"If I rehearse it, I'll be fine"

The run-up feels like the sensible response to all this. If the room's going to watch, prepare. Walk the route in your head before you walk it. Say the sentence four times so it comes out right. Check the jumper twice. A person who prepares is a person who's less likely to be caught out, and less caught out means less beam.

I think the run-up does the opposite, and here's why. The beam is built from your own attention, and the run-up is an hour of attention spent on yourself before you get to the room. Every rehearsal of the walk makes the walk bigger in your head, and by the time you do it you have a rich, detailed sense of yourself walking, which is exactly the anchor chapter 3 described. The people in the T-shirt study had been thinking about the shirt for a few minutes. You've been thinking about your walk since lunch. The adjustment has further to go and gets no further.

Spurr and Stopa's review describes the self-image at the anxious end as a picture built from inside, often from an observer's point of view, and inaccurate. The run-up is where that picture gets painted. You're not rehearsing the room. You're rehearsing yourself in it, from the outside, which is a view you don't have. This is my reading of what the run-up does, not a finding, and I'd only add that I've never met a rehearsed sentence in a meeting that came out better for the fourth rehearsal.

The alternative isn't no preparation. It's preparing the thing rather than the appearance. If you have a point to make, know the point, one sentence, and know what you want to happen after it. If you're going to the café, know what you're going to read. Then the route and the walk and the sentence's delivery are left to be done rather than performed, and when you're doing rather than performing, the attention is on the thing, and the thing is out in the room, which is where you want it.