According to surveys, three-quarters of us have a fear of public speaking; in fact, in some, it’s ranked higher than the fear of death. In the early part of my career, I found myself in the rather fortunate group of people who enjoyed speaking in public. At the age of 23, I travelled around the UK promoting my first book, sometimes speaking to a handful of people, other times to hundreds. I loved the buzz it gave me, and the opportunity to connect with readers.
Utilizing the skills I’d learned along the way, a few years later I had an unexpected side gig as a corporate speaker, offering a message of personal resilience and commitment. From time to time, I’d be brought in to speak at corporate training events, and I enjoyed the variety it brought to my day-to-day life as a therapist.
However, at the height of the period in my life when I was suffering from intense anxiety and panic attacks, which I described in the first chapter, I was booked to speak to around 100 salespeople at an event aboard the old battleship HMS Belfast on London’s River Thames.
In the preceding few months my anxiety had become so crippling that leaving the house was challenging enough, let alone being on display in a room full of people. The obvious solution would have been to cancel the event; however, a rather toxic marriage between my achiever and helper patterns meant I didn’t want to be seen as weak, or to be letting anyone down.
Perhaps as life’s way of trying to protect me from what was coming, I got stuck in traffic while driving across London to the event. When I finally arrived, there were just a few minutes remaining until I was due to speak, and my already severe anxiety had gone into overdrive. Hoping that the intense cortisol and adrenaline rush would see me through, I took to the stage feeling as if all I wanted to do was run from the building.
It’s not unusual to feel nervous at the start of a presentation. It often takes both speaker and audience a few minutes to relax and settle into each other, and to find a natural groove. The problem was, on this occasion, the settling in wasn’t coming for me. In fact, the opposite was happening.
I could feel that my voice wasn’t loose; I found it impossible to focus on the audience; and working the stage became a rather frantic pacing as I tried to move the energy of the intense panic that was growing in me. To say I was in extreme fight or flight was an understatement, but worse than that, I was about to go into shutdown.
When I noticed that my voice had started to shake, things unraveled. I realized that the confident act I was so desperately trying to present was starting to crack. And when you’re talking about resilience, drive, and motivation while at the same time having a panic attack, the message you’re selling becomes somewhat empty. As fight or flight turned to freeze, I was unable to draw breath or get my voice out.
At this point conscious control was gone, and instinct took over. I walked off the stage, and what happened next was interesting. I sat on a chair and managed to take a few deep breaths. As much as I wanted to run to my car and drive home, something else kicked in. Somehow, I knew that if I didn’t go back out and finish my presentation it might be the last time that I ever spoke in public. Despite the hell I was living through, that was a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
Driven by sheer willpower, I picked up my chair and put it in the middle of the stage, fearing that I might pass out if I stood. I then carried on with my presentation. A few minutes later I did finally start to settle a bit, completely blocking out in my mind what had just happened. I was back on my feet, and I knew I could get through the remainder of the hour. I managed to finish the presentation, and I received a standing ovation. So, on some level, I’d pulled it off.
Unfortunately, in the years that followed, the ECHOs of that experience were dramatic. I found myself joining the 75 percent of the population who fear public speaking, and although I had to continue doing so for parts of my work, I actively avoided saying yes to anything that wasn’t essential for several years.
The problem was that my nervous system had learned a new pattern. It had coded public speaking as dangerous, and that meant that my stress levels were off the chart at the very thought of it. And of course, the more this happened, the more the pattern was reinforced.
One of the miracles of being human is our ability to make sense of and orient ourselves in an increasingly complex and fast-moving world. In Chapter 6 we talked about our beliefs and how we develop simplifications of the world around us to help us navigate our journey through it. Well, our unconscious learns to repeat these patterns which it believes will keep us safe.
On a neurological level, these beliefs are effectively habits in our thinking that become wired into our brain. Our neurons (brain cells) literally build connections to help certain thinking patterns run more effectively. Like constructing a highway to bypass a city, our brain builds neurological connections to speed up its effectiveness.
