336. Rethinks: The “ABC’s” of Fright-Free Communication

0:02 At this time of year around Halloween, few things feel scarier than being put on the spot to speak in front of others. Your heart races, your palms sweat, and suddenly the words you planned disappear. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this special Holidays Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Communication anxiety can be frightening, but it doesn't have to haunt you. In this episode, we're revisiting practical, research—backed techniques for managing the fear of anxiety that can get in the way of confident communication. So instead of letting speaking anxiety spook you, let's learn how to manage it.

0:43 We'll provide you with some tricks so you can treat yourself to confident speaking. When it comes to effective communication, confidence is key. I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. Confident communication boils down to a simple equation. Confidence equals competence. The more confident you are, the more competent and credible your audience will see you as. Of course, you can take this to an extreme, and I am certainly not suggesting that we all be overconfident or arrogant when we interact with others.

1:25 Believe me, I work and teach in Silicon Valley, and I spend a lot of time talking about confidence versus arrogance. Now, the biggest barrier to confident communication is anxiety. Most people, upwards of seventy-five percent of people, feel anxious in high-stakes communication situations, be it written or spoken, in person or virtual, with large audiences or small, synchronous or asynchronous. Whew. I think I covered all the bases there. Today, with the help of clips from experts from previous Think Fast, Talk Smart episodes, I hope to provide you with several communication anxiety management techniques to help you feel more comfortable and confident when you communicate.

2:09 As a guide to help us learn these techniques, we'll be talking about the ABC's of anxiety management. That stands for affective, behavioral, and cognitive. Affective symptoms relate to how we feel and respond when stressed or under pressure to perform well. Many of us feel intensely negative when we find ourselves in high-stakes communication situations. We often feel that once these negative feelings starts, we can't do much to stop them. It feels like a train has left the station. Yet there are a few things we can do. For example, we can use techniques that come from the study of mindfulness that encourage us to acknowledge unhelpful or negative feelings that arise and remind ourselves that feeling anxious and speaking is completely normal.

2:56 In fact, it is unnormal not to feel nervous. Also, these negative feelings do not define us. As Professor Christian Wheeler shares in episode 18 when he talks about his class on spontaneous management. A lot of people feel anxious, you know, even giving a, a planned scripted presentation in front of others. And how much worse is that when you're dealing with circumstances that you can't completely control, such as an, a question and answer session that, uh, goes differently than you anticipated, or, or just being asked to make spontaneous remarks about something. Sometimes when we get in these situations, we can get a little anxious, and then we get anxious about being anxious.

3:39 We feel bad about being anxious, and that's, that's where the problem starts. There's nothing wrong with, with being uncomfortable. The problem is with your discomfort at being uncomfortable. And so we work on exercises, teaching people to, to be in that situation and to respond in that situation with a sense of calm. They can acknowledge that, that they feel a little bit anxious, but they're not gonna dwell on it, and they're going to trust their minds to bubble up the necessary responses that they have in that moment. By becoming aware of your feelings and how they impact you, you create a sense of agency, which provides you with the ability to reframe your negative thoughts in a more positive way. Another effective technique comes from Stanford lecturer and award-winning author Kelly McGonigal, who in episode 69 shares how she sees her anxiety as a signal.

4:28 What I have come to value about anxiety is it's a sign that I care. So, you know, for example, when I start to feel anxious now, I will say to myself, "My heart is in it." The purpose of any really interesting communication should be for the other person to have interesting thoughts in their own head about your work. It's not to convince them that your work is right or important or that you know everything about it. They are having their own interesting spontaneous thoughts and questions. That's the measure of success. Beyond affective experiences of anxiety that we can address through acknowledging and reframing our fear and reminding ourselves that it is normal and natural, we need also to address behavioral symptoms and sources.

5:16 Behavioral experiences, as the name suggests, relate to behaviors such as rapid heart rate, sweating, stuttering, and oh so many more. One tried and true method to address behavioral anxiety issues is deep breathing. Andrew Huberman, host of the Huberman Lab podcast, in episode 66 shared his thoughts on controlling our autonomic nervous system and breathing. There are direct control points through which we can control the autonomic nervous system, meaning that we can dial down the level of alertness or increase the level of calmness. When you are stressed, you are breathing less deeply. The most common, the most common advice is to take a deep breath.

5:59 It turns out that's exactly the wrong advice. Oh, no. The exhale emphasized breathing leads to much more rapid activation of the calming arm of the nervous system. And the, it turns out you don't just want to exhale. You want to do a double inhale. So inhale through the nose, and then before you exhale, sneak in a little bit more air. And then do a long exhale. And you do this just one to three times. Breathing in this manner slows down your heart rate, slows down your speaking rate, and can help you feel calmer. Here are a few other quick tips to reduce some of the behavioral symptoms many of us experience. When we get shaky, that's adrenaline trying to move us from threat to safety.

6:43 Use big, broad gestures or step towards your audience if you're in person. That movement will help the shakiness abate. Some of us, like myself, sweat when we get nervous. That's your core body temperature going up. Your blood is pumping faster, your vessels are tightening. This causes your blood pressure to go up. It's like you're exercising. By cooling ourselves down, we can reduce the blushing and sweating. A great way to do this is simply to hold a cold bottle of water or glass of water in your hands. This reduces your core body temperature. We've all done this in reverse on a cold morning if we've held a warm cup of coffee or tea and felt it warming us up. Some of us get dry mouth.

