How Do You Take Control When Faced With A Challenging Situation?

In business we regularly have to face situations which we find challenging whether it be that presentation or public speaking invitation or perhaps and meeting with strong individuals or a challenging employee, so just how do we control our nerves?

Remember It’s not how nervous you are but how confident you come across!

So what is it we can do to take control, well there are a number of things, lets start with movement,

1. Movement, trying to remain cool and calm results in shaking hands or worse, so just wiggling your toes in your shoe is good enough to stop any movement in the rest of your body.

1. Positive affirmations, Every affirmation we think or say is a reflection of our inner truth or beliefs. It is important to realise that many of these “inner truths” may not actually be true for us now or may be based on invalid or inappropriate impressions we constructed as children, which if examined as an adult can be exposed as inappropriate.

1. Visioning, much like the golfer or athlete, spend some time visioning the perfect presentation or meeting, focussing the mind on the positive outcome, remembering no negativity, if I ask you “Don’t think of a pink elephant” what is it you have just done?

And so if we fill our head with the thoughts of what might go wrong we move close to this possibility, so we to “not” think of something the brain must think of it first!

1. Anchoring, best to find an NLP practitioner to help but in short you go through the process of recalling a strong experience so you get your self to s a state of being in the present with that feeling. Lets say you are just about to speak in public, picture the crowd/audience, the venue, the sights the sounds the smells, and get the feeling of wanting to run away, of feeling sick and all those other emotions, then repeat for a strongly positive feeling.

   Then take the negative feeling and imagine pushing it away from you away over the horizon, then bring the positive  emotion up close, make it much bigger and closer to you, this way you create the positive feelings which dwarf the negative ones, get some help with this.

   Put all the above in to action and you can create a strong positive and confident you, remembering its not how nervous you are but how you show your confidence, you may still be bubbling away under the surface!