Most advice for pre-meeting nerves says to calm down, breathe, relax. Research on performance anxiety found a different move works better, and it works with the body's actual state instead of against it. It takes one sentence, and it is not the sentence most people reach for.
Anxious and excited are almost the same thing
Alison Wood Brooks, a researcher at Harvard Business School, ran experiments across public speaking, karaoke, and math performance, and found something the body already knew before the mind caught up. Anxiety and excitement are physiologically close to identical. Both are high arousal states, a faster heartbeat, heightened alertness, a keyed up feeling. What differs is the label attached to it, not what the body is doing.
Trying to move from that high arousal state down to calm fights what the body is already doing. It rarely works cleanly, which is part of why calming down before something that matters is so hard to actually pull off.
The relabel that changes it
Brooks found that people instructed to relabel the same feeling as excitement, rather than trying to suppress it, performed better across every version of the experiment. They were rated as more persuasive, more competent, and more confident by observers who had no idea which instruction the person had been given. The shift moves someone from a threat mindset, focused on what is likely to go wrong, to an opportunity mindset, focused on what is likely to go well, using nothing more than a different word for the same physical state.
Why this is not just positive thinking
This is not a general instruction to feel good about a hard moment. It works specifically because it does not fight the arousal itself, only its meaning. Telling yourself to be calm when your body is clearly not calm creates a mismatch you then have to manage on top of everything else. Telling yourself you are excited matches what is actually happening, and gives it a more useful direction.
Where to start
Right before your next high stakes moment, say, once, either out loud if the setting allows it or silently if it does not, that you are excited about this. Not a longer pep talk. One line, said with the arousal you are already feeling rather than against it.
Notice what changes, not necessarily how you feel internally, but what you actually do differently once you have said it.
Whether saying this out loud fits the specific room you are walking into, or whether it needs to stay internal, is something you will judge better than any general instruction can. What this gives you is the actual sentence, once you have decided how to use it.
There is a related move for what to do with your own internal voice once you are already inside the moment, not just before it starts, and it pairs well with this one.