Anxiety . . . What is it Good For? An Excerpt from Pitch Like Hollywood

I had the privilege of reviewing an advance copy of Pitch Like Hollywood: What You Can Learn from the High-Stakes Film Industry by Peter Desberg and Jeffrey Davis. The following is an excerpt from (pp. 109-115, McGraw Hill, February 2022).

The reason anxiety feels so horrible when you’re pitching is simple: You haven’t read the manual. You’re not using it the way it’s  evolved since a saber-toothed tiger first chased Homo erectus.

Picture an out-of-shape college history professor. The professor and his wife were good friends with a husband-and-wife couple in their apartment complex. One night, the husband, who had a bit too much to drink, accused the professor of having an affair with his wife. Worse still, this neighbor was big, strong, and, to our professor’s horror, a competitive distance runner. Not the combination you want to have chasing you, screaming he’s going  to kill you. Our out-of-shape historian managed to outrun him solely because of his adrenaline-infused energy.

The professor read the manual and used anxiety correctly. Anxiety is referred to as the “flight-or-fight” response. Fighting  and fleeing are two very sensible strategies if you’re about to be attacked by an athletic, jealous neighbor.

Your body and brain are designed to help you survive such dangerous situations. Your heart pumps faster, pushing blood to your limbs. Your limbs are necessary if you are fighting or flighting. This also results in less blood around your skin so that if you  get cut or scraped, you won’t bleed profusely.

Unfortunately, if you feel like Peter giving his humor lecture  to an ultra-conservative audience, panic will pulsate through your  mind and body while you’re pitching. The anxiety designed to help keep you alive in a life-or-death situation can instead make you dizzy, confused, and queasy.

When you’re stressed while running or fighting, blood carries  oxygen toward your limbs and away from your head. That’s useful for running, but if you’re pitching, this may leave you feeling dizzy and confused. As blood flows toward your limbs, away from your stomach, you may feel queasy. While blood is flowing away from your skin, it can make your hands and feet feel clammy. You might also feel some numbness in your extremities. Your lungs pump harder to help you run faster or fight harder, but while you’re pitching, you may notice a panicky out-of-breath feeling with tightness in your chest.

Anxiety causes your mind to be unfocused and your body to misbehave. That’s not what anxiety was designed to do.

Going Under the Hood

Anxiety serves as a warning to your brain that there’s a problem.

The limbic system is the emotional center of your brain. It’s sometimes referred to as the “reptile” or “lizard” brain. It’s also called the “old” brain because its evolutionary age predates your  neocortex, which is much more recent and where you do your fancier thinking. There is a small center in the limbic system called the amygdala that’s responsible for detecting and remembering fear.

When the amygdala picks up a signal that something’s wrong, it sets off the Sympathetic Nervous System. A variety of chemicals surge through your brain and body causing you to feel all the    symptoms of anxiety we mentioned above. This happens very fast. At the same time, a slower system is triggered, and a message is sent to your neocortex so you can evaluate what’s going on.

If the threat isn’t serious, your brain sends an all-clear signal. Within minutes, you will begin to calm down. If the situation is dire, you can quickly begin to form a plan for how to best deal with it.

Because we’re discussing fear and how it creates anxiety, it’s  important to understand the function of the amygdala. It forms a memory of the fear, but the memory is unconscious. Psychologists note that even after a fear has been dealt with, it can resurface from the right trigger. Walking into a room and seeing an obvious   cue like a lectern to something as trivial as a bottle of water may be enough to unlock a connection, an associated memory stored in the amygdala.

Why Is Pitching So Hard?

Why should you be worried about walking into a room, telling your story to one or more strangers who you know can decide whether your life will be a success or a failure? Fortunately, you are armed with the information that they are more likely to say no. The standing joke in Hollywood today is, “It’s hard to find someone who has the power to say maybe.”

When you present your project, you’re aware these people know a lot about running a business, creating movies and TV, or providing venture capital. They’re listening to you as they try to determine how much money or market share your work might generate. And as they’re listening, you’re feeling a kind of anxiety  we call “Pitch Panic.”

The key to understanding Pitch Panic is pressure. Pressure situations are defined by three principles. When you’re under pressure, (1) the consequences of the outcome are important to you, (2) the outcome of the pressureful event is uncertain, and (3) you’re responsible for the outcome and will be judged for it.

Even being looked at makes most people uncomfortable. There’s evidence that just being stared at directly is more unnerving than being looked at indirectly. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies show that being stared at directly stimulates the amygdala. This is enough to make you feel anxious.

It’s All in Your Head, but What Part?

 There are two kinds of knowledge. Both can be affected by Pitch Panic. Declarative knowledge is information you’ve memorized and can recite when called upon. It’s moderately straightforward. Think about how many times you’ve forgotten a word or a piece of information that was right on the tip of your tongue. Add additional stress that competes with your other mental processes, and you can probably remember lots of times this has happened to you. The other type of knowledge is more complicated. Procedural knowledge, like its name, involves learning how to do things. The reason why it’s more complicated is that the way you learn it is different from the way you use the knowledge once it’s learned. While you’re learning it, it’s generally a slower process because you have to think about every step. Once you have it, it becomes automatic.

