Overcoming Performance Anxiety

This is another story from our book Mindfulness for Transformation. The stories are written by members of our community.

By - Wendy Malko

I pull into a parking spot, sweating. I start focusing on my breath. Deep breaths. Breathe in calm, breathe out peace. Or should I be breathing out tension? Ugh... I think I’m going to be sick.

What’s that noise; is that my heart pumping? I feel like my ears are on fire. I now have anxiety ABOUT the anxiety, and that is the worst kind of anxiety.

I watch as people pass by my car. I imagine introducing myself:“Oh, hello there, nice to meet you. I’m going to be teaching your child tools to deal with anxiety today,” as I casually take another breath into a paper bag.

This experience didn’t happen during my first time teaching. I had a private practice where I taught mindfulness to small groups in my own space for a little over a year. Now I’d been offered an amazing opportunity to teach mindfulness to a group of children in a local psychologist’s clinic. I didn’t know what to expect.

Anyone who experiences performance anxiety would agree that the less you know about an event, the higher the likelihood of anxiety. I didn’t know the number of children, their ages, whether there would be another person teaching with me, or what the topic was for that class. I was also asked to arrive while the group was already in session, so I would miss the first part of the class.

So, I arrived early. I sat in the parking lot, hyperventilating and thinking up all the worst-case scenarios known to man. I knew the kids would smell the anxiety on me and it would heighten their anxiety – or worse, the psychologist would sense it and would think I was a fraud. How would they ever have confidence in me if I was literally sweating through my shirt? I knew my body was in full fight-or-flight mode, and I knew that meant my brain would be offline and I wouldn’t be able to access the words I needed for the class. This line of thinking brought me to the idea that maybe knowing what fight-or-flight mode does is not necessarily always that helpful in dealing with it!

That is when I started to laugh uncontrollably. The irony of it all! This group was for kids with anxiety just like mine. I was invited along to help these kids with the exact thing I was experiencing right in that moment. I needed to use the tools I was planning to share with these kids on myself, right now.

I went back to my breath: following my breath, nice and easy, all the way into my belly and all the way out. Even breaths. Breathing in and out.

I let myself feel the anxiety instead of resisting it. Resisting it only made it bigger. I let myself sit with it. I told myself it was okay to feel this way. I told myself that while some people may not have as dramatic a response as I was experiencing at that moment,feelings of anxiety are a common reaction for many people.

Then I checked in with my thoughts: just watching the thoughts, rather than getting tangled up in them. I asked myself: “What am I really afraid of?” I was thinking that I didn’t have enough experience to help these kids, and that I would be seen as a fraud in front of the specialist. I questioned those thoughts. It was true,I didn’t have a lot of experience in teaching mindfulness, but I had a lifetime of experience in feeling anxiety.

When I was growing up, I was referred to as shy. I remember dreading being called on in class. Even when I knew the answer was right, my lip would quiver as I spoke. I couldn’t sleep at night for fear of every noise or shadow. When I was very young, I remember getting hives on my arms as we drove home from visiting people I didn’t know. At the time we chalked it up to a random allergy, but looking back, I realise that my body was physically reacting to my anxiety.

As I grew older, I started allowing my anxiety to make some pretty big life decisions for me. I rationalised that I would just take one year off before going to university after graduating from high school. The truth was, I was too nervous to navigate a new school with so many strangers.

Instead, I took a job in a mental health unit within a hospital. I stayed at that job for many years, learning all that I could while working there. I read all the medical journals that were delivered to the psychiatrist at the hospital. I asked questions about mental health and the treatments that were provided. I enrolled in various distance education courses at universities, colleges and online schools in my spare time. Even though I had learnt a lot about anxiety disorders, I still didn’t see how anxiety had impacted me personally.

One of my responsibilities was to field phone calls to the psychiatrist from patients in the community. Many of them had been referred to take mindfulness courses, so I decided that taking a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course would help me better assist the patients. Meditation wasn’t really my thing,but the class itself would be worth it to help the patients, and I was interested in the theory.

In that eight-week course I learnt how very wrong I had been about meditation. It wasn’t until I learnt to sit and notice my thoughts and feelings, and how they felt in my body, that I finally realised how much anxiety had been ruling my life. As I sat with these emotions, they slowly began to soften.

The more time I spent on the cushion, the more I began to accept myself just as I was. In that acceptance I became passionate about sharing the tools I was learning with anyone who was experiencing the same anxiety. I kept thinking back to my childhood and how different it would have been if I’d had these tools.

I had discovered my purpose, my ‘why’. It was why I continued my training to become a mindfulness teacher. It was why I accepted this opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and teach mindfulness to the children in this clinic. These kids were just like me, and they needed these tools.

I walked towards the front door of the clinic with a queasy feeling in my stomach and a racing heart, all the while reminding myself of my why.

That first session was awkward. I was so nervous that I completely forgot to connect with the kids. As I walked out of the room, I felt relieved it was over, but at the same time I felt a sense of excitement, knowing that I was learning too and it would just get easier with each opportunity.

Since then, I have been asked to speak at large gatherings at schools, businesses and various health organisations. I still get nervous, but it’s a lot less awkward. I’ve come to realise that the discomfort in my stomach and my pounding heart are just my body’s way of telling me that this is important. I have replaced the mantra of “I think I’m going to be sick,” with “When I’m nervous, focus on service.”Learning mindfulness has allowed me to become more aware of my anxiety and, in that awareness, I have discovered how to use my anxiety for my own growth, rather than allowing it to continue to hold me back.Mindfulness has changed my life and I am so grateful for the opportunity to share it with others.

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