Let go of safety behaviors when we have to do something that scares us.
We often incorporate behaviors that are intended to prevent what we are afraid of from happening.
For example, if we are afraid of going blank while giving a dog, we might try it out and read our
whole presentation.
Other examples include keeping our hands in our pockets in social situations in case our hands shake
of being overly cautious to avoid offending anyone traveling with a companion only because of an anxiety
triple checking an email for mistakes before sending it.
There are two main problems with safety behaviors.
First, they teach us that.
But for the safety behavior, things could have turned out really badly, thus perpetuating their behaviors
and our fears.
Second, they can't actually impair our performance as when a capable speaker is overly reliant on notes
which prevents them from engaging with the audience.
In reality, the many of our safety behaviors are useless, but we never realize it if we always use
them.
We can combine testing our predictions with dropping safety behaviors to directly test whether they're
are necessary.