Perform Under Pressure: Change the Way You Feel, Think and Act Under Pressure

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The approach to coping with pressure that I teach is all about cultivating not mental toughness but mental flexibility, also known as ‘psychological flexibility’ (drawing partly on the principles of acceptance and commitment therapy or ACT, an approach in psychotherapy that has grown out of cognitive and behavioural therapy and blends it with insights from Buddhism and other perspectives). Mental flexibility is vital for coping well with pressure because, if you want to perform brilliantly, you need the skills to handle whatever is thrown at you, especially the unexpected. In sport, this might be a last-minute course change or finding out a scout will be watching your match that night. On the stage, it could be the understudy having to step in during the interval. In office work, it could be a last-minute request to join the team for a new business pitch. Cultivating your mental flexibility will allow you to better manage these kinds of moments. The last over began with South Africa, down to their final batting pair, needing nine runs to win. Facing the bowler was Lance Klusener, who was in the midst of a stunning run of form. In the first two balls of the final over, Klusener crunched both deliveries for four. So, you’ve been in the stretch zone too long, the pressure’s increased and you’ve had no time to recover. What happens? You enter the strain zone. To begin, it is essential to remember that the thoughts you might have when feeling under pressure are often not actually true. When you are standing on the tennis court, you might catch yourself thinking ‘I’m useless at tennis, this will be embarrassing’ (or in the office, you might think ‘I’m useless at presenting, this will be embarrassing’) but these are not facts, they are emotionally driven thoughts. By recognising this (in ACT, it is known as ‘defusion’), you won’t get unhelpfully caught up in these negative thoughts and any related self-talk, and instead you will have the flexibility to make better decisions that move you towards what matters, not away from whatever you find scary. Develop your ‘mental flexibility’ instead. This way, you’ll be better able to think on your feet and cope with the unexpected.

The High Performing Team explains how structured communication, situational awareness and cooperative behaviour empowers teams to achieve peak flow. It promotes graded assertiveness which empowers junior members of a team to raise issues. Quality leaders are encouraged to use ‘Rally Points’ whereby the perspectives of the team are sort to ensure maximum situational awareness and a shared mental model. Frontline Leadership lists the qualities of a leader and applies high value to emotional intelligence and leader vulnerability.We don’t want people stretched all the time, though. That would be exhausting. No-one can perform at their peak all day long. That’s why chunking tasks and interspersing breaks is a smart work strategy. An ideal zone for work is one which cycles between comfort and stretch. We can’t quantify what a moderate level of pressure would be. It’s not hours worked or problems solved. The levels of pressure are deliberately vague because one person’s idea of moderate can differ from another’s. The Zone of Delusion is where we falsely believe our performance will improve if we keep working harder. Rather than getting better and better, our performance decreases with too much pressure. We lose focus; we frantically multitask; make mistakes. The quality of our work suffers as a result. Break some of your own rules. Switch things up in everyday life so that you find it easier to be flexible when you’re under pressure. It is often said that nothing in training can exactly replicate the pressures of the biggest moments in matches. But even if that is true, more pressurised training can help athletes cope with pressure on the field.

However Peak Performance is primarily directed at the leaders and members of small teams – perhaps platoon and below – while nodding to middle management in regard to training and employee welfare and organizational culture and ethos – subjects that will interest those at the sub-unit level and above. Boreout sometimes occurs in those who retire. Leaving work without firm plans for the future, or without creating any new motivating forces, goals or deadlines can be a recipe for long-term boredom. These same principles are especially important when you feel under pressure – for instance, imagine your boss surprises you by asking you to pitch your product to an array of potential buyers, or perhaps you’re feeling nervous as you prepare to meet your partner’s parents for the first time. You might think that, in such high-pressure situations, the way to excel is to grit your teeth and toughen up. But a mentally flexible approach is arguably more beneficial, especially when you are clear on your values and know what matters to you. With values, you always have a direction, and every time you need to make a decision under pressure, you have a barometer against which to measure. A flexible, values-driven approach helps you perform well because you’ll be mentally nimble and you’re always working to meet your own metrics in life, not those driven by others, by fears or by expectations. You have to have a positive mind, you have to stand there and be tension-free. If you stand there and are worried about everything, it’s hard to swing. When I play my best, it’s free-flowing and relaxed, no tension – just focus and have a target, but you’re relaxed and your muscles can perform. There’s nothing worse than when you try to do something and it’s all tension and pressure and you can’t breathe properly.”Although the aforementioned deficits of homogenous sampling limit our ability to generalize, the human studies from WEIRD populations have been used in developing theories to explain how pressure impacts cognition and working memory specifically to produce a deficit in performance (Yu 2015). All of these theories relate in some way to the attentional demands that acute stress places on a performing individual and how that shifted attention negatively affects the ability to complete a task or make a decision. However, the theories differ in exactly what causes this attentional shift and to where that attention is reallocated. The distraction account suggests that the experience of pressure is an uncomfortable one, and that this discomfort is distracting enough to a person that their performance in a task suffers (Wine 1971). In essence, this hypothesis posits that performance deficits are due to attention being directed away from the task that needs to be completed. When under pressure, a participant’s attention is largely focused on the uncomfortable experience of the acute stress, and this distraction may lead to slower responses or slower cognitive processing in task-relevant regions. This reallocation of attention takes resources away from the cognitive processing required to complete the task, resulting in a deficit in available attentional resources to complete the task, which causes an observed decrease in performance when under pressure. Additionally, emotional or affective regulation in the face of stressful situations may add to the cognitive effort needed to complete a task under pressure. Gonadal hormones may also interact with the stress response to produce behavioral responses to pressure, especially since we have evidence both that they impact cognition on their own as well as having an interaction with cortisol. For instance, there has been extensive interest in the possibility that estrogen improves working memory performance via upregulation of hippocampal activity (Korol and Gold 2007; Hampson and Morley 2013), although not all studies support this (see Janowsky et al. 2000). Further, estrogen might mitigate the negative cognitive effects of glucocorticoids, or at the very least act to positively impact cognition and oppose the negative impacts of glucocorticoids (Herrera and Mather 2015). The cognitive impacts of progesterone are somewhat less clear, but if the stress response is a key component of choking under pressure, there is some evidence that progesterone might positively impact performance under pressure by ameliorating that stress response. Both endogenously produced (Frye and Walf 2002) and exogenously administered (Frye and Walf 2004) progesterone had anxiolytic (stress-relieving) effects in rodents, and a synthetic progesterone derivative was found to specifically modulate the effect of corticotropin-releasing hormone (a key hormone in the HPA cascade) on anxiety behaviors (Britton et al. 1992). This is an important consideration for our understanding of how hormones might produce behavioral responses under pressure: some hormones might affect cognition directly by acting on the cognitive systems needed to complete the task, but some might also improve performance by attenuating the stress response. Practise labelling your feelings more accurately. To avoid becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions, focus on improving your emotional literacy and you’ll see this opens the way to more creative solutions. Ariely D, Gneezy U, Loewenstein G, Mazar N (2009) Large stakes and big mistakes. Rev Econ Stud 76:451–469 Consider a mentally tough bike rider who might be great at climbing a mountain, but prone to complete panic if they get a puncture or a spectator runs out into the road. Or a mentally tough actor who can handle the pressure of a live audience – right up till the moment of distraction from a mobile phone, at which point they forget their lines. Their mental toughness means they would survive the moment, but they wouldn’t be thriving in it or ready to adapt – their performance will suffer and their enjoyment will disappear.