At work I recently needed to demo a project I was leading to our biggest customer (a somewhat famous company totaling tens of thousands of employees). As you can imagine I was a bit stressed out from the moment I learned I would need to do the demo (which was 5 days before), but I used a strategy to mitigate the stress: viewing myself as a character in a sitcom.

See, characters in sitcoms go through all sorts of stressful ordeals: they go on dates, they get stuck in elevators, they deal with annoying neighbors, they have stuff happening at work, and so on. And oftentimes, it doesn't go that well, and they end up in pretty embarrassing situations (otherwise the sitcom wouldn't be very funny). From the comfort of our sofa, watching the sitcom, we don't realize the amount of stress and embarrassment we would be put through if all those adventures would be happening to us instead of the characters (who are often more laid back than we are), maybe because we consider that the sitcom is happening in a magic world distinct from ours. Yet there is no need to invoke anything magic for it to be realist: even in real life, stress and embarrassment are just small dots in the grand scheme of things, and life just goes on anyway.

By viewing myself as a sitcom character, I can actually start appreciating the adventurous aspect of something like making an important demo, and instead of brooding over how failing the demo would be the end of the world, I can just be curious about whether it's going to go well or not.

The demo went very well.