Hey guys,

the shitty thing about anxiety or nervousness is that we usually stop focussing on the other person. When we are anxious what happens most of the time is, that all our attention is directed on our anxiety and the attempt to suppress it. However as we all know that doesn't really work.

A great way to overcome this and to shield yourself from the negative aspects of nervousness are implementations intentions. Implementations intentions are "if-then" strategies.

There are several studies that show, that by using "if-then" strategies you can be anxious or nervous but it doesn't impair your performance and you actually stay an engaged conversation partner.

Using a "if-then" strategy means "defining a stimulus which will evoke a goal-directed response". Now this is nothing else than picking a feeling, a specific moment or any other trigger, which will then automatically be followed by a certain behavior. For example such a strategy could look like this "If I notice I get nervous, I change my body language to appear more confident" or "If I notice I get nervous, I start to focus on my partner's voice". So you pick a trigger or stimulus and then you make a plan what you will do once you notice the trigger. This sounds very simply, but study after study showed that this works.

According to Chadley Stern from NYU you don't need to overcome your anxiety, simply define "if-then" strategies and you can circumvent the negative aspects of anxiety during a conversation.

Here is a link to a video where I explain this a bit more in detail (I upload more videos where I present peer-reviewed studies on strategies to deal with nervousness and anxiety.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsq1jN-q8_0

And here is the reference to the study:Stern, C., & West, T. (2014). Circumventing anxiety during interpersonal encounters to promote interest in contact: An implementation intention approach. Journal Of Experimental Social Psychology, 5082-93.