10 Minutes Too Late.

You know the moment.

The meeting ends. Everyone shuffles out. And 10 minutes later – usually somewhere between the car park and the kettle – the perfect thing to say arrives. Fully formed. Confident. Exactly what the room needed.

And the room is gone.

Or it’s the interview, and you only remember the story that would have made them laugh when you’re pulling out of the car park. Or the difficult conversation, and you only find your footing on the walk home. The confidence shows up – reliably – 10 minutes after you needed it.

I’m Jon Hunter, and I work with actors. This show is Emotions for Humans, and it’s about the craft of being human – the stuff nobody sits us down and teaches. So whether your room is an audition, a boardroom, or a first date… stay with me. Because today I want to talk about why your best state keeps showing up 10 minutes late – and how to meet it on time.

In the studio, I’ve heard a thousand versions of this story. The performance you nail right before you hit record on the self-tape – and the one that’s gone the moment you’re actually rolling. But here’s what I want you to hear today: this is not about being slow. Slow people don’t suddenly get eloquent in car parks. And it’s not about confidence being something you have or don’t have.

Something is happening in your body and brain in those 10 minutes – and once you see it, it’s trainable.

Let’s start with the thing nobody tells you.

Your body doesn’t switch states like a light. It ramps, like an engine. There’s an old and very well-studied relationship in psychology – first mapped by Yerkes and Dodson over a century ago – between how much charge your system is carrying and how well you perform. And it’s not a straight line. It’s a curve.

Too little activation, and you’re flat. The ideas are in there somewhere, but they’re out of focus. Too much, and you’re scrambled – talking fast, gripping, missing the room. The best performance lives on a curve between those, at a level of activation you have to arrive at on purpose.

Here’s the thing: athletes know this in their bones. No one walks into a grand final cold. Musicians warm up. Surgeons settle themselves before the first incision. Actors – we never meet the work cold. The warm-up is built into the room: every class starts with one, every rehearsal starts with one. It’s not mucking about, and it’s not some mystical ritual. It’s engineering.

But in normal life? We walk into the interview, the first date, the hard conversation – completely cold – and then blame ourselves for the dead first five minutes. As if we failed a personality test.

Your body showed up. Your state didn’t – not yet.

Now here’s what I actually teach, and it’s the reason I get up in the morning.

Ramping up is trainable. The warm-up that takes an untrained body 10 minutes can, with practice, be shortened – and shortened, and shortened – until at some point it stops behaving like ramping up at all. It behaves like a switch.

In my work, actors learn to arrive at an emotional state – not a mood, not a vibe, a specific energy – on purpose, in seconds, by doing something physical: a particular breath, a particular action, a particular focus of the eyes. The body doesn’t wait to feel. The body leads, and the feeling follows. That’s not a metaphor. That’s the mechanism.

Now, nobody gets there overnight – and that’s not what today’s for. But I need you to hear this: Ramping up that slowly isn’t your nature. It’s your default. And defaults can be retrained.

Now, the second piece. Why does the clever thing to say only arrive afterwards?

There’s a body of research on this – most famously the work of Sian Beilock – on what researchers call choking under pressure. And the finding is beautifully precise: pressure doesn’t delete your skill. It steals your attention.

Under pressure, attention turns inward. You start monitoring yourself from the outside – Am I doing this right? What did they mean by that pause? – and that self-surveillance takes up working memory. The bandwidth your clever, spontaneous thinking needs is now spent judging the person doing the thinking. And that person is you.

So the sharp observation, the funny line, the honest answer – they’re not missing. They’re queued – waiting in the wings for their cue. And the moment the pressure lifts – the meeting ends, the car park, the kettle – the bandwidth comes back, and everything you had arrives at once.

That’s the tragic joke of it. The car park version of you isn’t smarter. They just finally have their hands free.

For an actor, this is the difference between class and the audition room. In class, you’re living inside the work. In the audition, half of you is sitting with the casting director, taking notes. But the moment is universal – the performance review, the toast at the wedding, the question from the panel. The room didn’t take your intelligence. It rented your attention.

Okay. So your state needs ramping up, and pressure taxes attention. Now the third piece – and this is the one I see people get backwards most often.

Most people treat confidence as a feeling you wait for. When I feel ready, I’ll speak up. When the confidence arrives, I’ll raise my hand.

The research says it works the other way. A psychologist named Albert Bandura spent his career on this – he called it self-efficacy – and one of his most durable findings is where confidence actually comes from. Not pep talks. Not affirmation. Mastery experiences: the memory of having done the thing, or something like the thing, and survived. Confidence is built from evidence.

Which means waiting to feel confident before you walk in is doing it backwards. It’s like waiting to feel fit before going to the gym.

