Most people in many different walks of life can suddenly find themselves having to ‘perform’ in public or simply in front of a stranger. This can take many forms. A few examples are:
* Performing a musical instrument.
* Giving a Sales pitch to a Board Meeting.
* Interviewing for a job.
* Meeting the Bank Manager for a loan or mortgage meeting.
The problem is that lots if not the majority of people often feel uncomfortable in this type of situation and can often feel stressed or nervous, even to the point of getting the shakes. There are then other people who seem to be able to ride through the situation calmly and perform almost effortlessly even under severe pressure.
The main difference between those of us who can perform well under this type of pressure and those that don’t is simply confidence. Some people are born more confident than others and some people are inherently shy, and these traits occur in various quantities in every person. Some people are too confident or ‘cocky’ and some people are extremely shy bordering on withdrawn and there’s every level in between.
Many interviews have been lost by the best candidate and lots of fantastic musicians have spoiled public performances of pieces of music they can perform superbly at home purely because of nerves, shyness, being stressed, or ‘losing their bottle’ as the modern term for it in the UK goes.
So how can we help to avoid these unnecessary failures and help these ’shy’, ‘nervous’ people fulfill their potential and achieve their goals that they’ve worked so hard for?
There are lots of ways of calming the spirit and so enabling a better performance and we’re not talking about taking tranquilizer drugs here. The most significant and extremely easy thing to do to improve your performance in any field when under pressure is to breathe. That sounds so amazingly obvious and simple and yet you won’t believe how many people are depriving their bodies of oxygen just at the time when they need more of it than ever.
The biggest mistake that people naturally do when under pressure is to tense up muscles. The chest becomes constricted and the breathing shallower, this means the body has to cope with less oxygen and can’t send the required amount to the organs which causes more distress and shorter breaths and the circle of tenseness gets worse.
Always Breathe deeply when in any stressful situation. This doesn’t mean you have to raise your shoulders as you breathe and be obviously heavy breathing. Ninety nine percent of people don’t know how to breathe properly using the diaphragm to inflate the lower part of the lungs. All that raising of the shoulders does is merely help to inflate the top half of the lungs and the lower lungs hardly ever get inflated properly.
This is basic training for Trumpet or Trombone players but you don’t need to be a wind musician to get an enormous amount of benefit from this technique.
The easiest way to explain the secret of deep breathing for beginners is to try to push he stomach outwards as you breathe in. This uses the diaphragm muscle which creates room which the lower lungs can expand into. Practice expanding the stomach slowly as you breathe in and contracting the stomach slowly as you breathe out and you will find in time that the lung capacity will seem to increase. What this means is you are simply using your lungs more efficiently.
This in turn means your body is getting much more oxygen which it can distribute around the organs and blood vessels which makes the body more comfortable and able to perform better.
Remember, nerves and stress make the body tense up. Whichever ‘performance’ situation you are in this means you will not perform at your best. You will look uncomfortable, you will get distracted because your body is crying out for more oxygen.
So make sure you get that interview, that sales contract, that High ‘C’. Go on, Breathe!
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