2021-2022 – Page 3

Talk of interest to COR community…

Date: September 24, 2021
Time: 10:30 am-12:00pm
Venue: SB1 5100 (5th floor of the new Merage School Building, SB1)
can also join via Zoom: https://uci.zoom.us/j/96978185870

Lily Zhu [1]
Doctoral Candidate, Merage School of Business

TITLE: Projecting Passion: Connecting Anxiety to Passion Improves
Entrepreneur Pitch Performance

ABSTRACT: Entrepreneurial pitches are anxiety-provoking and pivotal for
the success of the venture. Despite a wealth of research indicating that
early-stage investors attend to entrepreneurs’ emotions, little research
focuses on how entrepreneurs themselves can manage their emotions to
improve their pitches. I investigate how entrepreneurs can manage
anxiety prior to pitches by acknowledging the anxiety and linking it to
their entrepreneurial passion. I theorize that interpreting anxiety as a
reflection of one’s passion for the venture increases the momentary
feeling of passion, facilitates expressions of passion during pitches,
and increases persuasiveness. Preliminary results from a field survey
and a randomized lab experiment support the theory. The findings offer
insights on how entrepreneurs can mentally reframe their seemingly
detrimental emotional experiences for beneficial outcomes in terms of
their own emotional display and others’ perceptions of their pitch. This
work also contributes to emotion regulation research by comparing the
effects of different coping mechanisms for pre-pitch anxiety, unpacking
the specific ways to reappraise stressful situations, and demonstrating
the utility of upregulating beneficial emotions.

Links:
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[1] https://sites.uci.edu/lilyzhu/

COR Fall Get-Together 10/14, 4-5pm

COR/Merage talk 9/24: Projecting Passion: Connecting Anxiety to Passion Improves Entrepreneur Pitch Performance by Lily Zhu