How do you feel now by looking at these pictures? I can’t help smiling, my emotions are already shifting. It is so beautiful to watch a face in excitement.
Compared to anxiety, it is very external, eyes are wide open and they shine. In the large majority of the pictures, the mouth is as well open, as if both eyes and mouth just want to interact with you and communicate something. Excitement is here to be shared, it is positive energy, it is contagious.
Excitement is also colorful, as if by being in a state of excitement we suddenly open our eyes on the many possibilities around us, from a black and white to a colorful perspective.
It is also about action and being alive, it ties the person to the present. Even if one can be excited about a future event, the feeling of being excited is connected to the present, as there is a sense of impatience to jump into action: I am so excited – I want to do it now! Funnily excited faces often also have some scary tinge, as if the fear or anxiety is never far away. Certainly it is still there but the person by being excited and in the present, manages to give less importance to the unknown aspect of the future that once triggered anxiety.
There is something about the excitement pictures that conveys a feeling of instantaneous – snapshot. Hence for the tool to be powerful, there is a need to be able to capture the positivity around the excitement and transform it into something longer lasting. As my mother tongue is French, I was trying to translate Excitement in French and here is what I found.
Excitement has two similar but yet different meanings:
- Excitation (noun) from exciter (verb) – excitare in latin: to put in movement, ex- and ciere (I put in motion, act). To give birth or cause a physical or physiological reaction.
- Enthousiasme from enthousiasmos “to be inspired by god” in the ancient time meant: a privileged state where a man, pushed by a force that outstrips him, feels capable to create 1. Or in more modern interpretation: intense emotion that pushes to action in joy.
By this French translation, I understand the subtlety of this word, it is as much the match that lights the passion to act (the instantaneous moment) as much as the long lasting enthusiasm that will allow someone to stay in action by being inspired by the inner passion.
The power of excitement in experimental studies
While experimenting the power tool in coaching, I realized how by being able to switch from anxiety to excitement, the client would feel more relaxed and his/her ability to find new ideas & actions would grow. I hence researched on that topic and here an interesting insight.
In Alison Wood Brooks’ article 2: “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement” published in June 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology , she shared her findings on 3 different experimental studies about how by stating “I am excited” before a performance improved the performance itself vs. the more intuitive approach of training to calm oneself down. She partly explains this as
Reappraising anxiety as excitement primed an opportunity mind-set, which improved subsequent performance.
She also mentions previous studies among which Mittal and Ross (1998) suggest
that individuals in a positive affective state are more likely to interpret issues as opportunities, whereas individuals in a negative affective state are more likely to interpret issues as threats.
Hence being able to shift from anxiety to excitement/enthusiasm is a very empowering perspective and it can help the client to move out from an internal-motionless-threatening perspective to an external-action oriented and full of opportunity one.
Self-application
The anxiety vicious whirl
Anxiety may show up in many different situations for each of us. And to some extent, feeling some stress before an upcoming event or outcome can lead to additional attention and focus on it. You can often hear people say how by coming closer to the deadline and the induced stress, they manage to perform well.
Where it starts to be an issue is when the initial stress transforms into an irrational fear about the unknown – the real anxiety.
Anxiety rarely hits us at its full blast from second 1 after being in contact with the unknown situation. It often builds up through our internal thinking process and the impact on our progression. The thought of the unknown triggers some emotion, which in returns affects our behaviors into often inaction which in return tells back to our brain that we have an “objective” reason for being anxious about it (we have not moved (mentally nor physically) – the uncertainty is still as uncertain, maybe even more than at the beginning.)