How Can Anxiety Boost Confidence & Improve Performance?
Why?
If you experience anxiety before an annual review, job interview, delivering a presentation or frequently as part of day to day life for what appears to be no reason, then understanding what Anxiety is and how to leverage it as a force for good will obviously be of significant benefit to you. Once you have this insight you can easily turn Anxiety into Confidence in situations you would normally experience something between excitement and fear.
What?
To better understand this seemingly debilitating emotion we cover how to manage anxiety the context of a delivering a presentation prior to walking stage. i.e. How to get inside your own to understand what triggered the anxiety, why anxiety continued to escalate over such a short period of time and how to create a checklist to interrogate yourself in real-time to put your feet back on the ground. By the end you will be in no doubt how to manage anxiety in almost any context instead of resorting to platitudes like “I can do better, I just need to be more confident” or “I can do better, I just wish I wasn’t so anxious”.
How?
We will deconstruct an event that was a personal challenge for me in the form of a TEDxTalk I was asked to deliver, specifically the few hours before going on stage at TEDxStirling in 2016, during which I experienced significant waves of Anxiety. As part of our analysis we will answer these 3 questions:
What are anxiety and Confidence? Revealing the lever to pull that converts anxiety into Confidence.
What does anxiety have to do with learning? Revealing anxiety is something you create, therefore can own and control.
What does anxiety have to do with high performance? Revealing that anxiety can be used to improve outcomes.
Anxiety & Confidence
I created this model based on the work of Tim Knoster, Dr of Education and Professor of Exceptionality Programs at Bloomsberg University of Pennsylvania. His research in developmental learning unveiled the correlation between the components of strategy and human fallout, which ultimately determines the level of success or failure in any endeavour. My version is an adaptation of the original for use in a business context by any individual, team or organisation in pursuit of a specific outcome. This can be anything from delivering a career defining presentation to a team winning a major sporting tournament. In the context of this case study we are only interested in the column labelled Capabilities & Skills.
Source: Based on Lippitt 1987, Knoster 1991 & Kenny Wallace 2021
We can see this model demonstrates Confidence and Anxiety, while opposites, are both emotional signals that bring to our attention the presence or absence of a skill, or skills, required to successfully complete an objective. Therefore, these signals can actually enable you to deconstruct and assess your situation, solve the problem you've been subconsciously alerted to and move from an anxious state to a confident state. This bring us neatly to our example.
In 2016 I was invited to deliver a TEDxTalk at the inaugural TEDx event in Stirling, which was a significant challenge for me. For context; I'm typically conversational and facilitative with groups of senior leaders in my work rather than a presenter, that is to say I do not talk at people. Be leveraging behavioural models, just as in this case study, I lead an investigative exchange of questions and ideas that enables the participants to solve a problem themselves. As a result the skill of presenting, i.e. Rote learning and parroting a story without direct audience interaction is something I was unfamiliar with. To compensate I spent several weeks writing, rehearsing and memorising my story until I was convinced enough, or confident enough, to stand on a stage and tell my story without thinking about it.
However, I distinctly remember background anxiety slowly rising from the moment I did my first rehearsal and sound check standing on the famous red dot an hour or so before the event started. I found a quite space in the auditorium to go over my story, yet the anxiety was growing, moving from the background to the foreground with the confidence I had built up rapidly slipping away.
I had two options: Do nothing and let this emotional state continue to escalate and potentially ruin the audiences evening or use it to my advantage by deconstructing my situation to form and implement a solution. I was able to find a quiet space and consciously run through an ad-hoc checklist
Q: Am I confident in my story?
A: Yes. I’m sure I’ve made it relatable and relevant for the audience.
Q: Am I confident I rehearsed enough?
A: Yes, I can parrot my lines without thinking about them
Q: When did confidence switch to anxiety?
A: When I did my rehearsal and sound check on the stage.
Q: Why is the stage significant, what is different to rehearsing at home?
A: Unfamiliar environment, lots visual and audible distractions, strangers in the form of Lighting & Sound Engineers.
Q: What can I do to shut out the distractions and focus on my talk?
A: Use the remaining time to run through my entire talk on stage, with slides, in the middle of the perceived chaos.
Q: Why do I think rehearsing on stage right now will work?
A: I can convert the unfamiliar to familiar, normalise the noise and create a spatial anchor on the red dot to make it mine.
While running through my entire talk and slides on stage, as the rigging crew continued to shout instructions at each other across the auditorium and the engineers tested lighting sequences and sound stages, my anxiety quickly changed to excitement. The Amygdala in the ancient Limbic part of my brain was attempting to highlight what it considered dangerous by hijacking my attention to "save my life". The more I tried to ignore it's signal the more it asserted itself in order to spin up my fight, flight or freeze system as the deadline approached.
The amygdala has no capacity for language, only sending out emotional signals, hence the need to pause and consciously decipher its meaning. Think of yourself as a building and your fire alarm goes off. You don't know what caused the fire, you don't know where the fire is, what size the fire is or what you need to put the fire out. All you know is you are on fire. It's up to you to find the answers to all the other questions to put your fire out. In this instance my short self-interrogation above was my fire drill.
Something worthy of note was the observable internal change in real-time of my emotional state as I ran through my checklist. Each answer evoked an emotional yes or no, that accompanied the cognitive yes or no in order to achieve intellectual and emotional congruence. Confidence arrived in full when I walked off the stage with the knowledge I’d done what I was there to do.
Anxiety & Learning
Below is my version of a learning curve demonstrated by merging the Dunning Kruger Effect with Noel Burch’s four stages of competence. In any given moment each of us is somewhere on this curve, and it changes from one moment to the next in any given endeavour.
