← Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People (HSP): Inner Work and Strategies for Coping with Stress, Overwhelm, and Negative Emotions
#295 | Afraid of Freezing Up? How to Get to the Root of Stage Fright as an HSP and Find Freedom Through Inner Work
00:15:59
What if your stage fright isn’t about the crowd—but about trying to be someone you’re not? If you're a highly sensitive person who dreads presentations, public speaking, or even casual sharing, this episode could change everything. Discover how...
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By the end of this episode, you'll discover how to find the most powerful thoughts to question around your stage fright.
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Welcome to Stress Management for Highly Sensitive People, a podcast helping HSPs avoid overwhelm, eliminate stress and find true inner freedom. I'm your host, Todd Smith, a facilitator of the work of Byron Katie, a way to question and reduce stressful thoughts. And you guessed it, I'm a highly sensitive person myself.
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In this episode, you'll discover how a client noticed her stage fright and found a powerful thought to question what she discovered when she did her inner work, and how you can use the same process to find peace in any stressful situation. This is an edition of Breakthrough Mondays, where I share success stories and helpful insights for highly sensitive people on the path towards inner freedom. Have you ever avoided sharing something for fear of being judged? That could mean something small or something big. Maybe you're making a presentation or you're being asked to make a presentation and you're trying to avoid it. Or maybe it's something small, just sharing with a friend, maybe a story that you'd like to share, but you find yourself freezing up or not just not wanting to do it, trying to avoid the situation. This is something that happens to all of us in different degrees depending on the situation. And it's not just HSPs that have this, but it does happen to HSPs. It can happen to us because we're so tuned in to what people are possibly thinking and we're trying to avoid, avoid the discomfort of rejection and those kinds of things. So if this happens to you, the question comes is what can you do? What can you do to begin to work with this and see if there's a way of loosening this particular kind of stress? You can call it stage fright, if you will, but that's kind of a generic name that seems to apply mainly to being on a stage or being in front of people. But it can also be in a smaller, more intimate setting where you're sharing something, you're being vulnerable a little bit, where people are going to see you. So I want to share an experience with a client recently who did some work on a similar kind of situation where she was asked by a business to give a review, to give a video review, and they had kind of a contest in that business to try to get as many people to leave their reviews and share their experiences. And, and she's had a great experience there at the business, so she wanted to share, but some. Something was stopping her. She was, she was feeling guarded. And that was the first kind of clue that there's something going on underneath the surface for her. So what we did. The first thing that I always do when I'm working with clients is to have them share the situation that they're looking at and look at and kind of brainstorm for the stresses that are the stressful thoughts that are running in that moment. Because I love to work with stressful thoughts when I work with the thoughts. When the client works with the thoughts, it can change the experience on the emotional level. So we started by just brainstorming, and she started by saying, well, I was guarded. And so I was like, what are the thoughts that could be going on there? She's like, well, I'm probably gonna freeze up. And this is like a surface level thought. It's a fear I might fail at. This was another one. I'm scared it won't come out right. All these were fears and could be questioned. But we kept brainstorming, and as we kept going, we find there was more. There was a self judgment that popped in. Oh, I'm too guarded. I won't be able to be real. I'm not able to be spontaneous. So this is where she's turning the judgment in on herself, which still is kind of in the surface range of what's causing the guardedness in the first place. But it's a start, and we just keep looking. Then she found a little deeper that she was afraid of criticism. And this is still a fear, but it's a little closer to what's driving it. I don't want to be judged. This is getting much closer now. And then she found, people will think I'm stupid. We're getting really close. Like, this is a. Like a strong fear that is well worth looking at that is causing this guarded kind of feeling. So what we're doing, you can see we're brainstorming, just looking. Any thought connected to this feeling of being guarded, she said, and I wrote them down. And then at one point she realized something, and that was that she was performing. And so this was just a new breakthrough into what was going on in this situation. She realized, I'm performing, I'm trying to perform. I'm afraid I'm going to fail and it's not going to go well. So once that became clear, it became even clearer what the root cause of that is, is the feeling that I have to perform. So that would be a thought that could be well worth questioning. I have to perform in this situation. Giving a testimonial and we kept on looking, though. You know, this is the fun thing about brainstorming. You don't just stop at the first one. There's more. And so she found things like, I want to be able to explain it well, which is more getting into an underlying motive. Like, I want to be able to explain it well so that I can look good. I want it to have it be meaningful. I want to be charismatic. Came up. So there it is. Like, I want to look good. I want to be interesting or to be seen as interesting. I want to be intriguing. These are deep, level motives that are putting a lot of pressure on her and making her feel this guarded and wanting to avoid the situation feeling. Then she got even closer, which is, I need praise. Like, that was sitting there, too. And when you're doing this work, it's almost embarrassing to find what you find there, because these things are not thoughts we tend to think even consciously. But when you look, this is what's driving it sometimes. So finding them can be very revealing and can be very freeing in and of itself, even before you actually question the thoughts. Then she found another deep motive. Like, I want them to say, wow, that was good. Like, that's the vision she was having. Like, wow, that was good. And that would make her feel good. But the problem is it's not. Hasn't even happened. She doesn't know if she can. She