In 1949, Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb coined the phrase ‘neurons that fire together, wire together.’ By this he meant that the more we use a certain neural circuit, the stronger than circuit becomes. It’s through this process that we embed certain ways of thinking, which is why just wanting something to be different is often not enough to change it. Put simply, our brain is shaped by the patterns we run, and this process is referred to as neuro (brain) plasticity (shaped).
In the case of my experience of public speaking, in the years following the initial event, my brain continued to code public speaking as dangerous, and so I built a super-fast pathway to trigger a stress response, even if I just anticipated having to speak. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy – the more it happened, the stronger the pathway became.
Being aware of the way our brain creates habits and behaviors and wires itself to reinforce them is important not just for understanding how to initiate change, but also for bringing more compassion to the situation. When it comes to addictions, for example, beyond the often-emotional needs and drivers fueling them, there’s usually a very deeply ingrained habit in the brain and nervous system.
It’s easy for someone who isn’t addicted to nicotine, say, to sit in judgement of those who are struggling to stop smoking. But when someone’s brain is wired to reach for cigarettes as a way to change their emotional state, and it’s also a core program for functioning in their day-to-day life, stopping is that much more difficult. Indeed, there are likely numerous triggers in different situations, all of which lead to the same action – smoking. And when this choice is taken away, in the short term the whole system is thrown out of balance, which is likely yet another trigger to smoke.
Although of course a level of discipline and motivation is required for us to make changes, we also need to remember that one person’s nicotine might be another person’s need for exercise, and that it can take some time and skill to learn to interrupt and rewire our programming. The harsher we become with ourselves, the more likely we are to default to the pattern we’re trying to change. So, finding a way to meet our unhelpful habits with kindness and empathy is often an important part of the change.
The good news is that the science of neuroplasticity clearly demonstrates that our behavioral patterns can be rewired.1,2 Although it can take some diligence, patience, and skill to train a new pattern, if we work to condition ourselves toward a new way of functioning, in time this can become our default.
Furthermore, the research on brain cells is fascinating. Although it’s true that as we age our neurons gradually atrophy, in fact, we have 10 times more brain capacity than was previously thought.3 And what’s most important is that we can create new neural pathways throughout our lives. Indeed, after Albert Einstein died, it was discovered that his parietal lobes (the top, back part of his brain) were 15 percent larger than average. Like a muscle, our brain responds to challenge.
When we actively work to change a behavioral pattern, initially it takes some effort and focus because we’re working against programming that might have been running for decades. Furthermore, the new pattern will feel unfamiliar and even uncomfortable. But in time, we’re building new neural pathways. To build these new pathways, we need to actively work to retrain our nervous system. Just as we do when developing a new skill, we go through a series of stages to install a new behavioral pattern. These are:
At the stage of conscious competence, we’re particularly vulnerable to giving up and feeling as if we don’t have what it takes. But the key is to stay with the pattern to train our nervous system until it becomes the new, unconscious competence. In neuroplasticity terms, we need to wire in the new pathway.
Ultimately, what we need is a way to catch and interrupt our existing unhelpful behavioral patterns. In my online RESET Program® this is something we spend significant time on, bringing in specific techniques we’ve developed within the Therapeutic Coaching® methodology. However, a simple way to introduce some of the key elements is to learn to STOP the existing pattern and create a new way of being:
Let’s explore this four-step process.
We’ve talked a lot already about the importance of awareness and learning to see the patterns we’re running, particularly in Chapter 8, where we explored the five personality patterns. At this point you’re likely sick of me saying ‘If you can see it, you don’t have to be it,’ but the more general awareness we build of the pattern we’re running, the greater the probability we can see it in real time as it happens. By seeing the pattern in real time, we’re able to do something about it.
Once we see the pattern we’re running, we then need to take a pause and shift the state in our nervous system. When a pattern of thinking or behavior has momentum, particularly if our nervous system is triggered, the last thing we might feel like doing is pausing, but it’s also the thing that’s most likely to make the difference.
