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Have you ever felt a subtle sense of anxiety in the lead-up to a ‘performance’?
Maybe in the hours, days, or weeks before you had to show up and coach, speak, facilitate or express yourself to the world.
Performance anxiety, for practitioners, is common.
I’ve worked with many coaches and practitioners over the year who find themselves:
- Getting ready hours before they need to
- Feeling the thrum of low-grade adrenaline pulsing through their system
- Stressing (and distressing) about what they’ll say
- Worrying if they’ll get it right, and
- Being distracted until the event is over
I know this place myself. After coming back from a 6-month break in coaching after the birth of my first child, I noticed a resurgence of performance anxiety before coaching sessions and teaching calls. It was an old experience that returned strongly. All aspects of my coaching ‘performance’ were impacted, coaching, teaching, selling/enrolling clients, and expression.
Performance anxiety doesn’t feel good. It’s not useful, or sustainable.
It draws our attention and energy away from that which we truly desire – intimacy & vulnerability in the way we show up.
So how do we relax our performance anxiety? How do we shift it into something more fruitful?
In today’s podcast we’re unpacking performance anxiety to understand:
- How performance anxiety has/does show up for me
- The (often unexamined) internal expectations holding our adrenals ransom
- The role of ‘professionalism’ & what shape it creates somatically
- What I (now) do instead
- The practices I use before & after a coaching ‘performance’ to shift anxiety into intimacy
Anyone who experiences subtle or strong performance anxiety will enjoy this podcast. If you’re a coach/practitioner working in somatic ways, then you even more so.
Once you’ve tuned in I’d love to hear your experience of performance anxiety – and what other tips/tools/practices you might use. You can drop me a note over on Instagram here →
Resources
- Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
- Excellence In Coaching Event →
- Primal Feminine Flow – An at-home, feminine embodiment movement practice to resensitize the body
- Feminine Embodiment Coaching – an emotional embodiment & vulnerability-based professional training for coaches
- School of Embodied Arts
- Leave a podcast review on iTunes here
- Thought or reflection to share? Leave a comment on Instagram here
Transcript
A warm welcome to the podcast. I’m Jenna Ward. And today, we are discussing performance anxiety. This conversation will be useful if you have to show up and perform, speak, coach or facilitate in any way. But it will be particularly useful if you’re interested in exploring how we can somatically shift the stress that can arise within our body, stress around showing up, turning on, performing. This is something that I’ve had a lot of conversations and experience with, personally and professionally, over the years. And so a very warm welcome to this conversation. And thanks so much as always for joining us on the podcast today.
So performance anxiety. Have you ever felt that anxious sense in the lead up to a performance, maybe in the hours or the weeks or the days before you had to show up and coach or speak or facilitate or express yourself in the world in some way? I’ve found that performance anxiety for practitioners is common and it’s also something that we can experience and have the invitation to overcome more than once in our professions. I’ve worked over the years with my own performance anxiety at a few different points, and I’ll be sharing those points today on the podcast. But I’ve also worked with coaches and practitioners who experienced performance anxiety in similar and different ways.
So if you’ve ever found yourself feeling the need to get ready or get prepared in an excessive amount of time, so taking days or hours where really you probably just needed 15 or 30 minutes, if you have experienced that sense of a low thrum of adrenaline coursing through your body or that low grade of activation lingering in anticipation of an event, if you’ve found yourself stressing or feeling distressed about what you’re going to say or how you are going to show up, and if you’ve noticed a sense of worrying that you might get it wrong or right or just feeling distracted until this event is over and just dreading, like dreading the event, resenting it in your calendar, wanting it to be gone, all of these can be a constellation of indications that there might be performance anxiety at play.
And as I mentioned, I know performance anxiety really well. As I was prepping for this podcast, there’s three different moments that have definitely presented. The first was when I first started coaching and being a practitioner and I just didn’t know a lot. I also was very unsure of my skills. I hadn’t been validated or encouraged or seen by a practitioner that I’d really trusted to verify that my skills were in fact solid/excellent/great. And so I was a little bit flying blind around am I doing an okay job, and that led to a lot of performance anxiety.
