Working with a client who declared she could not give presentations. I asked: ‘How do you know?’ After staring at me her eyes defocused. She looked slightly upward and said: ‘Well, at the very thought of it I just freeze and get anxious. I hear everyone laughing at me and my mouth goes dry, my brain goes numb. I just hate it!’

Enough said. From her body language I had an inkling of how she represented the words ‘give a presentation’ in her mind’s eye. It didn’t look or sound positive or encouraging.

The way we imagine events happening in the future directly affects how they will be for us. If we re-present them in our minds as uncomfortable and unpleasant then that tends to be the result. You could say our thoughts and feelings drive us. If we let them.

But why would we let our thoughts sabotage us and produce uncomfortable imagery of future events like this? Well, it’s due to a mixture of experiences, memories and beliefs that we hold subconsciously.

To help illustrate this recall a fond memory of your own now. Let’s say it’s your grand-dad and you having fun. When I ask you to think about it, you’ll go off to a visual landscape and fill in the feelings. Conversely, if I ask you to think of someone you don’t like you’ll do similar but the imagery and associated feelings will be unpleasant. Each time you know you’ll be meeting this person those feelings come up. You then act on these feelings and they are subsequently reinforced.

That’s a brief insight of how your thoughts and beliefs affect your experience and state of mind. But you can turn them around to your benefit when you need to.

To show you how let’s go back to the example of my client and her fear of presenting. She couldn’t remember a single time when she’d enjoyed talking to a group.

I asked her to think again about presenting and then quietly let her mind take her way back to earlier times. In a matter of moments she was back to school days and in particular a certain classroom with a strict teacher. She recalled with some pain reciting to the classroom her essay for a homework project. All her classmates were laughing at her. The reason was because the teacher cited it as the worst in the class.

Pinpoint Where the Problem Began
We had pinpointed why she felt the way she did about presenting to others. Now armed with the knowledge we could set about reframing the memory so that it no longer held her back.

The first step was to reframe the laughter of the other children. I asked her if she really believed now, as an adult, if they’d wanted to hurt her or humiliate her. She thought and answered no that they were just reacting as kids and led by a bad teacher.

I asked then to think about the qualities that the incident had left her with. She decided that they were sensitivity to other’s worries or discomforts. Also a willingness to support and encourage others. These attributes we both agreed where very worthy and made her a generous and popular team player at work.

Then I asked to her to go back to the memory, pick a scene and make a picture out of it. She took a moment and found she could do this. Then I asked her to make the picture black and white and put a frame around it. All this she did and as she did so, she noticed that all the trembling, worried and anxious feelings left her.

Finally, I asked her to shrink the picture, then flip it so that it lay facing upwards, and then let it disappear. When she’d completed all this she let her attention come back to the room. She was delighted and laughing.

A New Frame for an Old Scene
To test her new frame on the experience I asked her to think of her upcoming presentation. She paused, looked down and then back at me. Now her eyes lit up and she grinned and said: ‘Wow, what a difference. I can see it going really well!’

Do you have an old memory attached to a current fear or apprehension around presenting? Is it time to stop it holding you back? You can choose the way you think and therefore your performance. Try it for yourself.