Coffee Time With Andrew 2.0 Episode 104 Anxiety vs Excitement

Welcome to Its Coffee Time with Andrew. This is episode 104.
Anxiety vs Excitement.

Here is the machine generated transcript

Well, hello, this is Andrew Ledford and we are at another It’s Coffee Time with Andrew. This is episode number four,(…) oh, 104, I should say. Kind of starting over after a year pause.

And this is coffee time. Today we’re going to be talking about something that kind of bothers me every time I hear it and that’s that to reframe anxiety, the anxiety of public speaking as excitement. And I just, I always question that. So I decided I really need to go find out where that statement came from.

So I did a little research and found the research paper and it’s from Allison Wood Brooks.

We’re going to be talking a little bit about my experiment with reframing anxiety of public speaking as experiment way back when and the research and what it says and whether that really works and how it works. But first a little bit of coffee.

So in the 80s, it was probably around 1985 or so. I was going out and doing a lot of presentations, a lot of Chamber of Commerce events actually.

And I was quite stressed when I would do those and get up in front of people and talk.

So I remember discussing this with a girl I was living with, a girlfriend, that it seems like this is the same thing,(…) the stress, the fear of getting up there and speaking in front of a group. It’s the same thing as excitement.

And I was still training protection dogs back then and working a lot of aggressive dogs. And that was always borderline anxiety and excitement. It was kind of a thrill. And I always thought, why isn’t public speaking like that? So I tried to reframe public speaking and it just didn’t work the same way.

So I just thought that, hey, great idea. You have a lot of the same emotions or same physical reactions.It just didn’t work for me, basically. However, it may have worked better than I thought.

So now we’re going to fast forward to, I believe, 2013 is when this research was done.(…) And she did it with a few different groups. One was singing karaoke in front of somebody they didn’t know, public speaking and working on math problems.

And after reading the research, I would say that I now am a halfway believer that that may be an effective strategy.

And it’s statistically significant as well. So that has something to do with it. I always ask people, how do you know that?

So unless I can actually track down the paper, I’m usually a little skeptical.

So what do we learn here? Well, for one thing,(…) telling yourself a reframing that you’re excited instead of fearful, it may not lower your anxiety, but it improves your performance. And that’s one of the things they found out. So it’s halfway true. Might not make you feel better, but it makes you do better, which is probably an important thing, especially if it is an important presentation that you are giving.

So I tend to do this a little differently. In fact, I think the paper even mentioned sometimes that stress, that fear will make you prepare far in advance. And if you do that, you’re going to feel less stressed. And even if you do feel stressed and you tell yourself, hey, this is excitement, you have enough experience,(…) enough synaptic connections, behaviors and enough strength that even if you go blank and fumble a bit, you’ll probably still just carry on and do just fine.

In fact, I believe she was talking about how there is an old English saying, I think Winston Churchill said that made her think about doing this and that it was incorporated, I should say, into the original hypothesis. And that’s keep calm and carry on.(…) But I still think that may have some value, maybe still be valid in some situations.

But a really interesting thing I found with this research is that before she did it, everybody thought that that is how you became better at public speaking as you tried to relax.(…) So really what she was testing, what she was evaluating were two different strategies.(…) And this is really what the experiment was,(…) testing whether telling yourself that you’re relaxed, you’re going to be relaxed and do better, or telling yourself that you were excited with that help you do better.

And she found that just telling yourself that you’re relaxed and that everything’s cool, everything’s good in speaker land is not very effective for either managing the anxiety or the performance.

Where telling yourself that you’re excited, that may not help your anxiety much, but it helps your performance.

And an interesting observation is that before she did this research, everybody thought that the way you made yourself better at public speaking is trying to relax before you went on. And now many, many people I talk to think that the way you get better at public speaking and relax is by telling yourself that you’re excited instead.

So it’s quite interesting how these things are incorporated into the cultural beliefs, the cultural narrative of a group.

And that’s going to be it for today’s little coffee time. As always, I am wishing you the very best in life. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.