Another time that I experienced performance anxiety was when I returned to coaching after the birth of my first daughter. So I had taken multiple months off for my maternity leave. I obviously didn’t work or coach or teach during that time. When I returned to working, I really noticed a resurgence of performance anxiety before coaching sessions and before teaching calls. It was an old experience that really returned in full force and really across all aspects of whether it was delivering to existing clients or even past clients, whether it was selling or enrolling or expressing myself, I felt this renewed sense of being very unsure about myself. And that phase lasted for a little while. I used the tools that we’re going to be discussing today for that period.
And more recently, actually we had a pretty extreme situation last weekend where I was again reflecting on performance anxiety. So the extreme situation was that last weekend, myself and some of the members, some of the teachers from our School of Embodied Arts, we held and hosted a one day immersion and our first Excellence in Coaching Celebration, which was a fabulous long lunch. I’ll actually include some pictures of that with this podcast if you’re interested. So we had these two events back to back, two days on a Friday, Saturday. And on the Thursday, I began to lose my voice. You may even hear that in my voice right now. I’m still a little bit… I’m recovering from a daycare cold. And right now it just sounds like a cold, but last weekend it was full on laryngitis and I was speaking like this. I had no voice and I had no hope of projecting my voice into a room of amazing practitioners and clients who would be able to hear me and facilitate movement practice and embodied inquiry and give a speech. There was really very little hope of that happening.
I noticed at that point around the topic of performance anxiety, I was thinking, “Ah, this is exactly the moment where I know I’m not going to be able to show up professionally. I know this is not going to look like how I want it to. There are a lot of ways that I’m going to fail in this as I have no voice.” It was interesting because at that moment, I genuinely felt calm and settled, well resourced, optimistic and even excited. And the reason that I could feel those ways were multifactorial. The first was, I had the practices that we are about to speak about in the podcast today. I hadn’t utilized those practices as a way for me to stay centered, to not be anxious about my performance, knowing full well that my performance was going to be quite imperfect.
Another factor is the wisdom of maturity in practitionership. I feel that generally the more mature and skilled we become in our practitionership, the more settled we become. But that’s also not universal because I know a lot of very mature practitioners who are also still very anxious about their performance or their delivery or their offering of their expression into the world. So it’s not always the case that we grow in wisdom as we grow in maturity or age. And there’s reasons for that which we’ll be speaking and unpacking about soon.
The third reason that I could also rest and feel settled in this situation last weekend was that I was surrounded by the amazing support and teaching team from our school, which included our great event coordinator, Renee. I’ll include the link to her below. She’s an amazing, amazing event coordinator that I highly recommend. It’s also supported by my co-facilitator Kate Leiper from the teaching team here at the school. And so it wasn’t all resting on me. And I really want to acknowledge that because it’s a very important practical component of being part of a team and a community that deliver our services and on the weekend delivered and amazing immersion and a wonderful excellence in coaching. And again, I’ll include links if you’re interested in reading more about those with this podcast over on jennaward.co.
But circling back, performance anxiety, I know it well and I also can sincerely and hand on heart say I really feel like I’ve nipped that bad boy in the butt. And I would love to just share some of the things that have worked for me today from an embodied perspective, things that have really, from the philosophy of feminine embodiment, that have really supported, and maybe they’re supportive of you. I’m also really interested to know if you have other tips or tricks or suggestions that have worked for you. You can always jump over, leave a comment over on my Instagram because I would also love to be in conversation with you around this.
The thing that I feel is most critical to be aware of with performance anxiety is that even though it’s very common and in some ways it’s quite normal, it’s also very unsustainable. If our business, in our work is… And I use invisible air quotes right now, “performing,” like if our work is showing up to coach, showing up to deliver, showing up to be a practitioner, showing up to facilitate or speak or lead in some way, if our work requires us to show up and perform in that way and our performance is regularly riddled with either a high or a low thrum of anxiety, it doesn’t feel good and it’s not sustainable. Your body cannot and does not want to sustain an anxious disposition in doing this. It will not lead to an easeful, fruitful feeling way of working.
And so it’s definitely something that I feel warrants our address so that we can use that energy, that adrenaline, that life force that is being bound up in anxiety and that we can actually re-channel it, reuse that life force in a directionality that is more enjoyable for us and that also creates greater results in the way that we are performing.