You haven’t thought about how to walk down a flight of stairs     since you were a little kid. It’s an automatic procedural skill. Let’s create a scenario: It’s Easter Sunday, and you and your mother are standing at the open china cabinet. Your mother hands you a stack of dishes and asks you to take them down to the kitchen carefully because they’re irreplaceable.

Your stair-stepping will be slow, uncomfortable, and awkward. You’re suddenly attempting to guide yourself through movements that have been automatic for a long time. You haven’t had to break down the procedure of walking down stairs since you first learned it as a small child.

Under the right circumstances, you can turn the simplest things you know into a highly challenging experience by trying to think about them. Stress can play a big role making you think about automatic processes, leaving you feeling unnerved. If you’ve ever played a musical instrument and had the pleasure of being asked to perform, this might bring back some painful memories. Performing under pressure in a sport can offer you the same level of discomfort.

Does Everybody Get Pitch Panic?

When it comes to Pitch Panic, are there “haves” and “have-nots?” Some people seem to go through life unphased by any sort of performing they have to do in public, and others seem handcuffed by the experience no matter how small the occasion. Pitch Panic is situational. Under the right circumstances, we can all experience it. Peter and a colleague performed an experiment in their university classes. On the first day of class, they had students seated in a circle and recorded the seating order. They had each student introduce himself or herself to the group. Then they asked each student to write down as many of those names as he or she could remember. Almost every student forgot two specific names. The students forgot the name of the student introduced just before them and the student introduced just after them. Why? Because that’s when their anxiety was at its peak.

Consider what distinguished cellist Pablo Casals said about performing: “It’s amazing how much of a difference 50 feet can make in your playing.” Sitting on his bench in his dressing room before a concert warming up on his cello, he was comfortable and calm. Then the stagehands moved his cello and his bench 50 feet, and everything changed. Fifty feet was the distance between his dressing room and center stage in a large, packed concert hall.

But What About if You’re Smart?

Since you live in a world of ideas, you might ask if smart people  are more affected by Pitch Panic. Since you’re already used to surprises, you may have already guessed that, yes, they are affected even more than smartless people.

A group of college students were given a pretest in math as well as a bunch of measures to see how they ranked intellectually. You’ll have to stifle your yawn when we tell you that the higher-ranked students did better on the math tests than the other students when there was no pressure.

But when the experimenters raised the pressure substantially, the results changed for the better students. While the lower-ranked students performed almost the same as when they took the test without pressure, the brighter students got much lower scores than when there was no pressure. Their performance was now the same as that of the lower intellectually ranked students.

When brighter students do math problems, they use more complex strategies. These strategies take up a lot of mental horse power, or Working Memory. When anxiety enters the picture, some of their Working Memory is used up by worry; they don’t have enough mental power left for complex strategies, and so their work is done in a similar way to how the lower-ranked students do their work.

In a similar study, psychologists gave students a graphics-based IQ test. Group A was told that the test measured intelligence and used the type of reasoning that predicted success in math and science. This put a lot of pressure on these students because it would predict their chances of success in their chosen fields. Group B was told it was being given a perception and attention task. There was no pressure on this group at all. The students who didn’t feel pressured outperformed the group that was placed under stress. Even though the students in Group A were just as smart, the anxiety tied up their Working Memories and made it more difficult to process test items as they got more difficult.

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. When you’re fighting for your life, all your resources should be in the service of your physical survival. It’s just too bad that this type of fear often happens in someone’s office during a pitch.

Pitch Like Hollywood is now available on all major retailers.

Inside tips on how to craft pitches that seal the deal―no matter what industry you work in―and banish presentation anxiety forever

From impromptu elevator pitches to full-board presentations, sales and marketing professionals face an “audience” daily―often with make-or-break consequences. As the person delivering the performance, you need to know you have a great script and are able to maintain composure throughout.

To help you perfect both pitch and performance, there are no better coaches than clinical psychologist Peter Desberg and writer/producer Jeffrey Davis. With experience and insights from both the film industry and the corporate world, they understand the pitch process.

In Pitch Like Hollywood, they show you how to up your game substantially ―no matter what business you’re in―by incorporating elements of a classic Hollywood pitch: driving emotion, piquing curiosity, and ultimately winning over decision makers with powerful persuasion and performance. They take you on an insider’s tour of the entire process, from defining the fundamentals to designing effective presentation strategies to overcoming stage fright.

With chapters that include Persuasion Boot Camp, The Pitch Panic Cycle, and Creating the Pitch II (The Sequel), Pitch Like Hollywood provides a front-row seat in a master class on giving great performances for any audience, every time―at board meetings, sales calls, and whenever else you want to make a case to get the results you want.