You know you can do this, so why can't you trust it?

You've probably had moments where you thought: “I'm actually good at this.”

You knew your stuff.

You were comfortable.

You answered questions without thinking too much about it.

You weren't even worried about how you sounded.

You just... spoke.

Then there's another situation:

Same person. Same experience. Same knowledge.

And suddenly, it's different...

you feel the nerves coming on.

you start thinking about what you're saying.

maybe you lose your train of thought.

maybe you can't get the answer out the way you wanted.

And afterward, you're left wondering what happened in there.

Because you know you can do it.

You've done it before.

That's what makes this so fricking frustrating (i'd been there)

If every presentation went badly, you'd probably know what you were dealing with.

But that's not what happens, right?

Sometimes you're completely fine.

Sometimes you're not...

and you don't always know which one it's going to be.. one of my clients described it as Russian Roulette.

One person i spoke with described it this way:

“I don't know whether it's going to hit me or not on any given situation.”

That uncertainty can become a problem on its own.

Because now you're not just thinking about the meeting.

You're also wondering:

“Am i going to be okay this time?”

“What if it happens again?”

“What if i can't get my thoughts out?”

“What if i freeze when they ask me something?”

So you prepare, you rehearse.

You think through questions.

You try to make sure you're ready (we talked about that in the last email).

But there's another piece here.

At some point, you can start losing trust in your ability to handle the moment without all that preparation.

And that's a very different problem from not knowing how to speak.

You already know how.

You've proved that.

The question now becomes:

Why does that ability seem to disappear in certain situations?

What changes between the times when speaking feels easy and the times when it doesn't?

That's worth paying attention to, right?

Because if you can understand what changes, you can start to understand what's actually happening to you.

Instead of just hoping that next time goes well.

-waqas

PS--think about the last 2 times you had to speak.

One went well. The other didn't. Ask yourself: "what was different about those 2 situations?"

(If you found something worth sharing, reply to this email. I read every response :)

Root Before Skill