So the first thing to speak about in terms of how we shift this is bringing more awareness to the way that our bodies may often unconsciously posture themselves in anticipation of performing. Let’s unpack what I just said. I just said we need to investigate the way our bodies unconsciously posture ourselves in anticipation of performing. So we will, each of us, have a very unique internal lexicon or refidex of what we feel showing up professionally and doing a good job means. And this can be an inquiry that can be actually very useful to sit with and potentially even to write or journal on. What does my body hold as professional? What does my body hold as a high standard or quality? What does my body hold as an expectation in the way that I need to be as a professional?
I think those are very important inquiries, because for myself, as I’ve sat with those questions over the years exploring what success means for me compared to what success might mean for the general population, we actually, myself and the general population, actually have really different standards around what is professional and what constitutes success. But unless I illuminate those standards and unless I become conscious of what my body is holding what’s actually true for me, what’s going to begin to happen is my body begins to default towards whatever the norm that I’ve seen in the culture is.
So if I list out… Think about for yourself when you think of professional, what first comes to your mind? I think of looks good, looks well put together, tidy. So however she or they are being seen, the background is tidy. Knows what to say, can deliver eloquently and concisely, doesn’t need all attention on her, but is captivating. I feel that when I think about professional, I think of somebody in a suit. That’s the first idea that comes to mind. I also think about someone who doesn’t make errors, doesn’t spell incorrectly, doesn’t have a lot of ahm or they, or it was like this. Do you know what I mean? Not a lot of filler words.
So there’s all these ideas floating around in my body. And these ideas are things that I’ve absorbed from the culture around me, of what it means to be professional, because when I’ve been exposed to professions and professionals in the past, it’s been people like a university lecturer or a teacher or an accountant. And you know what? That version of professionalism actually has nothing to do with my version of professionalism. But there is a certain stature which is held around professionalism. And in our culture, a lot of that stature around professionalism is devoid of humanity. So we’ve come to see professionals as the segment of ourself which doesn’t have kids interrupting or is well put together and doesn’t look messy, and is this idea of almost perfectionism in a professional sense.
And so we begin to see that when our bodies are unconsciously orientating or posturing professionality, very often that’s an unconscious way that we are striving to being perfect, this perceived idea of perfect, which is just this cultural norm. And that doesn’t always serve us. If my job and my work as a feminine embodiment coach, which is what my work is, if my job and my work isn’t set about centering safety, the beauty of vulnerability, the rawness of expression, the direction of our goals, the depth of our feeling, none of these things actually require me to be well put together. In fact, they invite the opposite. None of these require me to have the right answer. In fact, they desire the opposite. None of these things require me to be less human or this persona of perfection. In fact, my work demands the opposite. My work is about rawness, vulnerability, humanness, intimacy, the exquisite blossoming of the depth of our inner knowing. And that stuff is intimate. It’s not requiring perfection.
And even though I’m showing up as a professional in these spaces, the values of my professionality are very different to the cultural values of what it means to be a professional. This is really important for us to illuminate, because if we don’t consciously find ways to feel and notice and attune, our body will unconsciously want to shift towards perfection and professionalism. And that is actually very often taking us away from what we truly need to be. And because we’re striving for something other than what we sincerely are, the anxiety arises in the need to get somewhere else.
So what I think is the really important first step is just illuminating for you what are your values in being a professional. I’ll share also this one little random story which I share so much, but it was really so impactful for me. When I was still a pharmacist working in a very professional setting, you can imagine a really nice business wear, maybe even a string of pearls and hair kind of in a little quiff. It was like a long time ago. I don’t wear that anymore and I don’t really know who that person is, but she was aspiring to some version of professionality in her work as well.
So I was working as this pharmacist and I started work with this intuitive coach who was also a mother. This coach in our very first session with me, she said, “Okay, so Jenna, I work a little differently. I’ve got kids here at home and I’m multitasking, working with my kids, having my kids here. They were older kids. They were maybe 10, 12, so they could be pretty self directed. But I’ve got my kids here and I’m coaching with you. So just so that you know, I’m a mother first and I’m a coach second. While we’re coaching, if my kids need me, I’m just going to lovingly just pause our conversation, tend to my kids and then I’ll circle back to you. I wanted to let you know that expectation up front just so that you could be aware that that might happen and that’s okay in our container.” So she’s telling me all this. She’s obviously totally cool. She’s really clear. “This is how I do me professionally. And I’m clearly communicating that to you.”
