Have you ever felt engulfed in the fear of messing up right before an important meeting? Maybe you fear being judged or falling short of the set expectations despite being fully prepared for the meeting. You’ll be surprised how common these instances are for every individual. Be it adults or kids, everyone undergoes performance anxiety at some point in their life. This psychological phenomenon can be best defined as intense nervousness arising before or during a performance.
It is more common than you think and affects people in various domains, like public speaking, academic examinations, sports events, musical performances, and even daily social interactions. While it is a natural response to situations your mind perceives as threats, there are ways to control it. To help children and parents lower their performance anxiety, we at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok, recognized among the best CBSE schools in Gurgaon, have brought here for you a list of some of the best tips in this regard that can help you fetch visible results pretty quickly.
So, if you’re ready to regain control, implement the following powerful techniques:
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Practice Deep Breathing
Taking deep breaths might appear as an insignificant step to overcome performance anxiety, but trust us, it is really effective. This technique works because it directly affects your body’s psychological response to anxiety and stress. When any individual gets anxious, their body goes into ‘fight or flight’ mode. As a result, you may experience shallow breathing, muscle tension, rapid heartbeats, etc.
Deep breathing helps counteract these psychological reactions, promoting a sense of calm and relaxation. Whenever you feel you’re getting performance anxiety, start taking slow and deep breaths. It will help regulate your heart rate, calm your nervous system, oxygenate the body, and reduce muscle tension, making you feel relaxed.
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Indulge in Positive Self-Talk
At Delhi Public School Sushant Lok, we believe engaging oneself with positive self-talk is a powerful psychological technique that shifts focus from negative to positive thoughts. Even if you’re feeling nervous, saying positive affirmations like ‘I can do it,’ ‘I am prepared for it,’ ‘Everything is fine,’ and similar affirming words can shift your mind from a damaging to an empowering and motivating state.
We have seen that repeatedly saying positive affirmations can make people believe in their abilities, eventually boosting their self-confidence. It shows up in their performance as they feel less anxious and perform incredibly well, even under pressure.
Thus, if you struggle with negative self-criticism, positive self-talk can be really beneficial. It can help you counter harmful thoughts, promote self-compassion, and build resilience.
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Celebrate Effort
Another effective tip to overcome performance anxiety is by beginning to celebrate efforts over results/outcomes. When your sole focus rests on the outcome, you are more likely to experience severe performance anxiety. By learning to prioritize and celebrate effort over result, you start validating the hard work and determination put into work. We at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok strongly advocate this technique because it teaches people that their worth is not tied to their performance.
Performance anxiety arises from the fear of falling short of perfectionism, whereas celebrating efforts makes people understand that ‘perfectionism’ is a myth. This is the reason why once people start celebrating their efforts, their performance anxiety begins to decline with time. It also contributes to peoples’ self-confidence, enabling them to approach challenging situations with a sense of self-assuredness.
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Post-Performance Reflection
No matter how hard you try, you can still come across defeat or underperformance some times. But trust us, it is absolutely normal! Overemphasizing on your performance may simply get you stuck in a negative loop of overthinking, stress, fear, and self-sabotage. It is hence always better to adopt post-performance reflection to break the harmful pattern and promote self-awareness.
Post-performance reflection can become your biggest and most powerful tool to overcome performance anxiety. It can help you learn from your mistakes/experiences, thereby empowering your future growth. As you self-reflect, you identify patterns that led to performance anxiety. Once the triggers are identified, you can choose appropriate strategies to tackle them effectively. Acknowledging what exactly went wrong and finding ways to prevent it is a guaranteed way to reduce anxiety.
Conclusion
Performance anxiety is a common psychological phenomenon affecting parents and kids alike. You can consider it as a universal challenge preventing people from achieving their full potential. If you ever felt the suffocating pressure and unbearable blinding spotlight before important events in your life, you can take effective steps to prevent experiencing the same in the future. We at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok, one of the best school in Gurgaon, understand how difficult it can be to work under performance anxiety, and, thus, to make the journey easier for our pupils as well as our respected parent fraternity, we thought of curating a list of some handy tips that can be used to control/significantly lower the issue.
We can assure you that if followed diligently, all the aforementioned tips are pretty much effective. However, make sure you follow them continually over a period of time to generate good results. Remain patient, remain consistent. After all, every small step counts.