Source: Dunning Kruger 1999, Noel Burch 1970’s & Kenny Wallace 2019
We now know that confidence correlates with knowledge. What this model shows us is Knowledge also correlates with competence, and competence comes in four stages:
Unconscious Incompetence: Unaware you lack a required skill.
Conscious Incompetence: Aware you lack a required skill.
Conscious Competence: You are learning a required skill.
Unconscious Competence: Unaware you have a highly developed skill.
We can see that anxiety exists in the middle two. The closer you are to the bottom of Conscious Incompetence the greater the challenge the greater the anxiety, more commonly known as panic. And the closer you are to the top of Conscious Competence the milder the challenge, the milder the anxiety, more commonly known as excitement.
To chart my example: I was in Unconscious Incompetence as I was unaware of the need to achieve some level of familiarity with my new environment until it was almost too late, rapidly tipping me into Conscious Incompetence, i.e. escalating fear. I had managed to move myself up to excitement by the time I was on stage as I had come up with an ad-hoc strategy to be competent enough to enjoy the experience while still partially on the back foot. Confidence arrived in full following the knowledge I had successfully delivered. I now know to complete this process prior to any speaking engagement over and above any other rehearsal.
Anxiety & High Performance
The model below is based on a matrix created by Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, who was first to formally investigate the traits associated with high performance, which he collectively called Flow; A highly focused mental state conducive to productivity. I have modified it for a business context to correlate a leadership style with its individual and organisational impact by looking at the relationship between Challenge, defined as: Degree of difficulty to be overcome, and Support, defined as: Available resources. Four organisational states emerge:
Source: Based on Massimini, Csíkszentmihályi & Carli 1987 and Kenny Wallace 2019
These four states correlate with specific behaviours that can be measured in any individual, team or organisation.
Anxiety: Missed deadlines, avoidance of interaction, likely negatively impacting employee sickness absence.
Apathy: Absence of enthusiasm or presence of indifference, likely negatively impacting employee retention.
Comfort: Lack of activity and accountability, likely negatively impacting employee productivity.
Flow: Pro-active, self-directed, emphasis on personal responsibility, likely positively impacting all above.
In the context of my example I was initially at risk of succumbing to the behaviours listed next to anxiety. However, I managed to quickly develop a strategy and execute it, i.e. create a SMART objective and exhibit SMART behaviour. In the moment this was enough to figure out how best to take advantage of the remaining time before the event started, to which I was the opening speaker, and tip me from the anxiety quadrant into the flow quadrant enough to complete my mission: Deliver my TEDxTalk.
Conclusion
So what?
As much as anxiety is a prehistoric biological response to danger, it's is still tremendously useful in day to day life. The key is learning to take advantage of it as a force for good by understanding it's nothing more than an incoming signal in an emotional format indicating a skill is either absent or under developed to deal with a scenario you have been or will be presented. It's your fire alarm for your fire, so it's up to you to develop your fire drill.
Anxiety is a key, and unavoidable, part of the learning curve that when used effectively can tip you from Conscious Incompetence; the awareness you lack a required skill to Conscious Competence; You are learning the required skill. With enough purposeful practice you will eventually tip into Unconscious Competence; Unaware you have a highly developed skill.
Learning to leverage anxiety in the moment by deconstructing and assessing it's message provides you with a powerful tool, meaning we can actually leverage them to take practical steps and measurably improve our performance in any situation. The more variables and/or distractions we can identify and mitigate with a successful strategy the more likely we are to achieve the state of Flow and deliver agreed outcomes.
Now what?
If you listen closely to the language most people use when discussing an emotional experience they refer to it in a way that implies it's something that happened to them. For example; He/she made me feel anxious OR every time I hear this sound I feel anxious. Reality check: No-one or thing can make you anxious. The anxiety you created is a direct result of not knowing how to navigate the situation you've put yourself in.
Understanding you own your emotions rather than them owning you enables you to put emotions under the banner of skill rather than identity, for example; I am anxious becomes I can feel anxious, and if you can feel one emotion you can feel others, except where brain injury and psychopathy are factors. The more you practise using anxiety as tool to put out your fires, the more refined your fire drill will become and the more resourceful, i.e. confident, you will become.
As these models are born out of the study of human behaviour they are relevant to everyone, transcending race, nationality, language, etc. In other words they are universal. In the context of this case study, the only thing getting in the way of dealing with your anxiety and improving how you perform in any situation to get the outcomes you want is you.
What next?
Now that you have a better understanding of what anxiety is, how its created and related to confidence lets consider how we might use what you have learned:
Do you contend with anxiety regularly OR deal with someone who experiences anxiety regularly? If so, what will you do differently from now on in terms of managing and leveraging your own or another's anxiety?
Given that anxiety is something we create within ourselves; has this case study highlighted a skills deficit on your part in specific instance that have sprung to mind? If so, what specific skills learn or enhance to deal with these scenarios?
When combining your temperament with the options available to you in terms of courses of action, which option will most likely benefit you in the long term?
Take your learning one step further and complete my Case Study Review. Capture your learning from this case study and commit to changes you deem relevant for your situation. A copy of your completed review will be emailed to you instantly.
For further insight on anxiety and confidence in the context of leadership styles and which ones evoke these emotions, and the remarkable measurable effects they can have on business outcomes do read: Bully, Micromanager, Puppet, Liberator; Which Leader Are You?.
If you are in the process of dealing with a situation similar to the one in this case study, then you do consider working with me to assess your Individual Readiness to manage this type of situation and it’s related issues that have come to your attention as result of this case study.