And from my position today in 2022, I’m cheering that coach on. That’s not personally how I work, but if that’s how she wants to work and she clearly communicates expectations, boundaries, and forms agreements with her clients around that, rock on with your bad self. And yet, 10 plus years ago, that me or the version of me in having that conversation was jaw on the ground, “What the actual F? Ah, are you even allowed to do that? I don’t know how I feel about that. I actually don’t like that.”
And I had all of these objections stemming essentially from the idea that this was unprofessional because I had held professionality to be a certain rigid view. This was one of the first times that it really got shaken up. And in retrospect, I’m so grateful to that coach for doing it their way, because that began to plant the seeds of, “Well, what is this mirage of professionality or perfection or getting it right? And all the energy and anxiety that I’m pouring into getting there, when in fact maybe just doing me, my way, is a much more energy efficient and easeful way of being in the world.” But it requires investigation, which is the first piece that we’re speaking about.
So then that brings us to the next piece, which is around, well, if we’re not aiming for perfectionism, the ideal, this vision of professionality, which may be unconsciously playing out in our body, if we imagine that all the way down the right hand side of the spectrum, we know we don’t want to do that. So what do we want to do? What’s the opposite all the way down the left hand side of the spectrum? And this is something that I feel we get to define each for ourselves. What works for me and what I actively shift my body into if and when I notice anxieties arise, I shift into the desire for intimacy. So instead of perfection, I want imperfection. Instead of professionalism, I want intimacy. Instead of getting it right, I want to feel my heart and feel their heart.
I would invite you just to think about a scenario where you may have had some performance anxiety, big or small recently, and just consider for yourself what happens in your body as you contemplate shifting towards showing up imperfectly, showing up with intimacy as your number one goal, and showing up willing to let your heart feel that intimacy. In my experience, this creates more connection. It creates more humanness. If our job is somatic coaching or practitionership in some way, then it’s definitely going to create more safety, vulnerability, and depth with your client. But even if you’re not a practitioner, maybe for example, you are a pharmacist that does speaking gigs, still your humanness is a huge asset. Your imperfection creates intimacy and it’s through intimacy that we can really connect with the heart of what’s being offered to us.
And so, as I’m even still to this day preparing for a teaching call or coaching call or jumping on the podcast with you, I’m not wondering how I can get it right. I’m wondering how can my heart meet your heart in an intimate conversation, knowing that I’m a hugely imperfect person and that’s okay. In fact, that imperfection is it’s endearing and it’s warm and it’s sincere. And that’s actually where so much of the value is created. Rehumanizing ourselves. Rehumanizing each other.
And this internal shift, this shift which is almost like an internal voice, instead of saying, “What do I need to do to get prepared?”, the voice inside me shifts. And the dominant voice now inside my being is, “How can I relax into more intimacy?” And you can notice it in a lot of very tangible ways. In the speed of my voice, in the rush of my getting through content, or in this case, the lack of rush, in the savoring of others experiences, in the genuineness of sharing. I find that this centering of intimacy instead of professionalism or getting it right, when I try that on in my body, I become so much softer and more available.
As a practitioner in the Embodied Arts, this also is very conducive to tending to the values of this way of working, the values being vulnerability and depth and embracing the full spectrum of our humanity. There are also some small rituals that I do to center this intimacy. I do these rituals before getting ready for sharing or coaching or teaching. And I have also some small rituals that I will sometimes do after sharing, coaching and teaching. Now these rituals, they’re not that exciting. And I’m not suggesting you take my rituals on, but I’m just posing the question, how can you ritualize the centering of your imperfection and your intimacy?
So in getting ready for this podcast today, I’ll talk you just briefly through the rituals I did. The first thing I did was I know my energy’s great in the morning. So I took myself to my altar. I have a beautiful altar, which feels to me like the little church of the wellspring of the feminine. That’s what I draw inspiration and faith from she’s described as the big mama or mother earth, or the beauty of a rosebud blossoming, this creative, fertile energy that underpins our existence. That’s the wellspring that is my personal faith. And in the model of feminine embodiment coaching, that alive essence which is uniquely created through each of us is also something that we want to reveal and reveal more.
So I sit down to my altar, which has all the typical stuff, candles, some beautiful intentions, some flowers, it has a smoke stick from some beautiful foraged natives to my house that I made with some girlfriends. It has some dried lavender. Just all these beautiful things. And for me, my altar is a little space where I can go to tune into myself and to tune into the beauty of the feminine.
