Instead of catastrophising about these feelings or trying to suppress them outright, a more mentally flexible approach is to increase your emotional vocabulary so that you can describe your feelings with more accuracy and nuance (psychologists call this ‘affect labelling’). This is important because most of us tend to be fairly lazy in our language and rely upon six to eight basic emotional descriptors (usually focused around joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation). When you use more precise words that better describe your actual feelings (there are actually hundreds of emotion words; see here for a list of 135 of the more common ones), this will help you to choose a more helpful coping mechanism for that feeling.

If you’re more explicit in how you acquire skills, you’re potentially more likely to break down under pressure,” observed Phil Kenyon, a leading putting coach who has worked with golf major championship winners including Rory McIlroy, Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson. “I try and encourage implicit learning, giving them a better chance of being able to handle things under pressure.” This is an edited extract from The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made by A Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore, published by Nicholas Brealey and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk 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. Delphis offers workshops, webinars and self-paced online courses delivered and developed by highly qualified and experienced business managers, academics and teachers. We help guide companies along the path to creating healthy and rewarding working environments for their people. It may seem counter-intuitive, but you get more done by working less. It’s your level of performance when you are working that counts. StrainOverly rigid thinking and routines can all increase feelings of pressure. Increasing your mental flexibility is the antidote, and one way to do that is by deliberately challenging your usual way of doing things. This sounds super-simple, but if you like rigid routines and have come to rely upon them, you will find it difficult. 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. The final and most fundamental step to performing well under pressure is to know why the performance matters in the first place – this is where your values come into play. Here it’s important to make a distinction between values and goals. Your goals are your long-term aims, whereas your values apply in every waking moment. For instance, you might have a goal to become the highest goal-scorer in your soccer team, but your soccer-related values might be to always try your hardest, to always strive to improve and to be a good team-mate. When you are very clear on your values, you gain two major benefits – you can spot when they could be violated (and so likely to trigger your emotionally driven threat systems), and you can also use them as a measure for how to respond when you feel under pressure, so that you stay consistent with them. 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.

The pressure performance curve / stress curve showing the relationship between pressure and performance. Whatever sphere you inhabit, whether you’re a pro or amateur athlete, businessperson, teacher, full-time parent or something else entirely, you’re bound to have felt the pressure of your own expectations and the expectations of others. Almost everyone must cope with daunting situations, in which they don’t feel they have the skills needed to succeed and meet the weight of those expectations. I’m a sports psychologist and I help teach my clients mental techniques to deal with this kind of pressure. I’ve found the same practical techniques and principles that I teach to athletes are also invaluable to my clients from many walks of life, including business and theatre.

References

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. Chronic stress refers to a state of long-term stress over months or years, whereas acute stress is the result of a single threatening situation and occurs in-the-moment at the appearance of a threat. By this definition, pressure most likely represents an acute stressor, in which the situational stakes pose a threat to psychological well-being (and in the case of life-or-death decision-making, to physical well-being). Chronic stress has been well-studied in both humans and other animals, with the overall conclusion that chronic stress usually has negative impacts on body condition, immune response, and cognitive functioning (Sapolsky 1990). In addition, chronic stress impacts the immediate stress response. Previous work found a negative association between increased chronic stress and cortisol reactivity in-the-moment, suggesting that high levels of chronic stress downregulate the impact of any one stressor (Rich and Romero 2005), although this does not necessarily translate into behavioral differences. Therefore, long-term and immediate stress states probably interact to produce any given behavior or decision, and we should be concerned with both chronic and acute stressors when assessing an individual’s behavioral response to a threat and the underlying decision-making processes.