By switching into a different mode – i.e., moving back to a state of socialization, back into a healing state, we’re breaking the pattern and teaching our nervous system a different response. Taking a pause can be as simple as taking a deep breath.
As you take a pause, the next thing is to open your attention to what’s happening in your physical and emotional bodies. The first step is to ground yourself and connect to the moment. Remember, the sensations and experiences of our physical and emotional bodies are our gateway to the present moment.
The second thing this will do is allow you to start to work with whatever it is that you may have been disconnecting from and trying to escape from. By giving that which needs attention your real attention, things can start to open up and change. We’ll explore this further in the next chapter.
As you do the previous step, you then want to praise yourself for the new direction you’re going in. Apart from creating a softer and more supportive inner landscape, this gentle reinforcement helps to create a new pattern of talking to yourself in a different way.
Praising yourself can be as simple as saying well done, or very good, to yourself. Although you may be tempted to skip this step, please don’t. Indeed, those of us who are the most likely not to give ourselves positive reinforcement are probably the ones who need it the most.
You can do this STOP process proactively – i.e., thinking about upcoming situations and then practicing in your mind responding differently – and you can do it reactively in the moment as you find yourself stuck in a particular thought pattern.
I know that the STOP process sounds very simple, but in many ways, it’s this very simplicity which makes it so effective. When we’re looking to change an existing pattern, if we need to go through a long and complex inner process each time, it won’t have the necessary effect of teaching our nervous system to do something different.
By having a very clear message to change focus, we’re actively rewiring our brain to go in a different direction, and training this as the new pattern. And remember, we’re learning new habits and patterns all the time anyway – the difference here is that we’re doing so deliberately and consciously. Ultimately, you’re learning to train unconscious competence to wire the new pattern into your brain and nervous system.
In terms of catching and interrupting an existing pattern, the speed at which we do so also matters. The longer we let the unhelpful pattern of thinking or behavior run, the stronger that neural pathway becomes. The faster and the more consistently we catch the pattern, interrupt it, and move to a new thought or behavior, the better we are at training this as the new pathway.
Consistently catching our patterns takes a certain amount of discipline and commitment to our healing work. And the more we invest in changing these patterns, the easier it will then be to do so, as we’ll have some momentum with the new neural pathway.
In time, what you’ll likely notice is that this process becomes a natural response for you. Whereas initially you had to work hard to even see the patterns, let alone shift your state, in time the process almost does it itself. Indeed, that’s neuroplasticity in action!
Now, I’m mindful that as you read this you might be thinking, this is all well and good, but how about the deeper emotional healing that we might need as part of our trauma healing? Well, that’s exactly where we’re about to go. But please don’t underestimate the importance of this work in preparation.
By learning to come back to our physical and emotional bodies more consistently, we’re also training our nervous system to have a different homeostasis. In the same way that our nervous system has been unconsciously shaped by years of life experiences, the power of this work is that you can now learn to consciously train a different way of living and feeling in your nervous system. It takes practice and patience to do so, but the possible outcomes have the potential to be life changing.
This was certainly the case for Monica (who you met in Chapter 8) when it came to transforming her depression and anxiety. She found the STOP process particularly helpful. Multiple times throughout the day she’d catch herself rushing to the next activity or ignoring her own needs. As she did, she worked hard to change her default response.
For example, she would See the pattern of pushing beyond her limits and would Take a pause by stopping for a moment and having a few deep breaths. She’d then Open to her physical and emotional bodies by doing a mini-meditation and slowing everything down. Finally, she’d Praise herself by acknowledging the changes she was making.
The more Monica worked to break the habit of her helper and achiever patterns, and the more she calmed down her nervous system using meditation, the more she found her mood transforming. As she committed to cultivating a more sustainable and self-caring way of being, for the first time in many years she found herself feeling real happiness and joy once again.
And, as things really slowed down for Monica, she was also able to open to the deeper healing that really needed to happen in her heart. As we turn our attention toward this next step in your healing journey, we first need to put a spotlight on the ways you’ve learned to not feel your feelings.