So I go to my altar, I put on one song and I just move with how am I showing up today. A little bit of almost like a moving meditation, just feeling myself, dropping into myself. And this dropping in space is really important because I’ve just been tending to a three year old and rushing around the house and doing laundry. So I need a little bit of a space and a buffer to shift out of just my domestic self and into my devotional self. Hmm. Shifting into my devotional self.
And then I love to break out my journal. I’m a coach so as you may have noticed, love myself a good question. I then contemplate… “What’s required for intimacy in this. How am I centering intimacy in this? What type of intimacy do I crave?” So these are a few of the example questions that I might pose myself. And I’ll spend a few minutes writing on intimacy, maybe also writing on anything other than intimacy that’s coming up so that I’m just, again, spending it’s no more than three or five minutes, another one song, just reflecting on how I’m feeling, my body’s orientation as I’m showing up.
Hmm. And those are my two getting started rituals. Very simple, but really important to make sure that how my body is postured, so the shape, who I’m wearing in my body, it’s not the professional. It’s the woman who seeks intimacy with you. And I wonder how you feel that.
Then my set down or my packed down rituals after I’ve done my coaching or my teaching, I love to, what I describe as, clear the deck. So that involves taking care of any technical or practical pieces. Maybe I need to shoot off an email or send someone a recording or whatever. So I do those practical pieces. And again, I just put on one more song just to simmer in the after effects, the afterglow that that intimacy created. So for many coaches and practitioners, once we’ve delivered a coaching session or we’ve spoken, or we’ve taught, there’s a really natural high that comes from doing that. From being in your flow supporting another person, it’s a natural high. It feels good.
And so I take again another three or five minutes, and I just sit in that and feel it. I feel the good effects that come from centering intimacy and being in this space. Almost reaffirming yes, this is why I do this. If there’s some things that didn’t go that well in the particular interaction, or if I feel like I spoke too much or I could have done this better, it’s also a time for me to let any of those little ripples or worries bubble to the surface and again be felt and processed in real time so that I can actively decide if there’s anything that needs to course correct or remember for next time I do it and not store that tension or that worry or ignore it for another day. Because we all know that other day never comes. And what’s going to happen if we don’t deal with any of those little ripples or worries is the next time we go to teach or coach or speak or express, they’re going to be left in our body.
So the clear out little ritual is about logistically clearing anything out to clear the decks, but then also internally taking a bit of time to clear out and just catch up with yourself. These rituals are so simple. They’re so simple. And when I do them, I feel sustained and nourished and easeful in my “performance.” And when I forget to do them, it’s easy for the dominant cultural narrative of what it means to be a perfectionist, to perform well. When I don’t do these rituals that kind of creeps back in, and it’s pretty sneaky because it’s the soup that we live in.
So thank you for joining me for this conversation. And if you have enjoyed it, I so encourage you to let me know with a comment over on Instagram and email. Or better yet, a review of the podcast [inaudible] the only one that allows reviews so pop over there. It helps other people to find this podcast. Equally, I’m very interested to see how this has landed for you. And if there’s any other tips, ideas, practices, resources that you have around performance anxiety for practitioners, keep them coming my way and I’d love to be in conversation with you about that.
I think the world benefits from more of us being human more of the time. And it is a bold, it is a bold step to embody that. It takes practice and conviction. It’s useful to know that you genuinely do have a valuable skill set that you are really rocking. I love when just last night I had a graduation call with one of our past participants in the coaching program from Stockholm. We were discussing how she had done 30 practice coaching sessions and really valued receiving the feedback “Your coaching is great. You should be charging for this. You are doing excellent. Here are your strengths. Here are some opportunities for the next phase of growth for your coaching, but really letting your skills be seen and validated and celebrated.” We were reflecting on the value of that, because knowing that you’re standing on a solid foundation does very much enable you to then take the next step of defining how you want to show up in your “performance,” what values you want to center.
Maybe you want to be like that past coach of mine who’s like, “My two kids are in the room next door.” If that’s your vibe and that’s your truth, that is such a permission and a medicine and a bomb for other people and for our times. And I really celebrate whatever it is that is you, do you. That’s your most humanness and that’s what’s going to create the most magnetic ripples of expression and of practitionership and of speaking and how you’re showing up. Thank you so much for joining us today. Until next time. Farewell.
