Oh my goodness. Now you may be saying, okay, I'm a musician. I can relate to performance anxiety. But think about all the ways that performance anxiety can come into your life no matter who you are. Um, about six months ago, I had to do a presentation at work in front of a group of people. That induced a certain amount of performance anxiety. It can even be as simple as going up in front of one of your clubs and speaking, or for some of my writer friends, you're launching a book tour.

You're an introvert and now you have to get up in front of people and speak and you're finding that your performance, anxiety or anxiety about sharing your art and being vulnerable in front of people is getting in the way of your ability to share your unique gifts and talents. We've all been there. It was just talking to one of my little clarinet students the other day and she said "the anxiety before that concerto competition wrecked my life. I'd be having a perfectly fine day and then all of a sudden I would think about the competition and I would get nervous and scared and nothing else mattered" I'm sure we can all think of times in our life when that little bit of anxiety has crept in and it's tipped over from excitement and being thrilled to share our gifts with the world and tipped over a little bit into it's eroding our confidence or at the worst moments getting in the way of giving your best performance of your life.

So I have this question for you. Are you intentional when it comes to addressing your performance anxiety? Do you just kind of deal with it and don't ever really think about it. Do you have a strategy? Do you have a plan? Are you intentional about how you handle it? If you're not intentional about it, today is the day for you to change that. And that's what I'm going to share with you today. So a little bit about me. I've been doing yoga for 30 years, a little bit longer than that. I've also been a clarinetist. I've performed all over the world. I've taught, I don't even know how many students, hundreds of students at this point, both yoga and music. I've had my own share performance anxiety. I've helped students of all ages through all different levels of anxiety and stress around performance. And I'm here today to sort of demystify things for you a little bit and show you a roadmap to shifting things for you.

So I want to share a little bit, um, about my story and performance anxiety. And then I want to share a story of a student and then I'm going to give you a framework, a three steps you can use to banish performance anxiety. And to start to shift it into one of your superpowers. So back when I was in the fourth grade, now it's probably fifth grade when I started playing clarinet and I went off to a summer band camp. And you know, back at my school, I was always first chair, clarinet, Ooh, big deal. But then I get to this big band camp with the big kids. And suddenly I found myself back in the third section. And I was used to being kind of the star in my little hometown and now I was one of many and I was way at the low end of the totem pole.

And it wrecked my confidence. And the day of the performance of our, after our first week, I got a horrible stomach ache. So bad, you know, I was this little pipsqueak fifth grader, I thought I was sick, like legitimately sick. So I went to the nurse at the camp. And she said, Oh little sweetie, nothing's wrong with you, you're fine. But I'm thinking to my head, of course something is wrong with me. I feel like I'm going to vomit, my stomach hurts. I can't concentrate because the pain is so bad. My hands are shaking and my fingertips are sweaty. And I remember leaving that nurse's office and going into the bathroom and locking myself into the stall. And I remember sitting there being too scared to go back to rehearsal. And feeling completely invalidated because I knew something was wrong with me. I felt sick, but here is an adult telling me there was nothing wrong with me.

Now I look back at that little girl and I'm like, Aw sweetie, you're just nervous. You're just in with the big kids now. It's kind of intimidating and I wish someone had walked into that bathroom and taken me out of the stall and showed me what I'm going to show you today. Because it doesn't have to be that way. And I think back then, this was like back in the 80s we didn't have a lot of language to talk about our vulnerability around being artists. And we also didn't have a lot of languaging of talking about how our minds and our emotions are directly reflected in our bodies. Now that languaging has changed. It is time to bring all of our vulnerability here on the table to share it, and a shift in elevate that conversation for ourselves, for our students, for all of our performing artists and all of us who have to get up in front of people and share our gifts and talents.

It's time for us to have the conversation. So I'm really thrilled to do that for you. So back to my story though, thank goodness about, Oh however many years later, that was, that was a fifth grade-ish. So by 10th grade I started doing yoga. Not the kind of yoga that you think of when you think of today, which is basically moving the body around a lot of different positions, which we call Asana or yoga poses. I started doing yoga that was right at the end of the counter-cultural revolution of the 60s when everyone was interested in expanding their mind, elevating their consciousness, transcendental meditation. So the kind of yoga I got into was a much more of a comprehensive lifestyle system. Yoga where you're training your mind and your thoughts to be your best friend. And you're using that meditation and awareness to guide you through every day.

