Anxiety Happens. Here’s What Helps

(air hissing) (mouse clicking) (upbeat music) Headspace Studios. (upbeat music continues) (gentle music) Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Abrahams, your guest host this week. Welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Monday morning. I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and I'm the author of "Think Faster, Talk Smarter" and the Popular podcast "Think Fast, Talk Smart." I've spent my career helping people feel more comfortable and confident in their communication, whether it's giving a presentation, speaking up in a meeting, or just having an important conversation. This week, we'll explore how mindfulness and simple communication tools can help us express ourselves with calm and clarity. The fear of speaking in front of others is ubiquitous. It exists everywhere. In every culture we've studied, we find it, and we find that it develops at the same time. When kids first become teenagers, that's when anxiety really begins to spike. Certainly for me, when I was 14 years old, I was instructed by my English teacher to give a presentation on his behalf at a speech contest. Every teacher in my school had to nominate one student to go to this contest, and I was his choice. (upbeat music) The only advice he gave me was, "Do something that gets the audience interested." So I showed up on an early Saturday morning cold outside into the big large auditorium. My friends were there, the parents of my friends were there judging this competition, and the girl I liked was even in the room. I had decided to do a speech on the martial arts. This was something I thought that would be engaging. I was so nervous about doing this speech that I forgot to put on my special martial arts pants, the ones that have a little extra room. I did a karate kick to start and I ripped my pants from zipper to belt buckle. Somehow I managed to get through that presentation, but it was at that moment that I became very interested in how anxiety impacts our communication. And over time and with a lot of practice, I was able to become much more comfortable and confident in my communication, and hopefully I've helped lots of others do the same. (gentle music) Confidence in speaking comes from a lot of practice and a lot of work. It's a whole bunch of mini-experiments that we run. Each of us has to find the techniques that work for us to manage our anxiety, and there are many of them. For me, one of the big sources of my anxiety was worrying about the future consequences of my actions. I was afraid people wouldn't support what I was asking for, they might not like what I had to say. All of these are future thoughts, and the way to counteract that, and what worked for me, is to become very present oriented, because by definition, if you're in the moment, you're not worried about a future negative outcome. So...