I was instructing the mid-career executives on “Persuasion and Influence” recently at Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education, and I was encouraging them to dive deep and ask the questions that mattered to them and their own personal development.  No one asked about performance anxiety, AKA stage fright. I thought, “hmmm, they’re either in denial or this is a singularly confident bunch of executives.”  Later on that day, in a slightly different context, I asked them more directly, “how many of you suffer from nerves occasionally?”

All the hands went up.

It’s universal.  Great actors, politicians, you, and me – and even Paul McCartney, get stage fright at different times and at different levels of panic and for different reasons.  But that primal fear, of standing up in front of a crowd, and having to hold forth, is near-universal.

From time to time, I write on the subject – how to cope with the feeling of anxiety, or nerves, various techniques for mitigating the extremes, mantras to chant to empower oneself to motor through the feelings, and so on.

Here’s the good news:  they all work.  You have to find the right mix for you, but there is indeed a mix that will work.

Here’s the bad news:  you actually have to do them.  And long before you are facing the crowd.  Each of the techniques, including breathing, relaxation and meditation, mantras and mental imaging – all of it only works if you do the work, and well in advance.

Now here’s a study that gives you a shortcut to all this effort.  The study, from 2013, found that saying 3 simple words to yourself works better than trying to calm yourself down.  Half the people in this study were instructed to say “I am calm” before giving a speech, and the other half were instructed to say “I am excited.”

That’s it.  Just say, “I am excited” before you start.

The excited people were “more persuasive, competent, confident and persistent.”  That last word, ‘persistent’, caught my eye.  It turns out that the excited folks spoke for longer than the calm people.  Were they enjoying themselves more?  Apparently. More research is required!

But the chief takeaway here is that it may be better to ride the wave of your excitement rather than trying to damp down your feelings.  As Obi-Wan Kenobi (and indeed, all the other Jedi masters) was wont to say, “Trust your feelings.  Go with the force.”  Or sometimes, “Let the force be with you.”

This coincides with the advice I used to give my undergraduates at Princeton, when I taught public speaking there, who readily embraced the connection between nerves and energy.  At 20 years of age, they were keen to go get the world, and so they frequently fastened on a mantra like “I am up for this! I am ready!” when we did the mantra work.  They tended to eschew the calmer mantras.  I attributed it to youthful enthusiasm, but now it’s clear that they were on to something.  When adrenaline is coursing through your system, ride the wave of energy and use that power to give an outstanding speech.

As I said earlier this year, my personal favorite way to handle the public speaking chore is to embrace the symptoms that adrenaline produces and tell yourself that it means that you’re about to do something exciting, and that your body is now geared up to do it. In other words, re-frame the symptoms from negative nerves to positive excitement.

Then, you’ll not only be more able to cope with the nerves, but you might actually have fun doing it.