doesn't know if she's capable of doing that. And so it caused a lot of stress. They even had a contest. So, you know, another motive. I want to win the contest. I want to be inspiring to others. And this starting to get into identity of who she wants to be, who she's wanting to show up as. I'm the inspiring one. I'm somebody people look to and see, oh, wow, that's. I helped people get involved with this, and it helped them. So this shows you the range of stressful thoughts that can be contained in one moment. That was just noticed by a feeling of being guarded. So when you give yourself time to explore and just keep on brainstorming and write those stressful thoughts down verbatim, you will find a lot of layers here. So what she ended up doing was choosing the thought I have to be inspiring. And that was a thought that she went in and did the work on and questioned. What she found when she did this work is that she was comparing herself to people like TED Talk, people that are, like, giving some kind of professional presentation, inspiring people. That's what she wanted to be. There's like the image in her mind and doesn't have to make sense logically. It's an emotional thing, like, oh, I, I want to be like that. And so if I'm not, if I don't know how to be like that, I don't know what to do. And then start freezing up and then I want to avoid it. And these are all the reactions that started happening. So what she found is she, if she imagined herself without the thought that she has to be inspiring, she could feel a freedom coming in that I could just show up, share my experience. It could be just run of the mill, but it's genuine experience. And it might resonate with some people and they may use it, they may not use it, but it doesn't feel like this big pressurized kind of situation. And so when where she landed was in the turnarounds, something like, I don't have to be inspiring. And she started to see how her own actual experience as a normal person could be the most helpful thing anyway. And on the deepest level, it wasn't even about having a productive session or having these amazing testimonial come out of it, or even a useful testimonial. It was more about her facing her own fears of sharing with, with sharing her experience, being vulnerable. And so instead of trying to leapfrog up to being a TED talk speaker, she could just be with herself where she is. And just the idea of taking part in it started to feel like a, a big step for her, like a big enough step for her, instead of having to be like really good at it when that's not where she's at. So how can you use this same process to find peace yourself in any situation? The key is to start with listening to your stress, observing what is your stress telling you. If you're walking down the street and suddenly something feels stressful to you, what's going on? Look, ask, listen, pay attention. This is your alarm clock saying, there's something off here on the inside. And what is it? What am I thinking? What am I believing in this specific moment? Then when you're in a place where you can do it, sit down either by yourself with pen and paper or on a computer or with a friend who can take notes for you, or a facilitator, and start brainstorming, what are you actually thinking and believing? And you'll find a lot of different layers and a lot of different angles of the stresses that are bothering you. Just listen, write them down, don't judge them, just get them on paper. Then you can Go through and pick the one that feels closest to the stress that you're feeling. And it doesn't have to be the perfect one. Any one of them is a doorway in. But pick one that feels like it's got a little charge on it. And this feels like it's really as close as I can see to what's really bothering me. Then go through the four questions and the turnarounds of the work. I won't get into the details of that, but that is the process that this client used. What I specialize in, where we actually question what we believe, when it's emotional, when it's stressed, and we start to loosen the attachment to that thought, and we start to see that sometimes the opposite of what we were thinking might actually be as true or even truer than what you were originally thinking. And that can bring in a lot of perspective, a lot of freedom, a lot of space. Even if you can't change the outer situation, how you see it starts to change. The feeling I'm left with today is that comparing yourself to even an ideal can make you feel less than. It's not that ideals are bad. It's great to have ideals, and it's great to shoot for things. But when you start comparing or start expecting that you should be there right away, it can add a lot of stress. And it can be a contributing factor to this idea of stage fright. It's something that I'm trying to be, something that I'm not. I'm trying to be ahead of where I am, and that is stressful. In this episode, we looked at how a client noticed her stage fright and found a powerful thought to question. And it was a process. It wasn't just the first thought that came up, although that can work. It was a brainstorming session and noticing which thought felt closest to the stress that she was feeling. Then we looked at what she discovered when she did her inner work, and she saw that she was trying to perform. She was trying to be inspiring. She was trying to be something bigger and better than she was. And whenever you do that, you will start to feel insecure. And then finally, we looked at how you can use the same process to find peace in any stressful situation. And this is what I do and I've been doing for so many years. I love how this simple approach of noticing an emotion in a situation, finding the thought connected to it, and then questioning that thought, how that opens things, how if you stay connected in a meditative way to this inner experience as you do this, it can be very impactful in how you see and experience the situation. So thank you for listening. It's always great to explore with you. This program comes out three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Join me next time for Self Compassion Wednesdays, where we dive deeper into understanding ourselves as highly sensitive people by exploring the unique traits that shape our experience.
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Tired of feeling overwhelmed by everything all at once? Take the HSP stress test@truinnerfreedom.com youm'll also find a link in the show notes.
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The test will reveal your unique sensitivity.
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Profile, including how your nervous system naturally responds to stimulation, emotions, social energy, and more. You'll also gain a clearer picture of how stress might be amplifying that sensitivity. Take the HSP Stress Test now. It's a powerful first step on your journey to true inner freedom.