Face Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety is a universal human experience. Whether arising when we have to give a talk, perform athletics, play a musical instrument or sing, all of us have contend with varying degrees of fear of what could go wrong, for some stronger than the confidence in what will go right. Many persons either do not pursue or do not fully develop potential careers due to debilitating anxiety.

The Counseling Services of University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire, has developed a program for coping with performance anxiety, built on first recognizing than resolving ten “cognitive distortions.” Cognitive distortions may seem logical, but they are not rational. They constitute mistakes in thinking, which elevate anxiety and diminish our ability to perform at the higher levels of our potential – to say nothing of enjoying performing.

Here are the ten cognitive distortions:

– All-or-Nothing Thinking: This is seeing things in black-and-white categories, like either winning or losing, with nothing in between. Hence, if a performance falls short of your expectations or those of others, you see yourself as a complete failure.

– Overgeneralization: From a single event, you assume or fear that a pattern has been established, namely a never-ending pattern of defeat. It is as if what happened yesterday has already predetermined what will happen today and tomorrow.

– Mental Filter: You select a single negative detail from a performance and focus on it exclusively, so that it is all you see when you reflect on your total performance. But like staring at a pimple on your face, you miss the greater and best features.

– Disqualifying the Positive: You dismiss positive experiences or elements by insisting they “don’t count” for one reason or another. Thus you maintain a negativity which is actually contradicted by your everyday experiences.

– Jumping to Conclusions: You jump to negative interpretations even though there are no supporting facts to convincingly justify your conclusions. Mind reading: you arbitrarily determine that someone is reacting negatively toward you, without bothering to check it out. The fortuneteller error: you think you can anticipate that things are going to turn out badly, then you act as if your predictions are already established fact.

– Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You inflate what you see as the important things, like your mistakes or another’s achievements, or you reduce such things until they appear tiny, such as your desirable qualities or another’s imperfections. This termed the “binocular trick.”

– Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions accurately reflect the way things are, as in: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

– Should Statements: You attempt to motivate yourself with should and should not, as if you have to whip and punish yourself before you can arise to satisfactorily accomplish anything. “Must” and “oughts” are equal offenders, all of which produce guilt. And when you direct should statements toward others, that generates anger, frustration and resentment.

– Labeling and Mislabeling: Instead of describing your mistake, you attach a negative label to yourself, like “I’m a loser.” You do the same toward others. Mislabeling means to describe events with language that is highly prejudicial and emotionally loaded.

– Personalization: You see yourself as responsible for things really beyond your control.