7:23 A great way to reverse that is to suck a lozenge, chew some gum, or drink some warm water right before you speak. Finally, GSB Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer in episode 34 reminds us that it is important to do physical warmups to calm ourselves down. Well, I think, you know, when I have Bill English and Susi Damilano, who are co-founders and, of the San Francisco Playhouse, come and teach my session on acting with power, uh, they give the students fabulous advice, which I will pass on on their behalf, uh, to your listeners, and that is to warm up. So they talk about getting your voice warmed up, getting your body warmed up, obviously not in public.

8:05 You know, Matt, you're gonna go play football before you play, particularly given our ages, uh, but even before, before you went on the football field, you would probably do some stretches and some exercises to warm up, and the same advice holds for speech and, and communication. You want to warm up so that when you enter the moment, you are as relaxed and as ready to go as you can be. The many people I teach and coach find these behavioral hacks super helpful. Beyond effective and behavioral, the third category that we need to address is cognitive. Cognitive symptoms affect our brain's ability to function smoothly.

8:46 We become flustered or forgetting what we intended to say. Additionally, we fall victim to all of the bad things we say to ourselves, something academics call negative self-talk. We can do several things to help avoid these issues. Here is advice from Stanford Professor Alia Crum in episode 40, followed immediately by guidance from Harvard Business School Professor Alison Wood Brooks in episode 73. Most people have the mindset that stressful situations are inherently debilitating. They're going to ultimately make us sick, make us struggle, make us crumble under pressure.

9:27 And when you look at the truth about stress, which is like most things, very complicated, you realize that that is a simplified assumption. It's not necessarily wrong, but it's only one way of viewing stress. And you start to realize that the true nature of stress is more complex. And in fact, there's a whole other side of stress that reveals to us that the body's stress response, the mind's stress response, was not designed to be debilitating, but instead designed to be, uh, to help us elevate our performance and behavior to meet the demands we're facing. There's a whole side of stress that shows that it can have enhancing qualities on our cognitive functioning, our physical health, and on how we behave and interact with others.

10:17 And so our work is not necessarily to find out the truth of stress, what is or what isn't, but to look at how our mindsets, the core assumptions we make about it, shape how we respond in stressful situations. And what we've shown is that if we can get people to open their minds to this notion that stress can be enhancing, that stress can help you rise to a newer level of understanding, can deepen your connection with others, can make us even physiologically grow tougher and stronger, having that focus shifts our attention and behaviors in ways that make that mindset more true.

11:02 So we tried a very simple coping strategy, a very simple intervention. And the question was: Can people reframe their anxious feelings as excitement? And it's a really simple idea, but the reason that it works is because when we feel anxious, we have this crazy instinct that we should try and calm down, like really powerful. Everybody feels like they should calm down when they're anxious. And that's hard, right? Like that, that would require that we mitigate the physiological signs of anxiety, so your racing heart, sweaty palms, spiked cortisol in your body.

11:43 You're trying to like push those down, as well as move from the negative valence, right? Like a negative emotion like anxiety, and move into the positive zone of calmness. And that two-step move, reducing the physiological signals and moving from negative to positive, it's pretty much impossible. It's very, very hard, especially the physiological component of it. So instead, what reframing as excitement does is it allows you to stay in that high arousal zone. You're not trying to combat your automatic physiological processes, but instead you're just doing this mental reframe from negative to positive. Both Alia and Alison point to how our mindset affects how we feel about our anxiety.

12:26 By changing our mindset, what we focus on, we can feel less nervous and perhaps even excited. Further, we can refocus our negative self-talk by adopting positive affirmations like, "I have value to add," and, "I've got this." These mantras redirect our thoughts and help us to be more positive in how we approach our speaking. With this understanding of effective behavioral and cognitive techniques, now we need to put these into action and create what I call an anxiety management plan, or AMP. For decades now, I've encouraged my students and people I coach to create a personalized anxiety management plan that they can leverage whenever they're put on the spot to speak.

13:10 Having a plan handy helps you manage both the symptoms and sources that make anxiety challenging. An AMP serves as a recipe you can follow to calm yourself down so you can communicate at your best. I hear from students from years ago who share how they are all still using their AMP's to help them. In fact, just the other week, I heard from a student who leveraged his plan to help him deliver what he called a killer toast for his brother's wedding. I have found that the best anxiety management plans consist of three to five techniques that you think will help you feel more comfortable and confident in your high-stakes communication. Try to pick examples from each of the effective behavioral and cognitive categories to make sure you cover all the bases.

13:55 I still get nervous in certain situations. In fact, I was recently in Australia presenting in front of many distinguished Stanford alumni, and I freaked out a bit. Luckily, I used my anxiety management plan to calm myself down. My plan consists of three steps. From an effective point of view, I reminded myself that it's normal to be anxious in these situations, and it reminded me that I really care about what I'm saying. From a behavioral perspective, I held a cold bottle of water to help reduce my sweating and blushing. And then finally, from a cognitive perspective, I said to myself, "I have value to bring." This plan helped me to feel more comfortable and to deliver a good communication.

14:39 Once you have a plan, you next need to test it out. Your plan is really a set of hypotheses. Some may turn out to be helpful and others less so. Simply iterate and adjust until you find what works for you. The bottom line is this: there are many things we can do to help ourselves feel more comfortable, calm, and confident when we communicate. This helps us do better, and it helps our audience to focus more clearly on what we're saying without being distracted by our anxiety signals. I encourage all of you to create your own anxiety management plans based on the ABC's of anxiety management, and I look forward to hearing about your success.

15:22 Thank you for joining us for this special Halloween Rethinks episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast. The one thing I hope you take away is that communication anxiety doesn't have to be so scary. Rather than trying to eliminate your nerves entirely, build your own anxiety management plan so you're prepared when they inevitably creep in. With the right tools and a little practice, you can keep communication anxiety from haunting you the next time you're put on the spot.