The physical poses and postures are part of it, but it's just one thing you could think of it like a spoke on a wheel. And I looked back at that. I said, I'm so grateful that the type of yoga I found on those little dusty audio cassettes, anybody out there, remember audio casetttes? those little dusty audio cassettes came out of the 60s and the 70s and was all about meditation because without really knowing what I was doing, by the time I was in high school, I started meditating and I noticed I started to feel better in everyday life. And I kind of noticed with just sort of stumbling into it that if I'd meditate and take a few breaths, and then I'd go down to the practice room and practice that my practice was more efficient. And I started to notice that my performance anxiety was still there.

I'd still get nervous when I would perform, but it was kind of like a dull little buzz instead of this roar that took me over and sort of just put me on autopilot. So I was just performing like an automatically not actually like connected to the art. And I look back and that I'm like, wow, I'm so grateful. I found yoga and meditation back then without even knowing I was doing it. And then along the way as I've been teaching and working with all kinds of people, from busy moms to writers to musicians, I've seen the ways that the simple reframing of this performance anxiety can really help. So at some point then the yoga and meditation kind of flipped for me and it went from a like a thing where the, the, the performance anxiety would back down a little bit. And it was like all of a sudden it got re channeled and that rechanneling meant that I was now using that performance anxiety as my greatest weapon.

It was like this extra fuel that when I would go to perform in front of anybody, all of a sudden I'd be at a next level. A level that I could not have gotten to in a practice room. I could only get there if I put myself up in front of people and felt that little nervous fire, then suddenly I could find that fifth and sixth gear in my performance. And I really do think that it's yoga meditation and a bit of positive psychology helped put me in the right framework. And this is, you know, nothing that like I discovered. This is 4,000 years of yoga tradition that's been replicated over and over and over again. The most basic behavioral science. This is stuff that the Olympians used. My friends. Olympians know that if they train their mind and they have the right psychology going into an event, they come out on top every time.

So I know that if you reached for this particular episode and you clicked play or listening in your car or at home, you chose this cause there's some part of you that suspects that you can take that little bit of buzz you get from that performance anxiety or adrenaline and shift it and turn it into your superpower. Let's get to how you can do that. So I had this experience with a student who had just a couple of days ago and I thought, how perfect the student, let's call her Jane, she is a sixth grader and a clarinet student and she had a little performance to do. And I walked in, they had been there rehearsing for about half an hour prior to the performance and I thought I would just check up on her, as you do, to make sure she was all set. I walk in and her eyes were like deer in the headlights, just huge.

And I was like, Hey kid, how ya feeling? She's like, I'm so nervous I can't breathe. I'm really scared to get up there. I said, all right, come take a walk with me. Let's talk. So I kind of walked down the hallway, I chatted with her and I led her through this three step process that we are going to do right now. At the end of that three step process, I set her off to sit in the concert hall and wait for her performance. I told a few of her friends to go sit with her so she could stay nice and light before the performance. She got up on that stage about 40 minutes later and she crushed it. Now she's a little tiny little slip of a thing. The clarinet is practically bigger than her. She was playing a really hard piece of music and she was playing it with a high schooler that she'd only rehearsed with once and I was a little nervous for her.

But man, she absolutely nailed it. And I am sure that it was her training and preparation combined with the three step method I'm going to show you now that helped get her in that right mindset so she could get up there and turn those nerves into fuel. So the first thing to do is to frame it, frame your performance anxiety. And the best way to do that is you got to put things in a bigger frame. The best way to do that is to find out your why. So often when you're preparing for a big meeting or presentation or getting up in front of your peers or a performance or a book tour, we get so lost and caught in the minutia of preparing or lost and caught in just the minutia of all the other stuff and challenges that are going on in our daily life that aren't even related to the performance that we forget why we are doing it in the first place.

And every time you lose sight with of the why, you're inviting distraction to come on in. So why is it important for you to perform? Are you an artist and you have this burning desire to share what you've created with the world? Are you a musician and you've read it, wrote a song that speaks from your heart and you want to share that with people? Do you actually like being up there on stage? And you get, as much as you're scared by it, you get enough of a rush from it that you think, wow, this is helping me advance. Why do you perform? Why do you read your books? Why are you doing this in the first place? Are you serving your work? Like some of my writer friends do? Are you serving underserved populations and telling their stories and bringing that to light? If you tie your art or mission to a larger why, your personal anxiety becomes really, really small in comparison. So you got to find a big frame for your performance anxiety. And that frame says WHY all the way around the edges. That why we'll keep everything in perspective for you and remind you why you are doing this.

