Choose to put yourself in pressure situations. Embrace and learn from them.

by Jonathan Bradshaw | September 13, 2011 | (0)

THESE DAYS, I GET EXCITED BEFORE I DELIVER PRESENTATIONS. THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, I WAS TERRIFIED.

It was my first big test—delivering the annual review of company sales figures. It wasn’t my fellow directors I wanted to impress, it was the assembled sales agents, many of whom had made no attempt to hide their skepticism at the recent decision to appoint such a relatively young candidate (me) to the board.

I rose from my seat, the conference hall descended into silence and the voice in my head got louder, convincing me that people wanted me to fail. As I approached the lectern, and despite a reassuring nod from the CEO, I felt the enormous weight of occupational pressure. 

It was the worst start to a presentation I’ve ever given. I had compartmentalized the 45-minute session into sections and mentally linked each so that, in theory, simply starting the first portion would lead me to the rest of the content. In the few low-pressure environments I’d been exposed to prior, this worked quite well, but with added pressure, my mind had other ideas. It went blank.

Well, partially blank. Rather than a welcome or introduction, my first words were from the third section. It was like asking audience members to start reading Chapter 3 and expecting them to understand the plot. I remember gabbling a toe-curling apology to no one in particular and having to take a considered pause, gather my thoughts and start again (from the beginning, this time). I wanted the ground to eat me up, and I felt that the audience did, too.

Psychologist Sian Beilock has investigated what happens in the brain when our performance crumbles under pressure. In an interview with the New Scientist, she describes the phenomenon of “choking” as not simply a poor performance. It’s performing below your actual skill level due exclusively to the pressure you feel.

Beilock compares our brains to computers; pressure takes up a lot of the RAM we require to manage multiple mental tasks at once. Her research also indicates that people with better performing brains may be more susceptible to underperformance in pressure situations (which must explain my sales speech lo those many years ago). 

“Those with more cognitive horsepower are folks who tend to over-think and analyze,” she said. “We found that over-thinking can be detrimental, that it’s better if an activity you have performed thousands of times runs on autopilot.”

The relationship between conscious competence (you are aware that you are good at something) and unconscious competence (you are good at something but can’t explain why) has always interested me. In an experiment about 30 years ago, author Tim Gallwey filmed himself giving a woman her first tennis lesson. Under pressure and unskilled, she performed extremely poorly. Then, Gallwey asked her to repeat the word “bounce” as the ball bounced in front of her and “hit” as she hit it. With her conscious mind distracted, the woman made staggering improvements.

So, why do some people insist that stress and pressure is necessary for them to perform at their best? In the early 1900s, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published a graph that they claimed showed the relationship between pressure and performance when performing a complex task. The horizontal axis along the bottom plotted pressure (increasing from left to right), and the vertical axis measured performance. It looks like an inverted “U,” indicating that a medium level of pressure is needed to attain best performance and that too little or too much has negative impacts.

There aren’t any sure-fire ways to know exactly how much pressure we need to perform at our best. Skill level, personality, self-confidence and task complexity affect the answer. However, if you do want to reduce the impact of pressure, Beilock suggests writing down your anxieties. 

If you read last month’s column, you probably think of me as a guy with limited control over his mental and verbal faculties. In an attempt to reverse that image, let me finish with an observation that I hope will not only be practically useful but will also restore a modicum of confidence in me as relatively normal human being: That speech 13 years ago was the best thing that could have happened to me. 

Falling short of our optimum performance and then figuring out why we did are first steps on the journey to developing new skills or improving existing ones. My “failure” spurred me to investigate numerous aspects of performance and led me to learn the practical tools I needed to evolve from a terrified novice to someone who speaks for a living. 

Choose to put yourself in pressure situations. Embrace and learn from them. Remember that, with practice, what was once outside your comfort zone can eventually fall within it. Pressure often comes with doing something for the first time. Learning new skills in life comes from having the confidence to leap into the unknown, safe in the knowledge that you’ll grow your wings on the way down. One+

Jonathan Bradshaw

Jonathan Bradshaw is an industry innovator who speaks, writes and consults on maximizing attendee performance at meetings. His work with behavioural psychologists, coupled with his experience in extreme sports performance, has led him to launch two innovative brands - Meetings Mindset® and the Meetology® Research Institute. He can be contacted at jon@meetingsmindset.com.

TAGS: One+ September 2011 , column , speakers , executive leadership , confidence