This is for anyone who gets nervous speaking in front of people.
I’ve spoken in front of thousands of people — at NASA, Harvard Business School, the United Nations — and yet, I get nervous, every single time. Like, really nervous.
Without fail, before I go on, my heart rate climbs, my chest tightens, and some part of my brain starts running through everything that could go wrong.
For a long time, I treated that as a problem to solve. Something to push through, talk myself out of, or hide.
What I’ve learned since then has actually changed the experience entirely, not by making the nerves go away, but by understanding what they actually are.
En route to speak at a conference for women in fresh produce (so cool, right?!)
Anxiety is energy that hasn’t been harnessed yet.
Physiologically, anxiety and excitement are nearly identical. Same elevated heart rate. Same heightened alertness. Same energy moving through your body looking for somewhere to go.
The difference isn’t what’s happening inside you. It’s the story you tell yourself about it.
Which means the goal isn’t to eliminate the nerves. It’s to convert them. I do this in two steps.
Step #1: Redirect the spiral
When anxiety takes hold, it tends to feed on “what ifs.” What if I forget what I was going to say. What if I lose the room. What if I’m not ready.
The best way out of a spiral isn’t to argue with it, it’s to give your attention somewhere else to go. For me, that means shifting from “What if” to “What I get.”
Before a talk, I ask myself: what do I actually get from being here?
In the case of the event I spoke at this week, the answer was: the chance to help women heal their relationship with money. The opportunity to practice a new presentation I’ve been developing. The simple gift of being in a room with real people, doing work that matters to me.
That’s not toxic positivity. It’s a genuine redirect away from threat, toward meaning.
Step #2: Work with the body, not just the mind
Thought-shifting helps. But it’s usually not enough on its own, because anxiety doesn’t live only in your thoughts. It lives in your body. And if you don’t address it there, it stays stuck, often showing up as tension in your shoulders, shallowness in your breath, a kind of buzzing that won’t settle.
Here’s the practice I use:
I visualize myself on stage feeling what I want to feel: grounded, open, present, excited. And then I go looking for that feeling in my body. What does grounded excitement actually feel like in my chest? My arms? My shoulders?
Once I’ve located it, I find where the anxious energy is sitting — the tightness, the flutter, wherever it lives — and I imagine the energy I want to be in slowly melting it away. Part by part.
It sounds woo-woo. I know. But it’s grounded in something real: the nervous system responds to imagery. You can’t think your way into a regulated state, but you can feel your way there. Visualization that’s anchored in somatic sensation is one of the most effective ways I know to shift your physiology before a high-stakes moment.
Your turn
Take a few minutes with these before your next high-stakes moment:
Notice: Where does anxiety tend to show up in your body? Is it your chest, your throat, your stomach? Get specific: the more precisely you can locate it, the more effectively you can work with it.
Reframe: The next time you feel the nerves arrive, ask yourself: what do I actually get from being here? Not what could go wrong: what is genuinely available to you in this moment?
Practice: Before something that matters — a presentation, a difficult conversation, a salary negotiation — try the visualization. Find the feeling you want to be in. Locate it in your body. Then find where the anxiety is sitting, and let the two meet.
You don’t have to do this perfectly. You just have to do it before your brain talks you out of it.
Remember this
The nerves aren’t a signal that something is wrong with you. They’re a signal that something matters to you. That’s worth something.
The goal was never to become someone who doesn’t feel afraid. It’s to become someone who knows what to do with it when it shows up.
Reply and tell me: What’s the “performance” you’re preparing for right now? What’s the story you’re telling yourself and how can we look at it differently?
Now go get paid.
x Claire
P.S. Need a high-impact speaker who will bring the ah-ha’s AND the action steps? Learn more about my areas of focus here.
Do You Want a Career (and Life) That Feels Better Than “Fine”?
You’ve built a real career. You’ve put in the years, earned the title (or something close to it), and on paper, things look… fine. Maybe even good. But something’s off. If you’ve been feeling the itch to energize your career, I’d love to tell you about my 90-Day Coaching Program: Clarity, Confidence, and Compensation. It’s private, it’s intensive, and it works:
Learn more here and if you’re intrigued, book a free 20-minute call to see if we’d be a good fit together.
Stop Waiting to Get Picked to Get Paid: How to Turn Your Expertise Into an Offer
Every Sunday on Substack, I share a recording of a real coaching session plus a post of key insights you can apply to your own life.
In my latest Substack, I coached a woman I’ll call Chloe: two layoffs in one year, a dormant business idea she’d quietly set down after the second hit, and a belief system that had convinced her nobody would pay her. On the surface, it looked like a confidence problem. It wasn’t.
Underneath it was a nervous system still in threat mode — one that was actively lying to her about her own competence. Until we addressed that, no strategy was going to stick. But once we did, what she could see clearly was this: she had already built something. She just needed to pick it back up.
Key takeaways include:
Why “I don’t have enough experience” is almost never a fact — and how to tell the difference between a real obstacle and a story your nervous system invented to keep you safe
The reframe that changes everything about how you think about competing with people who seem more credentialed than you
Why doing nothing but applying to jobs is one of the least effective things you can do for your confidence — and what to do instead
How to build and publish a website for your idea in under 30 minutes, with no developer and no budget
