Put yourself in danger of success
Do you get butterflies before a big presentation? I hope so.
I apologise for beginning this essay being the 385,122,654th person to say "humans didn't evolve to thrive in the modern world", but...
Humans didn't evolve to thrive in the modern world.
We have a whole bunch of biological adaptations which are either no longer useful or actively detrimental in a modern context. Take my absolute looooove of sugar, for example. The taste sensation that is unfettered sweetness never fails to cause me to over-indulge. This is a physiological relic of a time when sugar was a very scarce resource. Our bodies (particularly our tongues) adapted to let us know when we were eating something rich in energy.
In the modern context, we have a gigantic over-abundance of foods chock-full of energy (you can generally tell which ones they are because they taste the best). Our physiology hasn't adapted fast enough to react to this shift in our environment, and it continues to send us signals through our nervous system which are misaligned with our long term goals. Thanks in part to the delicious taste of sugars and fats, a frightening percentage of the population is subsequently overweight or obese.
Similarly, our physiology has not had time to adapt to public speaking. In the ancient past, 'public speaking' would have occurred almost exclusively in front of your family group. The audience would have been composed of your closest family and friends, with whom you would spend almost every hour of the day.
In the modern context, public speaking can see you speaking in front of tens, hundreds or even thousands of perfect strangers. Strangers whose opinions and actions might have a profound impact on your life. This is a highly unnatural situation to find oneself in. Whilst I'm neither a historian nor an anthropologist, my guess is that if you were standing in front of a group of hundreds of strangers in the time of hunter gatherers... you were probably facing a rival group, and quite likely you were in fairly grave danger.
Such a situation would give you butterflies, right?
Butterflies appear when your nervous system thinks you're in danger... but in the modern context you are almost never actually in danger. Just as it does with your taste buds, your nervous system continues to send you signals which are misaligned with your long term goals.
Lots of the people I coach in public speaking tell me they get butterflies. At this point I've done hundreds of speeches, and I still get butterflies nearly every time. I see this as an entirely positive thing. The butterflies are a sign that you're stretching yourself beyond your comfort zone; that you're doing something courageous; that you're doing something with real consequences that matter.
When you get butterflies, you know you're putting yourself in danger of success.
It's the right place to be.
P.S. — If you know a professional (accountant, consultant, economist, engineer, lawyer, researcher, etc.) who speaks to drive commercial goals (or they should), please send them the link to this article.
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[Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash]