Courage is contagious in a locker room. One person admitting they’re nervous lets everybody breathe.

Everybody in there is performing calm, which means every single person concludes they are the uniquely nervous one. The performance is expensive and mutually reinforcing, and it takes exactly one honest sentence to collapse it. What the first person actually hands out is permission, and you can hear the room change when it arrives.

Say it before the next big one, plainly, without turning it into a joke. Four words is enough. Then watch how quickly somebody else agrees and how much easier the warm-up gets.