One of the biggest challenges, when it comes to performance activities, is learning to manage the emotions that arise around them. Whether it is public speaking, playing sport, a work activity, or artistic performance, aside from the challenge of performing and functioning well, we are also faced with the difficulty of mastering the situation emotionally.
The problem is that the pressure we feel comes from the sense that we must perform to a high level in order to succeed. Whether it is fear of social judgement or the desire for peer approval, we create a lot of pressure in our inflexible stance toward the situation by demanding of ourselves that we perform optimally. It is all on us. We must take the actions required to make the situation happen.
This is good in some ways. It endows us with a sense of agency and control: we can make things happen; it is within our power to control the outcome. But putting it all on our heads can also create a debilitating sense of pressure in which performance suffers.
The ‘responsibility transfer’ is a good way to ease this pressure and lighten the load on our shoulders. Essentially, it involves taking a moment to displace responsibility from ourselves onto something else. If we knew that something else was taking care of the process and ensuring a positive outcome, wouldn’t we be able to relax into the situation a lot more?
Before a challenging or stressful situation in which you need to perform or ‘deliver’ try this:
Take a moment to imagine some thing or some process outside of yourself – it could be nature, some imagined benevolent force, a process, or a spiritual entity – it doesn’t really matter, as long as it is something in which you can gain a sense of trust. Then, you simply visualise in your minds eye passing control of the situation you are worrying about, over to this entity, trusting that all will be taken care of and relax into the situation with this knowing.
We can do this by picturing a physical weight – a metaphorical imagining of the mental-emotional strain we are under – and then consciously lifting it off our shoulders, before passing it onto the benevolent entity. Then take a moment to register the sense of lightness and freedom that comes with letting go of this onus and stress. The aim here is to let go of responsibility, in our imagination, and hence perhaps being able to let go of the pressure that comes with it.
Once the pressure has been taken off us in this way and we have cultivated a sense of trust and faith that the outcome will be taken care of, we can relax more which will ultimately help us perform better.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t prepare or plan for the task at hand. We train and prepare ourselves as best we can and then let go of counter-productive worry and rumination by letting go of control safe in the knowledge that the outcome is being taken care of.