Have you ever felt Nervous? What about Anxious?
If you’re like me, you definitely have and it can totally throw you off course. Sometimes your skin crawls. Sometimes your blood boils. Sometimes you shake. Sometimes you laugh incessantly. Sometimes you cry. Sometimes you go to sleep.
However you experience nervousness and anxiety, is your individual experience. Feeling those emotions are part of the 50/50 human experience where we get to feel all of the good emotions and bad emotions.
It’s what we do and how we show up when we feel the negative ones that determines our experience.
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to turn my nervousness into something very positive. It’s quite an interesting story.
I attended a 3-day coaching conference in Phoenix, Arizona. It was life-changing and super energizing to be with over 1,200 coaches from all over the world AND there were at least double that amount signed in virtually to attend, as well.
Over the course of the 3 days, we were invited to get “live coached” by a Master Coach, the brilliant and beautiful, Brooke Castillo, who runs the school I recently attended.
Brooke had asked the attendees in the days leading up to the conference to push ourselves to be who we really want to be and show up as the person who says and does what we want. In other words, if we want to be more courageous, we show up and be more courageous.
It really is easy to just make that decision to do it. However, the action of being more courageous brought some anxiety to my day.
Now, as a Master Results Expert and a Certified Life Coach, I’ve got the skills to fully feel and then process through the anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin my experience. But, what happened was fascinating and I learned a huge lesson.
I was able to get up, even though my hands were shaking, to the microphone and get live coached. It felt thrilling and empowering and life-changing because I had always had the thought “I was too nervous to do it”. I mean, in front of 1,200 audience members and then even more virtually all watching and listening to me? C’mon, really?
Well, yes. I did it folks. That was a first. And it certainly gave me the self-confidence to do it again at some time in the future because I had proven I could do it. I didn’t die. No buildings fell.
I had worked on my thought around getting up in front of an audience (by the way, there were also 10 HUMONGOUS TV screens across the hall showing my face when I was up!!) I did it. I stood up, spoke without a shake in my voice, sounded clear, and felt great!!
BUT, BUT, BUT………..wait there’s more!!!
Shortly after, we broke for lunch and I was experiencing severe pain in my rib cage. Like….SEVERE.
I did not become fearful, but more so I became curious. I knew, as a healthy 62 year old vibrant woman, I do not have health challenges. I never experience pain. This was rare and came on strong and I just knew it was related to my nervousness and anxiety.
Of course, I HAD to google it and there it was!!
“Summary: Rib pain is a symptom of many different types of anxiety, as is chest pain that can be felt in the ribs. Muscle tension and hyperventilation are the most common causes.”
So even though I resolved the nervousness in my thought and did not feel super nervous when speaking on the mic, I apparently still had some underlying symptoms of the anxiety and it resulted in a crazy pain in my body.
So without fear, I excused myself from my lunch with my friend and went and did some self-care and worked through the physical pain within 30 minutes. (I won’t go into the gory details of working it through, but just know it involved me camping out in the bathroom for awhile. Sorry! LOL)
The funny thing was if I had piled on the worked-through-anxiety, with the rib cage pain, and then threw a heaping portion of fear on top of all that, I would have surely been a mess. But because I was in total control of my thoughts, I deliberately and consciously decided NOT to be afraid, and NOT to create DRAMA. That would have been my Brain feeding me utter BS. I had no doubt I would be ok and just needed to give myself some loving and gentle self-care time.
The moral of this story? Well, we can talk ourselves into anything we want. We can allow our Brains to feed us constant BS and fearful thoughts and doubts and worry. And we buy into it.
But I chose different. I chose to be aware, be gentle and loving and patient with MY process, and to trust my body. I chose NO MIND DRAMA, and I chose to survive. AND, my friends, that is the ONLY thing I experienced from getting up in front of 3,500 people live and virtually and speak my truth and have an AMAZING experience and interact with one of my teachers and mentors.
I will never trade any experience I want to have for fear, or doubt, or anxiety or nerves or stress. Those are energy suckers. It’s ok to do something that you’re nervous about. It’s also ok to fail. It’s even more so ok to push ourselves to be the best version of ourselves JUST BECAUSE WE WANT TO DO IT.
So………….About Being Nervous? I say SO WHAT!! If it feels like a HELL YES, then go for it!! You are quite capable of anything you want to do.