Three Last-Minute Performance Psychology Tips For A Clutch YC Demo Day Pitch
What We’ve Learned From Olympic Athletes and Professional Musicians About Controlling Performance Nerves
Olympic Skier Mikaela Shiffrin threw up before her first race in the women’s slalom at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
Bill Russell, the NBA Hall of Fame center for the Boston Celtics was also known for puking before many of the team’s biggest games. Red Auerbach, his legendary coach, ironically considered the pre-game hurling a form of good luck.
Adele, Justin Bieber and Rihanna have all been known to do it off-stage and even in the middle of performances.
On Demo Day, you might be feeling the same kind of nerves before and even during your pitch.
At Kick, we’ve been working with a select group of YC founders to help them mentally prep for their presentations. And while there’s plenty of guidance around the content and mechanics of a pitch, most of the founders we’ve worked with say they hadn’t heard about the tools and prescription medications commonplace in performance and sports psychology for delivering clutch performances.
So we’ve decided to share.
With all your practice and iterating on your deck, you’ll be prepared. After all, this is YOUR company. No one knows the information better than you do. So to keep your focus on that information and off of your on-stage jitters, here are three of our favorite tools from sports and performance psychology for delivering a clutch YC Demo Day Pitch.
1. Reframe nervousness into excitement
2. Drop below your head into your body
3. Get into the Zone with the help of Navy Seals
Reframe Nervousness Into Excitement
You’re in front of 400 world-class investors for 2 minutes. You’re supposed to be nervous.
The most common advice is to try to calm down, take deep breaths, don’t overthink things. But this is the absolute wrong thing to do and is frankly terrible advice.
Instead, take a more proactive approach by reframing your energy. You are not only managing your own psychology, you’re going full-on Jedi by mind-tricking yourself. And it’s straightforward:
Don’t try to calm down. Instead, say to yourself (or better, out loud) that you’re EXCITED to get up on stage.
As a startup CEO who’s hired people, you want every interview with a potential candidate to go well so you can do your job and offer them the position. You want your candidate to be excited rather than calm about meeting you.
Investors are the same. Their job is to give money from their LPs to promising startups. That’s why they’re in the Demo Day audience and want you to succeed. You are doing them a favor and helping them. They want you to be excited.
In a 2013 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School found, in four studies “involving karaoke singing, public speaking, and math performance,” that “reappraising anxiety as excitement” led to better performance.
More details from NY Magazine’s The Cut.
Drop Below Your Head Into Your Body
The exciting new field of embodied cognition tells us that humans aren’t just talking heads on sticks. Rather, we’re always thinking with, and attached to, our bodies.
While in your mind you might be focused on delivering the lines you have memorized, the 2-minute time limit of your pitch, and a thousand other thoughts racing through your head, one way to perform confidently is to drop into and notice sensations in your body rather than focus on the ruminations going on up there.
You’ve heard the same old advice about just being confident and trying to speak slowly and clearly. But exactly how do you go about doing that?
In order to connect with the audience, you need to amp up your presence and groundedness on stage. It’s much easier for an investor who’s watching to connect to someone who feels in charge of the stage (i.e., themselves) than a frenetic stage monkey desperate to finish up their pitch.
One mindfulness technique for feeling more grounded is to shift awareness to somewhere in the body. I like to direct my attention to my feet and feel the supportiveness of the literal ground below me. Other people I know will touch their fingertips together since they’re so sensitive to remind themselves to stay present.
This one might seem weird, but squeezing your glutes, which happen to be the largest and strongest muscles in your body, can be a good way to ground yourself.
No matter which part of your body you choose to focus on, shifting your awareness away from your thoughts gives your mind a break from the chaotic and nervous chatter.
Use your body to control your mind.
Get Into The Zone With The Help Of Navy Seals
Right before Navy SEALS jump into combat, they focus on their breath, something they were taught during training.
It seems like a weird thing to do — we think of meditation and breathing exercises as sitting cross-legged on a mat with our eyes closed, tranquil new age music humming softly in the background. It’s a setting as far removed from combat as can be.
But focusing on the breath is a potent way of inducing psychological flow — also known as getting into the zone. When you’re in a flow state, you’re hyperfocused on the present moment and the present action. Things you do seem automatic, time can slow down. You’ve likely experienced it when the stakes are high, and you are fully in the present.
Jazz musicians call this same flow state being “in the pocket,” where the experience becomes spiritual, the music takes control of the musician and the audience is taken along for the ride.
One way to harness this for your audience at Demo Day is a technique the Navy SEALS use called Box Breathing. It’s simple: breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, breath out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Repeat. Gradually increase the number of seconds from 4 to 5 to 6 once you feel comfortable.
By practicing box breathing, you are learning to focus, to divert your attention in the present, and to reduce your fight-or-flight and panic reflexes.
More Info from Mark Divine, former Navy SEAL.
You’ve Done The Work. You’ve Got This.
On Demo Day, it’s absolutely normal to feel nervous. After all, this is a clutch moment for both you and your startup. But don’t forget that you’ve already done the work — Your metrics are solid, you’ve rehearsed your pitch time after time. You’re ready.
So when those performance nerves start to creep up, don’t let them take over. Instead, think back to these three performance psychology tips and confidently deliver your clutch demo day pitch.
Nerves are normal, but they don’t have to hold you back.
Kick helps smart, capable, well-prepared people like you thrive during demanding situations. We combine performance psychology, prescription medications and a mobile community to help you confront your fears and perform confidently.
Learn more at www.kickhealth.co
