What if we gently explored Performance Anxiety, not as a problem to fix, but as a tangled field we can notice, name, and breathe with, in ourselves and/or our partners, team members, children, thinkers?
This is a Socratic conversation with my future self; you’re welcome to take the “I” place and replace the thoughts with your own!
What happens when a feeling takes hold? What does the promise of its detachment look like?
Future Self: “What can you learn when you lean into curiosity and compassion, and when you loosen the grip of urgency and competition…?”
My Now-Self: ”The promise of detachment is calling me to…
… discover what becomes possible when I attune rather than perform or submit to limiting assumptions
… think with ease, not line up my thoughts obediently like schoolchildren waiting for marks
… make friends with you, future self, the person I’ll become when the tension goes
… accept that my performance anxiety is not a problem to fix
Future Self: “If it is not a problem to fix, what does this idea of Performance Anxiety allow you to notice and shape instead?
And… How does this question land in your body right now?
My Now Self: “It’s like some shy creatures are willing to emerge from the underbrush, to be in relationship with me, and they move at different paces…”
Future Self: “Hmm… Let them come… When you’re looking back on past paths of attunement, what do these creatures help you rediscover?”
My Now Self: “I remember the conditions that helped my anxiety soften…
Sometimes, my thoughts relax only when someone sits with me, warmly, with all their attention and without rushing. Then the jaw of performance quietly unclenches.
When I feel genuinely held, my “perform, produce, impress” reflex starts to dissolve. Grace can come into the room and we become this thinking environment.
Attention shifts from competition to compassion, from vigilance to curiosity.
Activation replaces agitation.
Movement, for instance, even a tiny breath, starts to soothe.
Ambiguity stops being a threat and turns into a kind of mossy shelter.
In these conditions, I surrender lightly, whispering: “I can have a go… imperfect, unfinished, alive.
Also, my journaling giggles from the sidelines like, “Don’t forget me, I can help too!”.
Capturing a few notes before or after a conversation softens the tensions.”
Will I listen to the belly-knots?
Imagine performance anxiety is a knot with a message curled inside.
I can’t treat nervous knots as intruders because they’re part of the ecosystem: roots twisted around old stories, saplings bending toward light they weren’t allowed to reach.
Future Self: “What are the knots whispering, then?
What strength is asking to be acknowledged gently, without forcing?
Where is your energy, and where does it want to go when the watchers disappear?”
My Now Self: “Great questions… I have so many ideas gagging to come out and am afraid people will think I am waffling.
My knot is not saying “You’re talking too much”, instead it says: “I’m afraid my way of knowing — rhythmic, relational, story-rich — will be misinterpreted through people’s hunger for speed, being to the point, and utility.”
My energy wants to say: Let whatever arises be a thread, not a verdict. My way of speaking is a portal into a poetic world, full of connections, not a shopping list with an end goal”
My knot becomes a guide: it doesn’t say “speak less,” but “sense first.”
I just need one first grounding sentence. Just one.
I remember, a few weeks ago, a colleague reminded us:
When you want to write and are afraid of the readers… write anyway.
Write for your first reader, which is always you. The noise and the tension will dissipate.
The other readers will arrive later, when things are quiet.”
Also… I shift and focus on the connection instead
Instead of: “What should I do? What should I say? How should I behave?”
I invite myself to the space in-between: ”Who can we be when we are together?”
This melts the “shoulds” into possibilities.
It de-centres performance and re-centres presence.
I bring in life and companionship
I realise I can ask for help, bringing in companions, practices, rituals, cushions, time, and breathing.
The place where performance anxiety arises is often part of the story, not a malfunction.
So when I create a space in the place (my body or the room), it whispers:
“You matter. You are welcome as you are. You do not need to audition for belonging.”
And in that kind of space, imperfect offerings don’t feel like failures. They are more like a draft. A beautifully imperfect draft.
Nothing is finished.
Everything is becoming.
And I know now that I ship things not because they are polished, but because they are alive.
I become a Thinking Environment
I notice that when I feel fully received, something in me unclenches
And I begin to trust myself again.
Performance dissolves into presence.
As a thinker, I become a Thinking Environment unto myself, in the presence of my own soft witness, my own spacious breath.
This is when the “anxiety” knot, once tangled, begins to dissolve and compost.
Not because I solved it, but because I held it long enough for it to remember its original shape.
And breathe.
So if you’ve been tied in performance anxiety at times yourself, may I ask you the same question?
What does this idea of Performance Anxiety allow you to notice and shape, instead of being a problem to fix?
How does this question land in your body right now?
And if you knew they are accessible to you, what conditions allow your “performance anxiety knots” to untangle with more ease?
—-
Hi, I’m Servane🫀! Learning with me is not about rushing to an end.
It is stepping onto a different, slower train,
where conflicts soften into conversations,
imagination rehearses futures not yet born,
and thinking stretches into new shapes.
We move at the speed of trust.
The destination is uncertain.
The journey is the work.
And the work is what transforms.
Because the horizon is always this:
a world where planet and life are valued,
and through our interactions
we whisper to one another: you matter
