Laughing for Performance Anxiety

I have a friend who leads walks professionally. When he was starting out, he was naturally a bit nervous, especially as he’s the type who likes to prepare really thoroughly, including memorising his script. In the early days, he used to get to the walk early and go over and over his script to make sure it was word perfect. The process was reassuring, but even so didn’t reduce his nervousness much. One day he passed a cafe where a group of his walkers, all fun ladies who liked a laugh, were having a pre-walk coffee. They beckoned him in so with a rather heavy heart because he was losing out on script-memorising time he joined them.

After a coffee, a chat and a good deal of laughter, it was time to assemble at the meeting point with all the other walkers. When the walk was over my friend noticed that he had been much more relaxed than usual, that his delivery was therefore much more assured, that he had been more able to think on his feet and that he had been able to access his memory much more easily and more effectively. In other words he had been able to dip into it, come out of it and extemporise, and then go back into it to pick up where he had left off.

Objectively, the pre-walk social contact, in particular the laughter, was nothing to do with his work of preparing and delivering walks. But by making him better at the delivery, it proved not only that it was a vital element but also that by attracting more people to his walks it had commercial value. These days, having been doing the walks for years, my friend is naturally more confident so the effect of pre-walk social contact and laughter is less striking. But he’s never forgotten the lesson he learned that day and he applies it on a regular basis in other areas of his life.

How do you use laughter to prepare yourself?

Anna