How to Hack Confidence Before a Pitch

Alright, humans, we're diving headfirst into the wild world of confidence – not the fluffy, feel-good kind that self-help gurus and ‘business leaders’ tell you about. But the science-backed, neuron-firing kind. 

The headline: confidence is something you do - it’s not something you have. 

Confidence is our brain’s very own "Pavlov's dog”. It's a conditioning, a mindset that can be turned on and turned off at will by altering our behaviour. Confidence is something we act out. But in moments of high ‘confidence’, on the inside, ‘confident-looking’ people are typically a big blubbering ball of insecurity-flavoured jelly.

Here’s why. 

People ‘feel’ confident when two sets of neurotransmitters are in harmony - the fight & flight mechanism (norepinephrine & adrenaline) and the “I’m a winner!” mechanism (dopamine & serotonin). These chemicals are ‘on-off’ switches to some of the ‘microcomputers’ that have evolved over millions of years in our brains. For example, the ‘computer’ that triggers our experience of fear is the amygdala. For ‘winning’ - or our ‘reward mechanism - it’s our nucleus accumbens. Fancy Latin words for ‘micro brain’, I imagine. When you are rewarded sufficiently with dopamine after managing/overcoming your fear, you feel what people call ‘confidence’. And mastering dear then becomes addictive - aka confidence. 

But here’s the hack… these neurotransmitters can be triggered by our behaviours. First postulated in the early 1900’s by William James (who I also named my second kid after), the ‘As If” principle suggests that individuals can change their feelings to a given stimuli by acting "as if" they already possess the desired emotions they are aiming for. Want to feel happy? Put a pencil in your mouth between your teeth and smile. Want to feel excited? Run on the spot to get your heart rate up while laughing. The belief that “you see a bear in the woods, feel scared, then run” is false. It’s actually… “you see a bear, run, then feel scared because you are running”. Hundreds of scientific studies have confirmed this (Wiseman et al.). They prove you can ‘reprogram’ your mindset/feelings in any given situation by acting out the behaviour associated to the feelings you want - including confidence. And the added bonus, if you do it a lot, because of dopamine it becomes addictive. 

Here’s how I use the As If principle to feel confident before pitching. Believe it or not, I too am an introvert with barrels of insecure jelly inside.. 

Tip 1) Pace for 10 minutes. Hold yourself upright, breathe slowly and deeply, whisper your pitch slowly, walk calmly, open your palms, blink slowly, etc. These are behaviours of mastery and activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Work by Sheldrake in 2016 and Haredasht in 2023 demonstrated that this triggers ‘winning’ neurotransmitters, and when the balance of adrenaline and serotonin is just right, dopamine hits, making you feel good. The more you do this, regardless of the topic, the more habitual these neurotransmitters activate. 

Tip 2) Eat chocolate before you pitch. As demonstrated by Cone in 2014 and Baladli in 2011, this triggers dopamine. If you do this before something scary, you begin to associate ‘winning’ with nervousness. While not as good as Tip 1 for the long term, it can kickstart the process in a pinch (assuming you don’t have a wild glucose mechanism!)

Tip 3) Imagine everyone is naked. As strange as this sounds, this technique based on research by Christiansen in 2011 is taught to those in secret services when confronted by aggressors. By imagining people naked, you trigger many neurotransmitters that are associated with bonding. This, in turn, creates greater harmony between your fight and flight chems and your reward chems - cutting through the panic.

While these are not foolproof, they are reliable. I use them regularly. So the next time you pitch me, stand up straight, eat some chocolate and imagine me naked. You’ll do just fine.

Written by legendary Chris Howard 

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