by Peter Meyers
We have ways of standing and breathing that correspond to different emotions. For example, if you are breathing quick, shallow breaths, with your chest collapsed in and your eyes darting around, it is physically impossible to feel happy. We only breathe in this way if we are under threat, so the neurotransmitters of happiness simply don’t flow under this condition.
The great secret to the brain is that the mind-body connection works both ways. If we’re frightened, our body will automatically make us breathe in short, shallow pants. But if we breathe in shallow pants, collapse our shoulders, and use our facial muscles to show an expression of fear, we can also create the sensation of fear. 1 Move and breathe the way you do when you’re scared, and your brain will assume fear. We now know that the brain fires off the same chemical reaction, whether the threat is real or imagined. 2
When you change your body, you change your emotions as well. Doubt it? Try it for yourself.
Breathe in short, shallow pants. Pace back and forth. Chew the inside of your lip. Make your torso concave as you slump your shoulders. Dart your eyes around quickly. Twist your hands together. Do this for sixty seconds. How do you feel?
On the other hand, if you move and breathe the way you do when you feel confident, passionate, and determined, your brain associates that movement with a corresponding emotion, and it will obediently supply that chemical reaction. Try this: Stand up. Lift your shoulders and your head. Look up. Put a big smile on your face. Punch both arms up into the air. Feel any different?
Constantin Stanislavsky used this fact to develop a system that later evolved into “method” acting, a technique used by many successful actors today. The emotions generated this way look real—because they are. 3 Unfortunately, if you leave it up to your body in a high-stakes situation, your body will default to a poor state. Once again, we are hardwired to mess it up.
When you’re at risk, your body naturally goes into patterns that it uses under threat. While that worked beautifully when we were fighting off saber-toothed tigers, we need the exact opposite response when facing a crowd. You need to retake the steering wheel of your body, and do what athletes, actors, and high performers have always done—manage your body first, before you try to perform. To do this, you just run the pattern backward.
First, identify what emotion you need to be experiencing. This is almost always the same emotion that you want your audience to be feeling. The audience takes on the emotion of the speaker. For example, if you’re congratulating a team, you need to feel proud. If you can’t feel it, they won’t feel it.
Second, identify the pattern in your own body, breath, and face that signifies this feeling. Do the things you do when you’re feeling confident or triumphant. Walk, stand, and move the way you do when you actually feel those things. (Hint: this is not about faking it, just behaving “ as if. ” Walk as if you felt confident.) There may be a variety of things that you do when you feel proud, but one thing’s for sure: they don’t include short, shallow breaths, a clenched jaw, and clutching white-knuckled hands in front of your body. Those patterns are universally associated with fear.
When you feel a sense of victory, the arms go up. The eyes go up, the head comes up, the face smiles, you jump up and down. This is true in every culture. To re-create the sensation of victory, just do these movements—the feeling follows.
What all professional performers have in common is this: they know how to prepare. For more than twenty years, Peter has been interviewing top athletes, martial artists, actors, ballerinas, and models. Without fail, they all confess to employing some kind of performance preparation pattern.
Watch a tennis pro. One second he might be screaming madly at the referee. The next second, it’s time to serve again, and he starts his routine. He bounces the tennis ball once, twice, three times in a certain way—and he’s completely focused again, back in state. The bouncing of the ball has nothing to do with the serve; it’s his preparation pattern. A ballerina about to make her entrance might always dip her toe three times in the resin and touch her right earlobe, just before she leaps out onstage. A top model who has to turn on the glamour for the camera (even though she’s been out partying until four a.m. the night before) might take a breath, flick her hair, and lick her lips in a certain way. Suddenly, the lights come up and she’s gorgeous. The hair flick and lick of the lips act as her preparation pattern. Many film actors, just before an important audition, will often jump up and down and laugh like maniacs. They do this because it produces instant joy and confidence. Brain research shows that it creates an elevated level of serotonin in the brain. The resulting shine in the eyes and on the face gives them a powerful edge. Joyful energy is universally attractive to other human beings—even casting directors! 4
You, too, employ patterns, whether or not you’re aware of them. Almost everyone has a pattern that they use to go to sleep. You might plump the pillow in a certain way, turn out the light, then turn over once. Always a certain pattern, always the same way. Try going to sleep without it once and you’ll see how powerful patterns can be.
The problem is that we are rarely aware of the patterns we use, and we fail to make conscious choices about them. Instead of developing positive patterns that help snap us into a performance state, we often default to negative patterns.
Imagine that you’re backstage before a high-powered event, and you’re nervous. What are you doing? If you’re pacing back and forth, shoulders slumped, rubbing your hands together, muttering under your breath as you try to recall your opening, you’re defaulting to negative patterns that are destroying your state. The messages your brain is receiving are all ones that will create an amygdala hijack—and before you know it, you’ll be standing onstage with your eyes unfocused and your mind blank, trying to remember what you’re doing up there.
