Mindset
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
-Mark Twain
The butterflies that come with not knowing.
That uneasy feeling in your gut when you are about to step into something unfamiliar.
That moment when part of you wants to move forward and another part would be perfectly happy to turn around and go home.
There is something useful in that feeling.
Public speaking is often cited as one of our most common fears, and I understand why.
I can still remember the first time I had to give a speech in class. I was in Grade 4, and the assignment was simple enough: prepare something and present it to your classmates.
I have absolutely no recollection of what I spoke about.
But I remember the feeling.
I was incredibly nervous. I was afraid of standing there, afraid of making a mistake, and probably most afraid of what everyone else would think of me.
That feeling stuck with me for years.
Then, during my final year of university, I took a course that once again required us to present in front of our classmates.
The feeling returned.
But something was different this time.
Instead of moving away from it, I moved toward it.
I prepared.
I invested myself in the subject matter. I decided that if I was going to stand in front of that room, I wanted to know what I was talking about.
My subject was running shoes.
I wanted everyone in the room to understand how running shoes were made, where the technology came from, the history of the running shoe and its anatomy. EVA foam. Last design. Anti-pronation posts. Construction. Materials. All of it.
I started knowing almost nothing about running shoes.
By the time I stood in front of that class, I knew more about my subject than anyone else in the room, even my professor.
And something happened to me.
The nervousness didn’t disappear. It became fuel.
That feeling mesmerized me.
Somewhere in the process, I went from podium coward to mic drop.
Even now, simply remembering that presentation gives me goosebumps because I recognize it as one of those moments in life when you get a glimpse of yourself.
Not who you have been.
Who you might become.
Something that had frightened me suddenly revealed something that was already living inside me.
That performance anxiety had been turned into motivation. I had flipped it onto its back and used it to propel me toward something instead of away from it.
I’ve come to believe that performance anxiety is a messenger.
When we feel it, our instinct is often to make it go away. We interpret those butterflies as a warning that perhaps we shouldn’t be doing whatever it is we’re about to do.
But maybe they are telling us exactly the opposite.
Maybe that feeling is telling us that something matters.
Maybe it is telling us that we are about to expose a part of ourselves that hasn’t been tested yet.
And maybe the answer isn’t to quiet the feeling, but to become curious about where it is trying to take us.
Because when we continually move away from that feeling, we never get to discover what might be waiting on the other side of it.
I really believe performance anxiety can be a precursor to mastery.
If you want to become good at something, find something you care about that scares you a little, then give yourself permission to experience everything that comes with doing it.
Will it always work out?
Of course not.
Sometimes the presentation won’t land. Sometimes the performance won’t be what we hoped it would be. Sometimes we’ll walk away disappointed.
But even then, we have learned something incredibly important.
We did it.
We experienced the discomfort and discovered that we were safe on the other side.
That matters because the next time the butterflies arrive, they carry a slightly different message.
You’ve been here before.
And so we reach again.
Years after that “Shoe Dog” presentation (an ode to Nike founder Phil Knight’s book), presenting has become one of my favourite things to do.
There is almost nothing I enjoy more than standing in front of a room full of smart, curious people, holding their attention for a while and hopefully giving them a few light bulb moments.
Not every presentation feels that way.
Some rooms are better than others. Some days I’m better than others. Some ideas land and others don’t.
Maybe we need those experiences too, if only to help us appreciate the special ones when they happen.
Because when everything connects, there is a feeling of fulfillment that is difficult to explain unless you’ve experienced it.
I imagine it must be a little like playing music for a crowd that bought tickets to hear you play.
They want to be there.
You want to be there.
And for a little while, the music holds the room.
My music is my experience distilled onto slides and brought to life through my words.
And every once in a while, standing there in front of a room, I still remember that frightened Grade 4 kid who wanted nothing more than for the whole thing to be over.
Now I get to do this.
What a gift.
Performance anxiety rocks!
So, what are the butterflies trying to tell you?
What will you do next?