Uh, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda have that awesome show, Grace and Frankie, if you haven't watched it, on Netflix, go binge that this evening. It is phenomenal. Now these women are well in their seventies and eighties and they have had tremendous careers as actresses. Very recently they were interviewed and asked about their longevity and why they're still are creating relevant, productive, and entertaining art. Even as they move into their octogenarian years, and Jane looked at Lilly and she said, because we both serve, we are both tied to larger missions of advocacy. We both have things that we volunteer for that we believe strongly in in the world and because of that it gives us the zest to keep on going. You've got to plug into a bigger why, a bigger frame. It can be as simple as, I wrote this folk song and I want to share some piece with my audience. It can be, I really want to help this organization move to another level. So it's necessary for me to do that. Find your why. So that is step number one, frame it. Remember why you're doing the thing that you're doing.

Now along with this, let me acknowledge, I know that there is vulnerability when it comes to performing. Whoa, I get that. But if we as artists, especially in the 21st century, don't talk more openly about our vulnerability and about our fears and about those things that get in the way of performing at our best, we are actually never going to advance as artists. It used to be the way when I was coming up through conservatory, through Eastman, Interlochen arts Academy, on and on, that you hid any performance anxiety that you had. You didn't talk about it, you didn't share it. Sharing weakness was a no-go. My friends, that conversation has changed. Thank you millennials. And we needed to continue changing that conversation to turn our vulnerability about sharing our art and our gifts with the world into our weapon. They're more vulnerable and expressive. We are, the more we're connected to that larger why and the more we can relate to the people that we're sharing with.

Back when I started doing the meditation, mindfulness, moving and breathing, I would do it backstage before performances. And I can tell you honestly, I was mocked openly many times. I was laughed at. I was dismissed. Uh, people roll their eyes at me and it got to the point where I had to go and find a place where I could do it, where people wouldn't actually see me. Just taking a few deep breaths and moving around a little bit before performance. It hurt me deeply, but I didn't stop. And I am so glad that the tide has now changed. And now people come to me and they say, Hey, so that breathing stuff you taught me, I've noticed is really helping. Can you teach me more? And I'm like, yes, let's do that. So remember that anytime you're getting up in front of people, you have that why in the frame understand that.

Yeah, vulnerability is going to come right along with that desire to serve at that higher level. And that's totally part of the game. The more willing you are to just allow that to be, the less it is going to SAP your strength and help fuel that performance anxiety. So, um, you know, I felt nervous preparing for this show. Come on. We're all vulnerable, right? So just roll with it. Okay. So number one step frame it, you got your frame to the bigger why. Number two, your second step to banish performance anxiety is to breathe it. Breathe it. Remember that story of that little fourth grade or fifth grade me with the stomach ache and the shaking hands. If someone had taught me in that moment to take two minutes and just take some gentle, slow and deep breaths, I am 100% confident that those physical symptoms would have gone away.

When you're in that fight or flight moment and your heart is racing and the nerves are going and you feel that you're right at that edge of it, like clamping you down before you can really have it as a superpower, your body is in fight or flight. Adrenaline is coursing. Your body diverts energy from your extremities and sends it to , the center core of your body to keep you alive. And in that moment, the only way to shift it sometimes is to actually go in through the body because you can think all the positive thoughts you want. But if your body is already flaring it, like alarm level, nervous system anxiety, the way to counter that is to come in through the body and the breath. It's super, super simple and you can do it anywhere and nobody even has to know that you're doing it.

So in yoga we have this concept, you don't have to remember this, there's no quiz, but it's a cool word, so I'm going to say it. It's a phrase actually phrases this pratipaksha bhavaana is fancy. Let me say it again. pratipaksha bhavana, and that means substitute the opposite positive thought. So if you have a negative thought to shift it, you substitute the opposite. Positive thought. If you're having a negative body reaction, super, super nervous. The opposite positive thing to do is to slow it down and take a deep breath doing that. Your body will actually teach your brain how to slow down. In turn, your thoughts can still be racing, but if you go in through the body, your mind will then learn how to slow down. That channel works sort of both ways. Brain to body, body to brain. It's just part of your breathe at framing. All you have to do is take a deep breath. Let's do one right now. Even if you are driving a car, this is totally safe. Just take an inhale and an exhale through the mouth. Let the stress go

do one more at your own pace. Take a breath in

and breathe out.

