You can’t really sit still. You fidget with a hand or a foot. Your palms are perhaps starting to become a little moist. You don’t feel so good. You feel nervous.
What do you do?
What can you do in advance to prevent nervousness? And what can you do to lessen or remove the nervousness that may rise within you just before or during an event?
Below are a few tips. Some you can use today. Some you can incorporate into your life over a longer
time-span.
Be prepared.
Obviously. If you have a presentation then study your notes and what you are about to say carefully before stepping up on stage. If you have an important meeting, do your homework so you know what will or may come up in meeting. If you have a date, perhaps try to think of a few interesting topics/questions to bring up in case the conversational flow hits an awkward silence. If you have a job interview, think about what they may ask you and figure out some good answers.
Doing this carefully and meticulously can remove a lot of nervousness. It may not always be fun. But being well prepared can be helpful not only to remove nervousness but also to ace the presentation or get the job.
Visualize in a positive way.
Much of our time is spent habitually visualizing what may go wrong in a future situation. This can, of course, create a lot of nervousness. It can also give you the results you imagined – or feared – through self-fulfilling prophecies. If you think you’ll fail, then you are making it a whole lot harder for yourself to succeed.
Visualizing in a positive way is definitely a more useful and pleasant way to spend some time with your imagination. Now, you may think that visualizing this way is just unrealistic. But visualizing in a negative way is just as unrealistic. Either way, you are imagining what may happen in a possible future scenario. Doing it in a negative way may just feel more realistic because that’s what people around you are doing or because it’s what you’ve been doing every day for the last few years.
How you imagine things will unfold and what will happen can change a lot about how you behave, what you say and how you feel in this present situation. And that can have a big effect on how things actually go.
Practice, practice, practice.
The more you practice, take action and put yourself in situations that may make you nervous the more confident you become. You have been there before, you know pretty much what will happen. So you feel more and more comfortable and less nervous.
Realize that people don’t care that much about what you do.
One big source of nervousness is focusing too much on what people will think of you. And thinking that their criticism is always about you.
But people don’t think that much about what you do. You keep much of your attention from day to day on your problems, challenges and triumphs. And that’s exactly what the next guy/girl is doing too.
In general, people keep much of their attention on their own challenges and problems. And their criticism is often about something negative in their life rather than about something you did. So don’t worry too much about it. Realizing that what you do isn’t that important to other people can be a bit disappointing. But also liberating.
Ask yourself: What is the worst that could happen?
What is really the worst that could happen? How will it affect you in the long run? In many cases you’ll find that the answer boils down to: not really that much. It’s easy to get too wrapped up in what is about to happen and magnify the event and possible consequences in your mind until it seems like it’s a matter of life and death. It seldom is. Asking a few simple questions can put things into a healthier perspective and calm you down.
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