我也有话要说（四十）：如何克服紧张？

I Have Something to Say Too (40): How to Overcome Nervousness

> By Li Xiaolai · 2011-05-02 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20110903090006/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/10554.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Nobody wants to be nervous on stage; nobody wants to be that embarrassed.

But most novices are just nervous, and feel they can't control it.

Most of the experts' advice doesn't work: get familiar with the venue, get familiar with the audience, get familiar with your script, relax... there's even advice like this: don't apologize [[1](#footnote_0_10554 "This is advice that looks reasonable but is actually absurd: not apologizing when you've made a mistake is shameful; the really useful advice is: avoid making mistakes through careful preparation.")].

In fact, the root reason novices are nervous is that they don't realize that the one they're trying to "play" on stage isn't actually themselves, but another person they've imagined.

That person who can quote widely on stage, handle weighty things with ease and perform freely was imagined by the novice himself, and isn't his real self.

And so even the novice himself actually knows he can't—absolutely can't—be the way he imagines himself... How could he not be nervous? More than nervous... it's downright fear: fear of giving himself away, fear of others seeing through him... Enormous fear leaves a person's cerebral cortex short of enough energy to run... What happens next, everyone knows.

This is the most fundamental reason. If you don't think this through, there's no way not to be nervous. Once you've thought it through, you can take the right actions and steps, and there's no need to be nervous.

The really useful advice is: never mind being "brilliant"; focus on being "real."

For every sentence you're going to say, ask yourself:

- Is this me?
- Are these my own words?
- Is this something I myself did or thought?
- Is this something I myself really believe one hundred percent?

Don't look down on these questions for being so simple; they're immensely important. Because these simple questions will weed the nonsense out of your head—what you say is true, what you talk about is fact, your conclusions are what you yourself truly believe, your reasons are ones you've carefully weighed... Because everything is real, you carry no burden; you don't need to deliberately care how others see you, because in fact the audience, like you, cares more about the facts and not necessarily about the speaker.

The vast majority of the time, the facts are brilliant—if you yourself are a brilliant person. The work and life of ordinary people of course aren't very brilliant, but this is also ordinary people's motivation to work hard and live with enthusiasm—to make themselves brilliant through effort, diligence, patience and persistence.

Jobs's talks are of course brilliant, but that's not only because his Keynotes are well made, nor only because of his carefully considered choice of words, still less because he's handsome—it's entirely because he's a brilliant person; his work, his pursuits, his achievements, and everything happening to him are all, for the audience, dazzlingly brilliant.

Learning to give talks is much harder than learning to write. When writing an article, we have to think it through first before we can write it well—people with muddled minds can't write truly beautiful articles. So for most people, taking any number of writing courses is useless. Whether a talk is brilliant often depends on whether the speaker's own life is brilliant—unfortunately, this is actually something the vast majority of people can never achieve in their whole lives...

But then how do those mediocre teachers in schools manage to speak in public without being nervous at all? They're lucky in this respect: the audience is forced to sit below and may not "disrupt classroom order" for any reason... and so those originally fragile fellows can actually "grow sturdily" in this respect. Of course, if one day these people face a real audience, whether they're nervous on stage is completely beside the point; the audience of course won't automatically buy it, and the speaker will eventually understand that their so-called "experience" is worthless.

So, for novices, the real question isn't "how to overcome nervousness?" but rather, "what to do so that it's impossible to be nervous?"

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Footnotes:

1. This is advice that looks reasonable but is actually absurd: not apologizing when you've made a mistake is shameful; the really useful advice is: avoid making mistakes through careful preparation. [[↩](#identifier_0_10554)]

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