Avoidance Has a Nervous System

I once walked away from the career I’d trained for-the one that lit me up-because my body decided it wasn’t safe. I told myself it was smart, temporary, strategic. It wasn’t. It was avoidance becoming identity. I know the loop from the inside.

Your nervous system is wired to keep you alive, not make you confident in a boardroom. That’s the lurch in your stomach before you speak; the trembling voice in interviews; the urge to cancel, delegate, or endlessly “prepare”. The system isn’t judging you. It’s protecting you, quickly and efficiently, the way it learned to do long ago.

Avoidance is a learned response that becomes a habit. Repeat it often enough and it looks like personality. You call it being efficient or selective. You decide you’re “not a natural speaker”. Meanwhile the body stores a simple lesson: good call, don’t do that again.

A tiny example. A Head of School knows the Q&A is where she feels most exposed. So she “runs long” on slides, leaving no time for questions. She calls it time management. Her nervous system calls it success. Next time, it nudges her to do the same even earlier. Multiply that across months and you’ve quietly redrawn your career map to avoid the rooms that would raise your profile.

Each choice feels harmless. Together, they build a brilliant, high-functioning life organised around threat reduction. The cost is visibility, influence, and the simple joy of speaking as yourself.

The way out rarely starts with cleverer strategy. It starts with teaching your system that visibility is safe. Confidence isn’t a thought you think; it’s capacity in the body. When safety rises, skill returns. Your voice steadies. Your mind joins you in the room.

Try this today. Before you touch your slides, spend 60 seconds training safety: breathe in for four, out for six; feel your feet on the floor; soften your jaw and tongue; let your shoulders drop. Then say the first line of your opening out loud once. Don’t aim for perfect. You’re not proving anything-you’re teaching your body that nothing bad happened when you were seen.

Make it a micro-commitment for seven days: one out-loud rep a day, thirty seconds each. Read your opening to your phone, your dog, a mug with a smiley face. Then stop, deliberately. Accumulation matters more than heroics. You gain confidence by showing up, not by waiting for it to magically appear.

I’ve lived both sides: the careful, quiet life my body designed, and the shift that came when I trained it to trust visibility. If a system can learn avoidance, it can learn safety. And when it does, everything opens up: interviews become conversations; panels become play; leadership feels like presence rather than performance.

Where is avoidance quietly shaping your choices this week? If this lands, click this link for my ‘10 Micro- Shifts for Speaking with Steady Nerves’ - https://www.charlienightingale.com/lead-collection

Or book a call and we’ll map your exact loop and the smallest next step to retrain it. https://tidycal.com/charlienightingale/30minutemeeting