Dealing with nervousness can sometimes be a difficult thing to do. When you feel nervous, you tend to lose control to some extend. You can start to shake and tremble a bit. You can start to sweat and even get a bit dizzy. The cause of this feeling can be many things but most of the time, it is caused by your focus. Sometimes it can be caused due to your habits but even then, it’s mental. Let’s examine why being nervous can cause you to perform poorly and why it’s something good to be nervous. I will also give you some tips to help you overcome nervousness as well.
There are many situations that can cause a person to feel nervous. It can be a situation where you are about to make a speech. It can be one where you are about to ask an attractive person out on a date. It can even be a situation where you are about to take an exam. All of these things can bring out that feeling of anxiety. It can cause you to stumble on your words. It can cause you to make a fool out of yourself in public. It can cause you to just plain freeze up. I can even cause you to turn around and go back the way you came from.
It may seem like a bad thing but realize that this feeling that you experience is your body’s way of telling you something. Do you think athletes get nervous before a game? How about professional speakers who are about to go out on stage for the 1,000th time? Nervousness is a signal to your mind that you need to get ready. It can sometimes be mixed with the feeling of excitement as well.
n order to control nervousness and use to your advantage, you need to do a few things. Here are some tips to help you.
1. Acknowledge the message.
As I mentioned earlier, when you get the nervousness anxiety feeling, most of the time it means that you aren’t as prepared as you think you should be. Let me ask you this. Is there anything you do easily without a sweat that used to make you feel nervous? Most of the time when it’s our first time doing something that is out of our comfort zone, we will feel a bit nervous but after we have done it over and over, we feel more confident about it.
In other words, in order to feel less nervous about whatever is causing you to feel that feeling of nervousness, you need more practice. There is a difference between feeling fully nervous because you aren’t prepared and feeling nervous and excited because you’re anxious to show what you can do.
2. Change your focus.
Controlling nervousness can be done by changing your focus. If you are nervous about doing something, chances are that you are picturing the worse case scenario. You are imagining totally making a fool out of yourself. What you will want to do instead is to first ask yourself if the worse case scenario were to happen, would you be able to handle it. Think about your most embarrassing moment in life. You went through it and you’re still alive aren’t you? Life goes on. Once you can accept that you can handle the worse, start to focus on more positive things. See yourself doing a great job. See yourself getting the results you want. Over 95% of the time, the worse case scenario never comes true so don’t bother focusing on it.
3. Don’t over think.
Overcoming nervousness can be done by realizing that no matter how bad you do, whether it’s a speech or some performance or asking someone out on a date, you will look at the situation as being 10 times worse than anyone else sees it. Most people are simply too busy focusing on themselves and their own insecurities to think about yours. We often get nervous because we are afraid of how others might thing of us. You don’t have to worry about that because most people won’t think much about you anyway. Their focus is on themselves most of the time. As the saying goes, “We are our own worst critic.”
Nervousness is something that can be dealt with through practice as well as realizing that life is too short to spend too much time worrying about what others think of you. If you want to do a good job, be prepared and practice as much as you can. From there, picture the best outcomes in your mind. After that, just do your best and even if you mess up, people are going to forget out it anyway because you are not the most important person in their lives, they are.