Take these three steps to shift your mindset and face your next challenge with calm assurance and high performance.
Do feel afraid before you perform surgery? Before you lead an all-staff presentation? Before you go into a hospital merger negotiation? Doing executive personal branding can convert your understandable fear about such situations into the kind of excitement that can help you work with calm assurance and deliver your highest performance.
Fear Versus Excitement: What’s the Difference?
How much does it matter whether you’re feeling fear or excitement about your work? It turns out it matters quite a bit. While physiologically these emotions are the same, their impact on performance is quite different.
When you experience either of these emotions, your brain directs an increase in your breathing and heart rate, dilates your pupils, and makes your palms sweaty. But as psychiatrist Fritz Perls, M.D., the founder of Gestalt therapy is quoted in ScienceOxygen article as saying, “Fear is excitement without the breath.”
Most of us know from experience that fear can freeze us, taking away our breath and preventing us from doing our best work. In contrast, being excited about doing something can support calmness and excellence.
But how can healthcare leaders successfully convert fear into excitement?
“Individuals often feel anxious in anticipation of tasks such as speaking in public or meeting with a boss,” wrote Alison Wood Brooks, O’Brien associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School in her 2013 Journal of Experimental Psychology article about reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. “I find that an overwhelming majority of people believe trying to calm down is the best way to cope with pre-performance anxiety,” she continued. “However, across several studies involving karaoke singing, public speaking and math performance, I investigate an alternative strategy: reappraising anxiety as excitement. Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better.”
Personal branding can also help leaders convert fear into excitement. Let’s talk more about this in the next section.
Converting Fear to Excitement Using Executive Personal Branding
In the Harvard Business Review article, “How to Overcome Your Fear of the Unknown,” the top suggestion for converting fear to excitement is to “reframe your situation by focusing on the possible upside.” An article from the health service in Scotland suggests that “looking at the evidence” is another great strategy for converting fear into excitement.
In keeping with these ideas, the time-proven Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ personal branding process from Revealing Genius has already helped hundreds of healthcare leaders reframe their mindset into one of excitement and positive anticipation by looking at the evidence already present in their successful careers.
Let me explain this more fully by giving you more detail about each step in the ETA process.
The Three Key Steps: Excavate–Tell–Affirm™
During the excavate step of the ETA process, we offer healthcare leaders a variety of powerful exercises to do.
One of them is to write out their answers to key questions designed to help them unlock their unique genius. Spend a few minutes writing down your answers to the five below. Then consider which seem to resonate most with you.
- If you had a minute to offer three to five bullet points that summarize your core strengths, what would you say?
- What are your proudest accomplishments, and why?
- What’s the big relevant change in the world that you are passionate about?
- What’s your favorite quote or mantra that you live by?
- What’s your extraordinary why?
The self-reflection involved in this step helps to drive away fear of a situation and invite excitement at the opportunity presenting itself. When you know you’ve performed at a high level in the past, it helps you believe you can do so again in the future.
During the second step of the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, tell, you are supported in articulating your positioning statement for your personal brand. This is a clear and concise way to authentically express to yourself and others what you are best at in the world—and why you do it. It’s developed based on everything you’ve taken stock in during the excavate step.
You can start by trying on this formula: I <action word> <beloved avatar/target audience> how to <get the achieve what they want most> so that <they experience a result/transformation.> For example, “I teach healthcare executives how to powerfully articulate what they do and why so they swiftly achieve the impact and fulfillment they desire and deserve in their careers.”
During the third and last step of the executive personal branding process from Revealing Genius, you’ll dive into various ways to affirm your burgeoning brand. A great thing to do during the affirm step of the process is to complete one or more science-based assessments. These tools will underscore what you are coming to understand about who you are and how you approach the great work of your life.
Ready to Try Executive Personal Branding?
Let’s go back to the examples we started with … a doctor getting ready to perform surgery, a top leader preparing for an all-staff presentation and an administrator thinking about the next steps in a merger negotiation.
Now imagine that each of these leaders has been through the Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ personal branding process. Because of that, each has clarity about their successful track record and knows how to articulate what they are best at in the world and why they do what they do. Many will have even used science-based assessments to affirm their brands. I think you can see how going through this process will help them transform any fear they’re experiencing about the task at hand into calm assurance that they can and will do it well … and in service of their larger professional vision.
Ready to join the hundreds of leaders who have already benefitted from going through the time-proven, bespoke and fun Excavate–Tell–Affirm™ process from Revealing Genius? Now is the time to sign up for our complimentary Excavate Your Brand webinar or invest in our newly released online course or 7-Day Summit. We provide 1:1 executive coaching options too.
