Overcoming Performance Anxiety:
A Stress Relief Meditation for HSPs

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover how to come back to your own sense of flow, even when you’re in the spotlight.

Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress, and find true inner freedom. I’m your host, Todd Smith, a certified facilitator of the work of Byron Katie. A way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I’m a highly sensitive person myself.

In this episode, you’ll discover an innocent thought that will instantly create performance anxiety for you, how to question this thought and find a new experience of freedom waiting for you, and how to get in touch with your own joy again, even when you’re being observed.

Performance anxiety is a common experience for people who are highly sensitive. There’s a reason for this. Because of the sensitivity, we naturally notice what’s going on around us. So if somebody’s observing us, it’s very easy for the mind to start thinking about what they’re thinking and what their experience is.

We start almost experiencing the same situation from their point of view, at the expense of our own point of view. When this happens, it becomes really hard to be productive and do what you already know how to do. I’ve had this experience many times where I was very competent at doing something, but when someone started observing me, I fell apart.

I couldn’t do it, and it was because of the mind’s tendency to be so aware of everything else going on in the room. Luckily, there is a way to work with this and reduce it. It’s not going to change who you are—you’ll still be aware of the nuances in the situation—but we can question a stressful thought that will help bring you back to your center.

The thought we’re going to question today is, “It’s all about me. It’s about me.” When someone observes me, my mind can often go into thinking they’re judging me. I feel like I need to do a good job, that it’s important, they’re depending on me, and I don’t want to let them down.

In all these statements, it’s about me. “I” become the central point, and it puts a lot of pressure on me. Let’s question this thought together and see if we can find some wiggle room.

To begin, find a situation where you were experiencing performance anxiety, where you were anxious because someone was watching you. Look for something concrete, something that actually happened.

For example, the first time I gave a presentation to a large group about the work of Byron Katie, I was at a library. There were going to be a number of strangers there, and I started getting nervous.

What’s yours? Where were you feeling flustered, nervous, overwhelmed by being observed?

When you have your situation, let’s go through these questions together. The statement we’re questioning is, “It’s about me.”

Is it true in your situation that it’s about you? Just a yes or no.

For me, if I listen to the stressed part of myself, the part getting nervous, it feels like yes, it is.

Second question: Can you absolutely know it’s true that it’s about you? Yes or no?

I’m going with no.

How do you react when you think it’s about you in that situation? What happens?

I become nervous. I start trying to do a good job. I stop trusting myself. I’m no longer present. My stress levels go up. I start imagining what people are going to think. I start seeing outcomes. I’m in the future.

I see myself as a potential failure. There’s already a feeling of shame, like, “Oh, I messed it up.”

How else do you react when you think it’s about you?

Who would you be in the same situation without the thought that it’s about you? Same people observing you—who would you be? Imagine.

I notice right away that I get more into the job at hand. I’m excited. I love doing this. I know how to do this.

If I don’t have the thought “it’s about me,” something relaxes. I just take the next step in doing the job. Even though I’m aware of the people observing me, that awareness becomes fainter, more background—not so central.

This is who you are without the thought that it’s about you. Experiment with it, play with what it’s like to be that in your situation. What does it feel like?

To me, it feels the same as if I’m alone or if I’m doing something one-on-one.

These two questions—how do you react when you believe it’s about you, and who would you be without the thought that it’s about you—show the effect of the thought. The thought makes me self-conscious, makes me nervous. Without it, I’m back to being more myself.

Let’s turn the thought around. “It’s about me.” An opposite would be, “It’s not about me.” In your situation, can you find anything that would support that? That it’s not about you, even with someone watching?

For me, I’m seeing it’s about the people who are coming to listen and work with me. It’s about them, not me.

Suddenly, it’s just a service role. It’s not about me.

I remember when I first saw this many years ago, the nervousness left me. “Oh, it’s not about me, it’s about them. It’s about the people I’m here to serve.” Since that time, I have not experienced nervousness when presenting what I do to people.

One thought, “It’s about me,” can make a huge difference. Another turnaround might be, “It’s about the job I’m doing.” How could this fit in your situation? How is it more about the job itself than about you, the doer of the job?

For me, there’s joy in doing a job. There’s fulfillment in doing something. I like doing things well—it’s fun, playful, creative. So it’s not about me, it’s about the job I’m doing. That draws me in, that captures my attention, and that is actually truer than “it’s about me.”

If you can find that, there’s a lot of joy, playfulness, and fun that comes back in, even if someone’s watching you.

In this episode, we looked at how an innocent thought like “It’s about me” can instantly create performance anxiety for you. We also looked at how to question this thought and explore the opposite of it to see and experience something different.

Finally, we explored how to get in touch with your own joy again, even when you’re being observed, by focusing on what you’re actually there to do.

Thanks for being here with me to do this meditation. This is a simple version of the work of Byron Katie, which is a way to question what you think and experience something different without changing anything on the outside.