Performing Under Pressure

Bruce Wilson, PhD & Lizbeth Wilson, PhD

“Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what you're doing.”
Chuck Knoll

How do they do it? How do performers consistently succeed under pressure? Maybe they don’t excel under pressure all the time, but certainly more than it should be expected. What is their secret? What are they aware of that most of us cannot even imagine?

Self-Efficacy

Psychologist Albert Bandura first suggested self-efficacy as a measure of how strongly you believe you can execute the actions needed to reach a goal (1). Self-efficacy depends on the context and the skill. Most importantly, self-efficacy helps view challenges as tasks to master rather than threats.

Self-efficacy is a personal belief in one’s capability to organize and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performances. This equates to the belief that one can perform if and when the opportunity arises. This allows self-efficacy to turn into self-confidence and achieve the task at hand, which builds an attitude that success can be repeated. This happens in sport, in business, and in all varieties of performance.

Demand Appraisal

How an individual evaluates the requirements, difficulties, and stakes of an upcoming task or situation is known as demand appraisal. The brain instantly executes a cognitive appraisal divided into two distinct parts: demand appraisal and resource appraisal.

Mental Toughness

“People think SEALs are cold-blooded, heartless, wound-up, brainwashed killers. They imagine you can just point a SEAL in a direction and say, 'Go kill.' The truth is you're talking about a bunch of kind-hearted, jovial guys. The only thing that separates them is mental toughness.”- Howard E. Wasdin

Psychologists see mental toughness as control, commitment, challenge and confidence. By managing your emotions and thoughts you establish control.

Through dedication to your tasks and achieving your goals you demonstrate commitment. This involves training and off the field life-style habits. Seeing stress and obstacles more as exciting opportunities minimises perceived threats and fear. Maintaining strong internal self-beliefs in your talent builds confidence.

“At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.”
Edmund Husserl

Cognitive Restructuring

Cognitive skills are utilised mainly to assist performers to identify, challenge, and replace unhelpful, distorted thought patterns with more realistic and balanced alternatives. These skills are implemented through self-talk, imagery techniques and simulated pressure training drills.

In basketball, this might be a session in how to handle a full court press by your opponent. This type of training is like a stress inoculation practice designed to facilitate performance under pressure.

The Flow Performance

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified an optimal state of consciousness as when the performer is fully immersed and deeply absorbed in an activity (2). There are no distractions to take the performer away from the moment in this fully immersed state. Focus is like a laser.

This "flow state", or being "in the zone", is directly linked to peak human performance, regardless of the activity being active or passive. Chess players have admitted that they have ‘flow states’ in their best performances.

The Flow Channel

When the task is too easy, it may lead to boredom. When too difficult, it may lead to anxiety. The "Flow Channel" occurs when the task stretches the individual's abilities to their absolute limit without causing them to crack under pressure.

“I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.” - Geraldine Brooks

Implications

We see all these high functioning performers achieve under extreme pressure and wonder how they can do this on a regular basis. Basketball players like Michael Jordan, Lebron James and Larry Bird have won games in the last second like clockwork. Baseball players like Aaron Judge, Mickey Mantle and Shohei Ohtani hit home runs in the last inning to walk off the win. Football players like Tom Brady, and female athletes like Nadia Comaneci, Kathy Freeman, and Michelle Kwan have done the same. They have performed in the moment when it counts the most, under pressure.

Obviously, sport is not the only environment where performance under pressure thrives. We see performance under pressure happening in the arts. In theatre, dance, singing, painting and writing, performers are rising to the occasion all the time. We see it in business when entrepreneurs succeed in new and impressive ventures. We see it in architecture and engineering when creative construction provides new infrastructure.

These performances do not happen automatically but rather with reflective training and self-discipline. The combined talent and dedication of performers who succeed under pressure and achieve the transition from unbelievable to reality are salient exemplars for the rest of us.

Psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in 1908 developed the pressure performance curve (3). They demonstrated the relationship between pressure and performance in the workplace, as well as many other aspects of life; such as training, relationships, and personal growth.

While most people prefer to stay in their comfort zone where it is safe, warm, and results in a good level of performance, Yerkes and Dodson suggested that staying in your comfort zone all the time is not ideal. Everyone needs to grow.

Leaving your comfort zone to the point of growth promotes reaching a flow state. Flow is a state of being so totally immersed in a task that it requires your full attention and effort, which promotes growth and fully utilising your skills. Ultimately, this discomfort leads to optimal performance and sustainable long-term growth.

Reference

1-Bandura A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioural change. Psychol Rev. 1977; 84:191–215.

2-Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2014). Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014.

3-Yerkes RM, Dodson JD (1908). “The relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation". Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology. 18 (5): 459–482.

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