Anxiety

"Each time, I imagine it going perfectly. If negative thoughts creep in, I push them out of my head and start over again."

-Darrin Prescott

Here is the problem with all people who are prone to get nervous, myself included- we let our fear overtake our perfectly able minds and let ourselves lose. The few situations in which I have grievously let myself down are memories that are still slightly tender in my mind, as it probably is for anyone. It’s an almost out of body experience, when your nerves take over. You can hear yourself doing badly, and you want to stop, ask for another try, do it the way you know you can, but it’s like you’re incapable of controlling your actions.

You see, since I’m incapable of imagining my brain as tissues and neurons, I imagine it as a small factory, run by cheerful workers who each have vital tasks to keep me running through the day. There are those who sit infront of screens and input the words that come out of my mouth, others that press buttons whenever I’m supposed to feel hot or whenever I’m supposed to feel chilly. And I extend this metaphor to my failures, as days when the factory breaks down. ‘There’s been a freak accident in the word inputting department!’, I will hear someone exclaim on the day of a very important recital, ‘there are no survivors!’. Frantic factory workers running around trying to recover what is left out of a completely wrecked system. The buttons are incomprehensible, the controllers, nothing but charred bones.

And then, when I go infront of an audience, and glance at the collective stares, I positively freeze. How unreliable of the factory workers. Next time on, I should really try to enforce that no-smoking inside office policy.

Deep and intelligent metaphors aside, psychologists say that visualization can play a key role in doing what you want to successfully. Darrin Prescott, who has coordinated and performed stunts in commercials and movies such as Moneyball, Drive, and Gone, says he pictures the entire scenario in fine detail at least 20 times from beginning to end.

Each time, I imagine it going perfectly. If negative thoughts creep in, I push them out of my head and start over again.

In his field of expertise, I believe there is very little room for error. It makes humiliating yourself infront of several people far less detestable. And while I do, on occasion try and do this before something important, I have never really done it in fine detail, nor have the outcomes ever really been positive. If you walk into a room for a job interview having visualized exactly how it will happen, I suppose any experience, even imaginary, will help make you do a better job.