Coping with social anxiety during a business trip can actually be pretty tough, especially if you’re usually prone to suffering from it.
The thing about anxiety is that it generally doesn’t discriminate.
All humans are susceptible to stress and anxiousness during high-pressure, tense, or otherwise difficult situations.
Traveling certainly opens you up to plenty of stressors—and traveling for business can definitely put you into a high-pressure mode.
With that being said, there are a few methods that you can deploy to help you control your anxiety, especially while traveling for business.
Let’s dive into it and talk about our 5 top tips.
1. Be Aware Of Your Limitations
Now, everyone has their limits when it comes to anxiety.
For some people, the idea of public speaking absolutely wrecks them with stress and pressure.
For others, the idea of exchanging numbers, networking, navigating large groups, and starting conversations is the part that scares them.
For some people, just the idea of booking hotels for large groups of people can induce some pretty serious travel-related stress!
And for others, it might be the aspect of flying or the fear of getting lost in an unknown city that tends to cause them the most nervousness.
It’s important to understand your limitations in all of this.
If you tend to deal with anxiety during business trips, it’s in your best interest to try to figure out why it’s happening—and to then understand that pushing yourself in that direction too much may not be the best approach.
2. Know Yourself
Speaking of understanding things that make you anxious, it’s also important to understand yourself, and to try to understand the source of your anxiety.
If you just tend to feel an overall blanket anxiousness about work trips in general, then you may be suffering from generalized anxiety.
However, in some cases, you can back-engineer the negative feelings to figure out why you’re feeling them.
And sometimes, this can give you a clue as to how to solve the problem.
3. Talk About It
Sometimes, the best key for solving anxiety, especially social anxiety during business trips, is to just talk about it.
If large crowds tend to make you anxious, then talking about these fears beforehand with a trusted colleague, friend, or loved one can sometimes help you to quell that nervousness.
It’s all about knowing yourself and using the resources at your disposal to prepare you to feel as comfortable as possible.
4. Develop Coping Mechanisms
When it comes to navigating large crowds and high-pressure situations, you can sometimes deal with social anxiety by adopting one or two classic coping mechanisms.
For example, some people may limit their networking to 20-minute stints with breaks in between.
Some people may rehearse their pitch and then plan to do more in-depth networking over dinners drinks, brunches, and/or other outside activities.
Of course, finding a coping mechanism that works for you can be open-ended and creative.
For example, maybe carrying a stress ball that you can squeeze in the palm of your hand while you’re engaging in conversation is the best strategy for you.
You may even be able to use something as simple as a fidget spinner to help you keep your mind off of the anxiety and on task.
5. Learn To Face Your Fears
One of the difficult things about anxiety is that it can often cause us to feel fear and nervousness for no good reason.
Obviously, this isn’t good for you.
But even though it can be problematic to fix, it’s always in your best interest to try to develop a strategy to at least minimize it—so as to avoid allowing it to sap your mental energy, clarity, and focus.
In other words—don’t just embrace it and live with it.
Instead, try to develop strategies and experiment with different approaches until you find something that works.
Then, face those fears and deploy those strategies to help you overcome the issue.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this blog post has given you at least a little bit of inspiration that you can use to help quell your social anxiety during your next business trip.
Hey, this is difficult stuff.
But with a can-do attitude and a little bit of ingenuity, you’re sure to figure it out and move on to the next level.
You can do it.
Now get out there and make it happen!