For an actor, this is why we do the reps. The confidence in the room isn’t a personality trait – it’s a rep count. And this is also why the studio exists at all. Sometimes the real room is too big for today, so we build the evidence in a slightly easier space first – class before the audition, a small meeting before the big one, the hard conversation rehearsed with a friend before you have it for real. The room shrinks, but the rep stays honest: you actually did the thing, and you actually survived it. That’s what counts as evidence – and it’s a stepping stone, not a hiding place. But you don’t need a studio for this. Every time you raise the hand in the meeting, send the email, make the call – slightly scared – you’re depositing evidence. And the person who looks effortlessly confident in the room you’re dreading? They’ve almost always just made more deposits than you.

Not fearless. Banked.

So if the state needs ramping up, and confidence needs evidence… here’s the tool that connects them. It’s the most-studied idea in all of performance psychology, and almost nobody outside sport uses it: the pre-performance routine.

A pre-performance routine is a fixed sequence of small actions you run in the last 90 seconds before the room. Not a vibe. A sequence. The same one, every time.

The research here is deep – decades of it, across golfers, gymnasts, musicians, marksmen – and recent meta-analyses point the same way: routines stabilise arousal on that curve we talked about, aim attention at the task instead of the self, and reliably lift belief that you can do the thing.

Here’s a version you can build from, and it’s only four moves.

Step one: the breath. The single fastest lever you have on your nervous system is the exhale. In 2023, researchers at Stanford compared breathing practices head to head, and the winner was a simple one: a double inhale through the nose, then a long slow exhale out the mouth – what scientists call the physiological sigh. Two or three of those and your body gets the message that the emergency is over. It’s not relaxation homework. It’s a gear change.

Step two: one physical anchor. Something with the body that isn’t thinking – feeling your feet, rolling the shoulders, tapping the thumb. Pressure lives in the head; the anchor grounds your attention in the body.

Step three: one cue word. Not a speech to yourself. One word for why you’re here. Actors do this constantly – a single word that replaces a dozen instructions.

Step four: the first action. Decide now what your first move will be – walking in, taking your seat, saying the first line.

And notice what you just did, because it matters: you chose a physical pattern and let it set your state. The body leads. That’s the doorway to the advanced version of this – in the studio, actors train physical processes that reliably produce specific emotional energies. What I’m giving you is the entry-level version: one breath, one anchor, one word. But the principle is the same one. The body leads.

That’s it. Then run the sequence the same way every time – 90 seconds, every room, no exceptions – because the routine only becomes automatic when it stops being a decision.

One final layer, and it’s the one that changes rooms for my actors more than anything else I teach.

Most people over-rehearse the middle and improvise the opening.

Think about it. You’ll spend hours on what you’ll say in the interview, the pitch, the apology. But the actual first 30 seconds – walking in, sitting down, the hello, the moment all eyes land on you – that’s left to chance. And the first 30 seconds is exactly where you’re coldest. It’s where the cold start and the stolen attention meet.

Actors know this, which is why we rehearse entrances on purpose. The start of a scene gets its own work – because if you own the first 30 seconds, the rest of the scene plays itself.

And there’s research that backs the instinct: when people script their openings as if-then plans – if my hand is on the door, I take three slow breaths; if they say my name, I stand and smile and introduce myself – the plan runs without needing willpower. The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer showed that these simple if-then plans carry you through exactly the moments where self-control would otherwise run out.

So don’t just prepare the content. Prepare the entrance. The first 30 seconds is 30 seconds. It’s the cheapest confidence you’ll ever buy.

Let me close the loop with Episode 1, because these two episodes are mirrors.

Last time, the whole episode was about the 10 minutes after – reflection, and how an experience becomes yours. The tool I gave you is 10 minutes long, and you spend all of it after the room, with the pressure gone.

This time, you’d expect the mirror to be 10 minutes before. It isn’t. There is no 10 minutes before. The only number that belongs to the before is 90 seconds – the routine.

And here’s the real mirror: the ramping up happens either way. Run the routine, and it happens before the door – 90 seconds, on your time – and the room gets you on time. Skip it, and it happens anyway, inside the room, on the room’s time. Your best state clocks in 10 minutes late. That’s what 10 minutes too late means. It was never your nature. It was your default, running unbilled.

The confidence was never late. You just kept leaving without it.

So, putting it together.

Your state has a switch. Ramping up is just how everyone starts. Pressure taxes attention, which is why the brilliant line arrives in the car park. Confidence is built from evidence, not summoned by willpower. A 90-second routine makes ramping up automatic. And the first 30 seconds deserves its own rehearsal.

Try it once this week. If the car park moment is yours – if you recognised yourself today – don’t let that recognition be just another experience that evaporates. 90 seconds before the door: the breath, the anchor, the word, the first move. Then run Episode 1’s three questions on it afterwards – the link’s still in the show notes – and you’ll have bookended a real experience: arrived for it, and kept it.

Okay, that’s all for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time – or maybe see you in class. Go be a human.