Even the most extroverted person in the room can feel overwhelmed and anxious by the often stuffy, performative atmosphere of most networking events. Even as a self-proclaimed social butterfly, that feeling of dread brought about by the monthly happy hour is as familiar to me as it is unwelcome, despite my comfortability in other types of social situations. Through my decade of B2B sales experience and networking event attendance (which includes a highlight reel of embarrassing moments that prevent me from getting to sleep from time to time) I’ve come up with 5 tips on how to overcome that anxiety in order to get the most out of your experience, and hopefully, lessen the dread that comes with them.

Seems a little counterintuitive, doesn’t it? It’s important to remember that, odds are, there is a significant portion of your fellow attendees that feel the exact same way you do when they arrive, and the best way to disarm a potential future connection is to simply show them you’re a normal person. Stale introductions and a vocabulary consisting of buzzwords and industry jargon makes an impression on nobody. In fact, being too stiff might just cause those you meet to file you under “boring corporate flunky” before they flee to the next conversation as quickly as etiquette allows.

By no means am I recommending you tell one of your uncle’s eyebrow-raising jokes out the gate, but don’t be afraid to talk about things that actually interest you. Get excited and tell them how you spent your free time last weekend, show them some unsolicited dog-pics–even joke about how much you hate attending these things.

Authenticity and approachability are reflected back at a scale of 1:1, and everyone feels more comfortable around someone they feel they can be themselves around.

Part of that overwhelming feeling stems from being flung into a living throng of people and realizing that simply arriving at the event was only half the battle. Nothing eases that anxiety like having a plan in place. If you have an idea of who is attending, who do you want to talk to at this event? Type a reasonable list of names in your phone’s ‘Notes’ app, and check them off after connecting.

Are you there to meet new people? Set a goal of how many people you’d like to meet, and tally them on your phone between conversations. Needless to say, it’s probably best not to do this before you’ve left the conversation to avoid awkward explanations of why their name has a green checkmark next to it.

Having a tangible list of goals for the event will help you focus on checking the box instead of spiraling over what everyone else might be thinking about.

For those of you who have never tried meditating before, I highly recommend checking out the app Insight Timer. They have hundreds of thousands of guided talks and meditations, encompassing a near innumerable spread of topics. Taking a moment to get mindful, isolate the sources of anxiety in your body, and just breathe will help quiet that busy mind of yours. Most of the time, we just need to get out of our own way and let the event happen as it was meant to happen, and there’s no better way to get into that headspace than 10 minutes of meditation before leaving the house.

In our modern, self-centric culture, we can be led to believe that we’re far more important as individuals than we really are, and this sort of mentality can trick us anxious folks into believing everyone is thinking about or judging us, when in reality, nobody is doing that but you. They’re busy thinking about their own problems, their own impressions, and their own insecurities–-just like we are!

It’s important to try and reframe your perspective in this manner before entering the event space, whether it be a trendy bar or a lavish hotel convention center. As an attendee of this event, you are now a part of the amorphous blob that is the crowd, and believe it or not, you blend in perfectly! Allow yourself to be swept up into the chatter and laughter with the comfort of knowing that half the people you meet there might not remember your face, let alone your name. There’s peace in anonymity, and the more accurate our perception of our place in the grand scheme of things is, the more we realize it’s not half as intimidating as we make it out to be in our minds.

The insecure and anxiety-ridden individuals, like us, shoot ourselves in the foot by putting too much pressure on the outcome of events. We need to secure the deal, woo the prospect, or impress the boss. If you spend your whole time there concerned over how these things may play out, you may just end up fumbling the bag over your own fretting. Is it bad to want something positive to come out of your interactions? Of course not! But if having a good time is contingent upon outcomes that are essentially out of our control, then our happiness that night (or week or month) is left up to a coin toss. Take some agency back!

Shifting your focus to simply enjoying yourself and letting loose (as far as corporate constraints may allow) brings control of the night’s outcome back under your influence. Not only will you feel more in control, but the sense of ease and quiet confidence you exude might just tip the scales in your favor for those things that had you so worried.

At the end of the day, anxiety and insecurity are complex emotions with layers that differ wildly from person to person, but anyone can take the above tips and apply it to their individual circumstance. Break things down into pieces. Lower the stakes. Remember to breathe. Practice makes perfect, and if you do your best to take baby steps like these at every opportunity you can, you’ll be the kings and queens of the networking world before you know it.