Performance Anxiety
Performance Anxiety can range from being mildly discomforting to totally debilitating.If someone suffers badly with performance anxiety they may begin to suffer well before the performance itself. Anxiety can colour the weeks leading up to the performance and firmly sensitize the person to the event well before it arrives. When it does arrive the anxious and fearful mindset has already been rehearsed to perfection, and , as expected, worst fears tend to materialise. You are very nervous and your voice is very tremulous and people do begin to notice it.
If this has happened with a number of performance events a pattern of response is being laid down in the sub-conscious mind and the performance anxiety begins to trigger automatically. If you are someone who has to give presentations as a regular part of their work this is not something you want to encourage. If you are a professional musician or singer performance anxiety is going to make your life intolerable.
Hypnosis is an effective means to intervene in this programming process and re-orient your responses in a way that welcomes the arousal state of performance and actually uses the adrenalin to perform more powerfully rather than falling into an inappropriate fight or flight response. Hypnosis can direct you into experiencing the tensing of vocal chords the drying up of your mouth and the sudden confrontation when you step in front of your audience all as powerful cues for you to begin to find your attention out there on them rather than on your own physiology - for you to begin to let yourself move into the pleasurable flow of communication and forget about yourself for the time being.
If you think about what usually happens, the physical signals of being nervous and unsure at the beginning of a performance are perceived as the enemy.Your attention begins to focus on them and they enlarge in your own mind. At this stage they have not yet become sufficiently strong for the audience to focus on them in the same way that you are doing, but your fear begins to feed your own responses in a very unhelpful way. It magnifies them in your own mind and increases your unsteadiness. Eventually your audience begins to notice this, you begin to be aware that they are noticing which focuses you in the unwanted feelings even more strongly. So the whole thing begins to snowball in an inevitable way.
Using hypnosis we begin to create a different attitude to your anxiety. We persuade you to immediately bring into the situation what that part of you actually needs i.e. a lot of support, reassurance and thereby a degree of relaxation.You begin to make this an habitual response that triggers every time you come into a performance situation or begin to anticipate a performance situation. Instead of catastrophising you begin to trigger feelings associated with confidence, calm, relaxation. As soon as you become aware that you are anticipating, this cues you into beginning to release positive feelings, to find your attention traveling outwards to connect very strongly with your audience, which your audience begins to notice and appreciate and reciprocate. You accept your anxiety in a way that totally changes it's effect on you. Now it becomes a stimulus to draw you into the resources that that part needs, instead of disconnecting you from your audience and focusing you in a fearful reaction to your own physiology.
Self -hypnosis can provide a powerful personal tool to carry this reframing process forward