Preparing Your Mind for Stage Mastery

Apply the Switching Strategies

In her ground-breaking book, Your Destiny Switch, New York Times best selling author, Peggy McColl shares fifteen simple and profoundly effective strategies for switching your emotional state from negative to positive. When I read this book for the first time, I remember thinking how relevant her insights are to speaking and performing.

Since speaking is mostly transference of feeling, it’s important that you feel the right emotions when you speak, in order to keep your emotional state congruent with your message.

To apply the fifteen strategies effectively, McColl suggests that you first acknowledge your emotional state, and observe how you’re being affected, both physically and mentally. Then, you need to make a clear decision to change your emotional state if needed. If you decide you need a change, you move on to the first step in deploying the switching strategies.

The fifteen strategies are:

Slow your breathing.

Get away, even if it’s just into another room for a while.

Nature meditation. Go outside and stare at a flower or a tree for one minute or so.

Mini meditation. Take a few moments alone to detach yourself from your thoughts.

Use Humor. Humor releases endorphins that help lift your mood.

“Snap” out of it. Wear a rubber band around your wrist and snap it to remind yourself to apply these strategies.

Create a Verbal Cue. A few words can act as the rubber band to remind you to make the conscious decision to feel differently.

Get Moving. Physical activity increases oxygen to your brain and clarifies your thinking.

Attend to your body. The benefits of a healthy body are obvious.

Listen to positive music. Music triggers emotions in your brain. Listen to the theme song from “Rocky” and see how it affects you.

Connect with positive people.

Use your imagination. Create an imaginary experience and trigger positive emotions. Take a luxury car for a test drive or try on an expensive suit.

Use your memory. Think about a time in your life when you felt emotionally elated.

Reach out and help someone else.

Replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts.

“Your Destiny Switch,” by Peggy McColl is a definite “must read” for anyone in the business of speaking or performing.

So, what’s the lesson? Follow the above fifteen switching strategies, to switch from a negative emotional state to a positive one.