Once you know how you move, breathe, stand, and smile when you’re experiencing emotions of joy, confidence, and generosity, you can produce that emotion on demand by reproducing that pattern in your body, breath, and face. 5 If you’re about to enter a high-stakes situation, or walk onto a stage, try the following. These are physical triggers that will consistently stimulate a positive emotional response from the brain:
1. Posture. Lift your head and your sternum, as if you were being pulled up by a string.
2. Breathe. Take long, slow, deliberate breaths that fill your belly with air.
3. Face. Find any excuse to put a smile on your face. Laugh. Lift your eyebrows and widen your eyes.
4. Movement. Move through the room (if the situation allows), walking the way you walk when you feel confident, strong, and generous.
5. Gesture. Use your arms and your hands as you do when you want to share something. Re-create the movements associated with the feeling you want to generate. This can be as simple as opening up your chest and extending your arms for a moment. For example, to feel joy, confidence, victory, lift your arms and hands up over your head, with a huge smile on your face, and you will feel close to the way you do after your team scores. If you want to feel generosity, use your hands the way you do when you’re giving a gift—generally with open palms, moving toward the person in front of you.
To assist you with this process, you’ll find an audio exercise in the download package (go to www.standanddelivergroup.com ) that will put you into an ideal performance state. The exercise is called “Performance Preparation.”
On the soundtrack, you will learn to evoke memories of moments when you felt particularly powerful, and layer these emotions to bring you into a peak state. The way that you stand, move, and breathe when in this state will become your personal performance preparation pattern.
8
THE MIND’S EYE
SO FAR WE’VE discussed the ways in which your body impacts your state. What else determines the way you feel?
You can only have a feeling about something if you’re paying attention to it. There are an infinite number of things in the world around you to which you might choose t
o pay attention at any given moment. So, it’s not the things that are going on in the world around you. What determines how you feel are the things on which you choose to focus. Think of this as the mind’s eye.
You can focus the mind’s eye anywhere you choose. Most of the time, however, we don’t bother to choose. We just let the mind’s eye wander around. In this default setting, the brain will choose its focus primarily based on fear. Why? It’s for much the same reason that you’re predisposed to fail in a stressful situation through an amygdala hijack. We are built to look for danger. Your brain is not designed to automatically think happy, positive thoughts. Your brain is designed to keep you alive. And for tens of thousands of years, the human brain has done a great job by looking for trouble.
We think of negativity as being a bad thing. But this tendency to search for the problem is actually the sign of a healthy brain. Imagine yourself back in time 100,000 years ago, living in a cave. You might walk to the edge of the cave and look out, scanning the environment. Your brain wouldn’t be noticing the flowers, the herd of gazelles, or the lovely sunset. You would be asking, “Is there anything out here that can hurt me?” And if you saw something with stripes and long teeth, hiding behind a rock, you would ignore the sunset and the flowers and hurry back inside the cave. That’s how we survived.
We focus the mind’s eye through the questions we ask. 1 When you ask a question, the brain immediately sets out to answer it. Imagine your brain pulling out long file drawers, looking for the answer to a question. The question you ask determines the file drawer in which the brain will search. And if you ask enough times, your brain will always come up with an answer.
The trouble is, when facing an audience, most people ask questions that cause them to focus on their fear, rather than their objective. Imagine walking onto a large stage, getting ready to speak to a hundred people—all your best friends, closest family members, and biggest fans are out there. But in the third row is that guy with the goatee, red pen, and clipboard. You remember him. As you peek out from behind the curtain, where does the mind’s eye focus? On the hundred people waiting to applaud you, or on the one guy with his head down, marking his clipboard? You know the answer. Your mind’s eye will not only focus on him, it will zoom in so closely that you can count the blocked pores in his nose. And in the process you forget about everyone else.
When you’re standing in front of group of people, you reveal yourself. Nothing feels more threatening than facing a mass of human beings, staring at you in the dark. Your genetic memory tells you to cover your core and narrow the target, like a Roman centurion, with his sword and shield. You can’t run, and you can’t fight. The closest you can get is to assume the “fig leaf” position, or adjust your cuffs. Anything to get your arms in front of you for protection!
Think about a typical question you might ask yourself as you get ready to enter: “Will they ask me hard questions?” The brain, primed to lean toward the negative, searches for an answer. Brain says, “YES!” You start to get nervous. You’re panicky, starting to sweat. “Am I prepared enough?” Brain searching . searching . answer is “NO!” Now you’re really losing it. Defaulting to negative patterns, frowning slightly, pacing up and down, taking short, shallow breaths.
“Will they like me?” Brain says . “NO!” Welcome to your amygdala hijack.
Questions like “What’s missing?” “Will I forget what to say?” “Will I know the answers?” and “Will they find out I’m not as smart as they think I am?” may seem like intelligent questions to ask yourself. But they’re actually sabotage questions. The answers to these questions can only produce a negative state.
So what’s the answer? Ask a different question. The way you control the focus of the brain is by changing the internal questions that you ask.
