Harnessing Nervous Energy: Turn Anxiety into Authentic Connection

Part 2 of my series on how to CRUSH YOUR NERVES

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Here’s the video….scroll to read!

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Now that you’ve made friends with your Nerves in Part 1 – Let’s put them to work for you!

So, in Part 1, we learned that you’re not really nervous - you’re excited. Today, I want to take that idea even further.

Did you know that you can actually learn to harness that excited energy and use it to your advantage? That nervous energy can heighten your likability, charisma, and charm, making it work in your favor to captivate your audience.

Instead of trying to push it away and calm yourself down, try leaning into it. Embrace that excited, frenetic, carbonated energy. Allow yourself to really feel it. While this may feel a little scary at first and might take some practice, doing so allows your authenticity to shine through, so we, the audience, get to connect with the real you on a deeper level. This vulnerability makes you even more human and relatable, like a hand-knit sweater that’s not perfect but still warm, inviting and one-of-a-kind.

When you tap into this raw, unfiltered energy, it adds a sense of liveliness to your presentation or performance, and makes impossible for your audience to look away. By sharing your message with genuine enthusiasm and emotion, your audience becomes rapt with attention, eager to connect with your energy and authenticity.

When you learn to lean into that nervous energy rather than fighting it, your natural charisma takes over, and you begin to engage people in a way that’s both powerful and captivating.

If you’d like to experiment with putting this idea into practice I’ve created a meditative exercise to implement this concept.

In this exercise, we’ll dive into the nerves you feel in high-stakes situations like auditions or presentations. By recreating a moment when you felt intense nervousness, we’ll explore the sensations that arise and then, instead of fighting them, we’ll experiment with breathing into the fear. You’ll learn how to shift those feelings of terror into exhilaration and use that energy to fuel your performance. We'll even embrace the nervousness with a bit of humor and recognize the bravery it takes to face those fears head-on. By the end of this exercise, you’ll imagine yourself completing the presentation, feeling accomplished and proud of how you managed your nerves. This practice is about building a working relationship with your fear, empowering you to perform with authenticity and confidence.

So go ahead, get comfortable and hit play to try this out….

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