Do one more at your own pace, wherever that is for you. You just take a breath in and you just exhale. Now imagine taking a timer and setting it for two minutes, and before you begin to prepare to go into your meeting or your conversation or your performance or your workshop, you just sit quietly somewhere for about two minutes and you just breathe slowly and deeply. Imagine how that could shift your neurochemistry. You've got your Y framed, you're breathing it. Now your body chemistry is all aligned. Imagine how that could shift the experience for you. Wouldn't that be nice? Take a breath, my friend. The third step to banish performance anxiety is to be it. It's all well and good to talk about. I have this lovely frame. I know my why. I am breathing. That's all great, but if you don't practice a mental way of be ing the why and the breath, your mind is going to run away with you.

One of my favorite teachers, Sonia Sumar yoga teacher. She says, your mind can your thoughts, rather your thoughts can either be your best friend or your worst enemy. And so this be it step is all about turning your thoughts into your best friend. So you have your why turn that why into a catch phrase. You just need a short little thing. You could even call it a mantra if you wish. You just need a little short phrase that reminds you why you're doing what you're doing. Like for me, mine for the podcast today was I want to share what I've learned with my friends. Simple that cuts right through all the anxiety for me of like being on camera with the lights and the headphones and that this and that that just want to share what I've learned with my friends. I say that over and over, every time I would feel that anxiety coming in, I came in and recorded.

No problem. So what is your catch phrase? Can you think of one right now? Why do you do what you do? Why are you going to do that thing? Keep it short and simple. My student, the one who had to perform with a high schooler who I saw who was just so nervous hers was, I love to share my music. That was it, and I said, okay, now put it all together. She had her why? She had the breath and she had the be it. She had her little catch phrase. I said, when you're sitting in that chair and it's two or three people before your turn to perform, I want you to take deep breaths in and out and silently repeat your catchphrase to yourself. Just say it over and over and let your mind focus on that so your mind is focused on the bigger picture.

I hope this makes sense to you. So to recap those three steps, frame it, find your why, breathe it, shift your body into a more receptive, relaxed, restful state. Third is be it. Find your catch phrase. Link that with the breath and just let your mind repeat on that over and over until you live in that space. In this way, my friends. Then whenever you go to step into that situation, you will find yourself completely prepared to the best of your ability using psychology, yoga, meditation, breath, all kind of put together so you can serve the world with your unique gifts. Remember, being vulnerable is a part of this process. I'm not saying it's easy. Oh, it's hard. It may even bring you to tears. It brings me to tears. Sometimes I get so scared, being vulnerable in front of people, but the world needs you.

They need your art. They need your voice, your poetry. They need your presence at a meeting. Speaking truth. The world needs you. So make sure that you are prepared to meet that challenge and to share your gifts because that lifts us all up. Okay, so it's homework time. Tell me, what are you going to do proactively and intentionally to help cope with your performance anxiety? Pick one of those three, frame it, breathe it or be it and start working on it today. Start to address your performance anxiety intentionally with a game plan. In this way, you shift from reacting to stress and nerves intention and you are firmly in the driver's seat and you can shift it from being something that dominates you into fuel that you use to find your next level of intention, growth, creativity. So get busy with the homework. I can't wait to hear how it goes, my friends. So as always I'd like to close with a little chant for peace. This chant for peace comes from India. It's in the language Sanskrit and I will give the translation at the end of course so you can chat with me or you can just listen. But let's send a little piece out there into the world.

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

It means May, the entire universe and You my friend be filled with peace and joy, love and light. Then we say Om Shanthi, which means peace. Om Shanthi Shanhti Shanhti, thank you. If you liked this, my friend, please share it and spread the love. You can sign up at my website for updates and insider deals on my teaching programs, or just follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. Tell me how it's going. Share your performance woes with me. You can find me at Gita C Brown. Look forward to see you online or anywhere. My friends take good care. Om. Shanti. Peace to you.