Imagine a downhill skier, about to perform a risky run in front of television cameras. What will happen to her if she looks down and says, “Will it hurt if I fall and destroy my kneecap?” How fast do you think she would ski, and how well do you think she would perform, asking herself that question? No, a professional skier would ask herself this question, and this question only: “How do I shave a few microseconds off my time and look incredibly sexy while I’m doing it?!”
It’s a question with a presupposition. A presupposition is an implicit assumption about the world, as revealed in a statement whose truth is taken for granted. For example, the question “What’s great about this opportunity?” contains the presupposition that there is, in fact, something great in the opportunity that you haven’t noticed yet. What you want are questions that have this kind of powerful presupposition in them. This will drive the brain to produce a better answer, and produce a feeling of exhilaration rather than terror.
Examples of powerful questions that have presuppositions in them are: “What’s the best part of this presentation?” “What am I most passionate about in this material?” “What’s the most powerful way I can impact this audience?” “How can I give them a gift?” “How can I best inspire them?” “How can I make a difference?” “What’s the most exciting part of this event?” “How do I know they want to hear from me?”
This is not—repeat NOT—positive thinking. Positive thinking is trying to hypnotize yourself into a different mind-set. It’s a bit like a bald man looking in the mirror and muttering, “I DO have hair, I DO have hair.”
Asking the right questions before you go on is a very powerful way to manage your state. You’re directing the capacity of your brain to search in the right file drawers. You are programming it purposefully, so that it will come up with answers that pull you forward, rather than hold you back.
The architecture of a good question is very specific. It contains a presupposition that forces you to think of new possibilities. Not “Will I succeed?” but “How will I succeed?” Not “Will they ask me tough questions?” but “How can I use Q&A to build their trust?” The first question will get a negative answer. The second question presupposes excitement, so that’s what your brain will search for.
Be persistent with your brain. Once you get an answer, ask again. Repeat the process. Keep flooding the brain with more and more references until you are in an ideal state to perform. Not “Is it interesting?” but “What is the most compelling part?” “What else is compelling?” And “What else?” Note that there is a time to ask the tough questions, and explore everything that could go wrong in your talk. That time is one to four weeks before the event. Ten minutes before you go out, you cannot be asking yourself, “Will it hurt if I fall?” It’s too late to do any further preparation. You must turn your attention to your state, and ask yourself performance-enhancing questions only.
9
BELIEFS
IF YOU’VE FELT fear when facing an audience in the past, chances are that it was your beliefs, and not the audience itself, that tied your stomach in knots. Your beliefs about yourself as a speaker will determine how you show up.
Human beings don’t just assemble facts. We constantly interpret the facts to tell a story, and make sense of what’s happening around us. That’s how we learn. Beliefs create the meaning you bring to the things that happen. You wear your beliefs like glasses; you view everything through them. And here’s the thing about beliefs: they are always true for you. Whether or not anyone else would agree is irrelevant.
For example, if you believe that you couldn’t hold an audience’s attention because you are too new, too old, too young, a woman, a man, an introvert, etc. then that will be true for you. There are no superficial “tricks” that you can put on like a costume to cover anxiety. The problem is that the core source of fear remains. That core is formed from your negative beliefs.
If you perceive that you are in danger of being judged, attacked, or ridiculed, that perception is all that counts. As we discussed earlier, the receptors in your brain respond the same way, whether or not the attack is real. If you close your eyes and imagine biting into a lemon, you will salivate. Whether o
r not it’s really happening, the brain sends the same signal, and the identical biochemical reaction fires off. If you’re walking into a room full of PhDs and your fundamental belief is that you’re not really smart enough to speak on this subject, then you will unconsciously look for all the ways to confirm that belief. When you get in front of the audience and deliver a boring speech, and the audience becomes disinterested, it will confirm what you believed all along. On the other hand, if you believe that you have a unique perspective on this situation, and this is an opportunity for you to provide insight, then everything from the way you enter the room, to the way you connect with the group, to the sound of your voice will be very different.
Your beliefs determine how you interpret the things that happen in your life.
Facts are the things that happen. Beliefs are the stories we tell about those facts. With one set of facts, you can tell many different stories.
* * *
PETER
I was once called in to work with the senior vice president of a bank. Jeff was very bright, and highly valued by his boss. But every time he gave a quarterly presentation to the board, he completely fell apart. We worked on his narrative, his delivery, and his slides before I finally got to the core of the issue; I asked him what negative beliefs were holding him back. After some uncomfortable soul searching, Jeff finally admitted the problem.
“I’m a blue-collar worker,” he said. “And they all know it. I came from the streets—I was a cop before I came here. Because I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, didn’t even study business, and never worked my way up through the halls of other financial institutions, they all know that I don’t have the background for the job. I just got lucky [limiting belief].”
I asked him what kind of cop he was.
“Sergeant. Narcotics squad.”
“Were you good?”