My Event Prep Toolkit (Nerves Included)

The honest version of getting ready for something big

For years, my version of getting ready for something big looked the same every time: say yes to everything until the last possible minute, answer every email, let the calendar dictate my activities, do every single possible thing…

Then collapse the day after and call it earned.

It sucks when you know that you’ve “earned” a cold by torturing your nervous system and immune system into submission.

This week looked different. And I want to tell you why, because in three days I’m running a full-on, half-day training, and pretending I have this entirely figured out would be its own kind of lie.

What I Cleared Off My Plate

The first thing I did this week was to figure out what I could subtract.

I looked through my calendar and rescheduled two calls that could wait. For a work sprint I wanted to join this week, I checked to see if the live sessions were recorded, and they are. Yessss! I took those off my calendar as well and wrote a to-do to catch the replays next weekend.

I let everyone around me know that this week, the workshop gets my best hours, not whatever’s left over after everything else.

There’s a real cost to skipping that step. Every time you switch from one task to a different one, part of your attention stays behind on the last thing, even after you’ve decided to move on. Researchers call it attention residue, and it’s part of why cramming prep in around a full workload leaves people feeling scattered even when they technically got everything done. I don’t want to walk into Saturday half-present because Monday’s inbox was still running in the background of my brain.

So instead of doing more this week, I decided to do less, so the thing I’m protecting has room to be good.

As far as the non-negotiables, I front-loaded those and cleared away as many as I could over the weekend. By the time the week started, I only had to focus on the workshop.

Did I have to work on the weekend? No. But knowing that I have this and only this on my plate at the moment really lets me immerse myself in it. To me, that’s worth spending the time up front for. (See that attention residue bit above.)

TBH, I’m Nervous

I’m trying not to dwell on it, but I’m nervous.

My shoulders are closer to my ears than they should be. I keep mentally rehearsing in the shower. And more than once this week, I’ve caught myself holding my breath at my desk without noticing… until I exhaled with a big sigh and realized what my body had been doing without my permission.

I used to think being a breathwork person meant I wasn’t supposed to feel that. But feeling it and knowing what to do with it are two different things, and only the latter is the job.

Meanwhile, any time I notice any of my systems rearing up, I remind myself that “I’m not nervous; I’m excited.” I try to lean into that energy and use it to fuel work. And it’s true – I am excited. It’s cool that I get to do this!

Something I find helpful is writing about it in my journal in the second person. I believe myself more when I think, “you’re ready” as opposed to “I’m ready.”

What’s In My Toolkit This Week

I don’t have one go-to technique. I never have. But I do go through phases of having favorites. Lately, I’ve been reaching for resonant breathing to bring my whole system down a notch before a call, a physiological sigh (double inhale, one long exhale) when I’m creating or rehearsing, or a modified box breath late at night, when my brain wants to keep running the slideshow even though I’ve already turned the lights off.

This week I’ve been doing a lot of rectangle breathing as I get ready for bed. That’s a 4 count inhale, a 2 count hold, a 4 count exhale, and a 2 count hold. I like to imagine my brain waves slowing down while I do it. I picture an EKG monitor with the spaces between pulses getting longer. Or sometimes, the squiggly wrinkles in a drawing of a brain being slowly erased from a piece of paper, getting more and more faint with each pass.

It sounds simple, and that’s the point. This doesn’t need to be complicated. It just needs to be something I trust enough to reach for at 11pm when my mind would otherwise happily keep bouncing around like a ping pong ball.

None of this makes the nerves (excitement!) disappear before Saturday. But it means I’ll show up on that Zoom screen having taken care of myself, instead of arriving already running on empty and hoping adrenaline covers the difference. Which will be better not just for me, but for my workshop guests as well.

If you’re heading into your own version of a big week, a launch, a pitch, a hard conversation, you don’t need a totally different toolkit than the one you already have. You just need to give yourself permission to use it instead of pushing through without it.

Last Gasp

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living (1960)

There’s still space in the Breathing Lab if you want to join me on Saturday. Check out the details and sign up here.