Performance Anxiety

Performance anxiety is anxiety/fear one experiences before or during any kind of performance. Performance anxiety appears to be experienced by several people but some experience it more intensely and more frequently than others. Performance anxiety can be a problem if you think its the primary reason you aren’t performing at a level you realistically think you can be operating at. Comments like, “I wasn’t myself that time” or “he/she wasn’t their self” are another way to describe the negative impact of performance anxiety. There is a difference between being incredibly anxious before a performance and being alert, energetic, a focused. Reducing performance anxiety allows you to experience more of the latter.

It’s my view that performing one’s best (what I will sometimes call “high performance” and what the field of psychology calls sport and performance psychology) is a result of exercising the mental discipline to eliminate emotion from possible outcomes, free oneself from having to fulfill outside and internal expectations, and apply absolute focus to completing whatever objective or task is at hand. I’d argue that consistent high performance requires the mental skills to handle mistakes during a performance in an unemotional manner to eliminate emotions from negatively impacting performance. I’d like to note that performing your best optimizes the chances that you’ll get the outcomes that you want but won’t guarantee it—cultivating an outcome-independent mindset will enable you to handle this uncertainty with limited emotional pain.

My fascination with high-performance psychology began in 2017 after I felt extremely nervous during one of my first work presentations on a new team. I want to understand what prevents humans from performing their best at all times. I use the knowledge acquired from this research to help myself and others who want to perform their best moment to moment. 

We’ll work to find the beliefs and thinking patterns that you may not be consciously aware of that are impacting your performances. Once identified, you’ll have the choice to modify them if you’d like and we can also work on adopting a new way of thinking that’ll help increase your ability to access your best performance time and time again. 

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Sport and performance psychology focuses….”on identifying and applying psychological principles that facilitate peak sport performance, enhance people’s participation in physical activities and help athletes achieve optimal human performance.”

American Psychological Association