A senior pupil who is undertaking tests and exams, shares similarities with an athlete taking part in a competition.  Both require the ability to perform under a certain amount of pressure – sometime pressure we have put on ourselves – and turning our hard work and preparation into a one-off performance. Both can make young people feel nervous, but learning to manage these emotions in a relatively low risk, supportive environment, such as All Hallows, can pay significant dividends in senior school and beyond.
Having worked alongside some former professional sportspeople, it struck me that the techniques used by pupils to manage nerves are also utilised by athletes.  The context and situation may be different, but some of the same strategies can still be employed to help us manage our emotions successfully.

In addition to approaching any performance with a growth mindset and key strategies, we have discussed how to minimise our propensity to tumble into our ‘fight or flight’ mode, where are thinking can be hijacked. It can also be important to acknowledge that it is a natural response to get nervous at times.  After all, we are biologically programmed to do so!  The trick is to manage this bodily and psychological response to ensure we can still perform at our best.

The Spotlight Effect  describes how we tend to overestimate how much attention other people are paying us. You feel like all eyes are on you, that others know how you are feeling and are judging you perhaps. This was demonstrated in a study (Gilovich 2000) that had students wear an embarrassing t-shirt to a lecture. For transparency (although you may disagree vehemently with this selection), for maximum awkwardness, a Barry Manilow t-shirt was selected for this experiment!  The participants predicted that 50% of the other students would notice the t-shirt. In reality, less than 25% did.

A similar situation applies to nerves. It can be easy to think that you are the only one who gets nervous. That you are the only person in a test or exam feeling this way. That everyone else around you is calm and confident. This could not be further from the truth. Every elite athlete gets nervous at some stage. Every student, no matter how highly performing, has moments of self-doubt. Reminding ourselves that these feelings are normal, natural and happen to everyone else can help us keep them in perspective and minimise their impact on both our performance and our wellbeing.