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Perform Under Pressure

By Ceri Evans

Dedication

Te waka taiuhu, monā I whakatau akē, ngā ngaru āwhā. The prow of the waka will cut a decisive pathway through the stormiest of ocean waves.

Introduction

  • Whatever your performances look like, the aim of this book is to change the way you feel, think and act in high-pressure situations. But my bigger goal is to show you how you can reach your full potential through powerful responses to powerful moments. I want to help you go from ordinary to extraordinary.
  • If you restrict yourself to performing only in comfortable situations, your life will miss the fulfilment available to those who don’t restrict themselves. But if you embrace them, those challenging, high-pressure moments can be especially powerful and rewarding.

Part 1: RED and BLUE – Understanding Pressure

RED AND BLUE UNDERSTANDING PRESSURE 

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist (1905–1997)

CHAPTER 1 THE NATURE OF PRESSURE

  • Pressure is universal. No matter what our level of performance, we all fall victim to it in the same ways. Pressure is real. What happens inside our heads and bodies–anxiety, tension, frustration, exasperation, foggy thinking, tunnel vision–is not imagined. And when it comes to the effects of pressure, there is no immunity. Pressure is a mystery. The simple rules of the external world of cause and effect don’t hold. The mental world is a non-linear, invisible, cryptic one, where our unconscious often lurks in the background with sinister intent.

Two Kinds of Threat 

  • At the heart of pressure is fear. But not all fear is equal.
    • So, there are two kinds of threat: one that is triggered by real external danger, and one that is prompted by an internal emotional conflict.

CHAPTER 2 TWO MINDS–INTRODUCING RED AND BLUE

  • Our brain is the part of our body that has the greatest influence on our performance under pressure. Even when a challenge is mainly physical–such as training for a marathon–pressure places demands on us mentally as we solve problems, make decisions, adjust timing, fight through the discomfort, and much more. Our mental response is what makes the difference.
  • We can view the structure of the brain in terms of three parts, or levels. 
    • The first level, located at the base of the brain–at the top of the spine–is the brainstem, which is responsible for our major physiological drives and functions and our basic survival responses. It is fully developed at birth.
    • The second level, sitting at the heart of the brain, is the limbic system, which is responsible for processing information about our emotional and physical state, and emotional information about those around us. It develops after the brainstem, going through significant change in the first year of life.
    • The third level is the cerebral cortex–the outer layers of the brain–made up of two halves: the left and right hemispheres, joined by a thick bundle of fibres called the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex, which controls advanced mental processes such as language and reflection, is the last part of the brain to develop, and is still maturing in our mid-20s.
  • Right-hemisphere processes are automatic, fast, and largely unconscious. The right hemisphere works in the here and now, using non-verbal information such as images, and has the capacity to see the big picture, taking an instant snapshot of the situation. Left-hemisphere processes are deliberate, slower, and conscious. The left hemisphere works by matching current reality with past experiences, using language and calculation to construct stories, explanations and timelines.
  • To keep things simple, we can see both our right hemisphere and our limbic system and brainstem as dealing primarily with feeling, and our left hemisphere as dealing mainly with thinking.

The Feeling System

  • The feeling system is primed for survival–including our essential physical processes and the fight–flight reaction. It runs on raw, unprocessed data: when a large dog suddenly appears in front of us, all we need to see and sense is that it’s angry and growling, not its name, species or favourite park. The defining feature of this survival system is speed. Because it’s linked to emotions such as fear, it has been described as ‘the hot system’. I call this system RED.

The Thinking System

  • The thinking system is primed for potential. Once we’re safe from the dog, we can think about how to avoid crossing its path in future–maybe we need to buy an even bigger dog ourselves! This system allows us to solve problems, set goals, learn and adapt. Because it’s linked more to thinking and rational analysis, it has been described as ‘the cool system’. I call this system BLUE. RED The RED system is strongly connected to our body through powerful nerves, to maintain the overall functioning of our body and main organs within certain, comfortable limits, and to allow us either to run away or to defend ourselves when the situation demands. There are two RED brain abilities that are particularly relevant to performance under pressure: 1. Emotional regulation 2. Fight–flight–freeze

1. Emotional regulation 

  • The RED system runs essential physiological processes like sleep, hunger, thirst, sex drive and our heart and lung function. We don’t want to think much in most of those situations, so the RED system runs our internal world automatically and unconsciously by monitoring sensory information from our main organs. And we can’t switch it off–it never sleeps, even when we do.
  • The RED system regulates (controls) our emotions, and since our emotional self-control directs our behaviour at all times, the RED system sits at the forefront of how we experience the world around us. Our RED brain specialises in processing social and emotional information in a non-linear, holistic way. To give us vital split-second reactions, it runs on broad images, impressions and feelings, delivering an unending stream of moment-to-moment, gut-based judgments about our constantly changing world.
  • The trade-off is that a lot of detail is lost or not processed, resulting in an approximate system that provides rapid judgments at the expense of accuracy. Information is combined to provide an overall synthesis of a situation, rather than being broken down into smaller categories.
  • Our two amygdalae, considered the most primitive parts of the limbic system, act as our threat detectors. They’re constantly on high alert and exquisitely sensitive: they can be triggered simply by picking up on the dilation of another person’s pupils, a sign of potential hyper-vigilance or fear. They can respond unconsciously within 30 milliseconds, much faster than the 250 to 500 milliseconds it takes us to consciously focus attention with our BLUE brain. This is why we can find ourselves reacting to something without knowing why; then our conscious BLUE mind will catch up and recognise the threat that our RED system saw a quarter to half a second beforehand. In life-threatening situations, our amygdalae allow us to act first and think later.
  • This reaction has a slightly different biological pathway from the fight–flight mechanism, and it works in the opposite way: it shuts us down physically.
  • Psychologically, we disconnect from our body. If we can’t get out of there physically, we certainly don’t want to be present mentally. We go numb as endorphins are released to protect us from physical and mental pain. The technical term for this is dissociation, a mechanism that has fascinated psychologists for over 200 years.

BLUE 

  • The BLUE world is one of logic and reason. As we’ve seen, this system is responsible for higher mental functions such as prioritising, planning, abstract thinking, decision-making, goal-setting and problem-solving. These more advanced intellectual functions are linked to the frontal lobes, which sit behind the forehead. 
  • There are three BLUE brain abilities that are particularly relevant to performance under pressure: 
  • 1. Logic, language and numbers 
  • 2. Metacognition 
  • 3. Working memory

1. Logic, language and numbers 

  • The BLUE system processes information that has already been handled by the RED system. That means that it is a secondary system to the RED, always dependent on the information it is given, but it also means it can provide a feedback loop and revise the RED information.
  • BLUE brain processes are conscious, slow and rule-bound, in contrast to RED processes, which are fast and unconscious. Our BLUE mind processes information in a linear way, one piece after another. Timelines and sequencing are its specialities. This means that the BLUE mind is often explaining and making sense of events that have already unfolded. The BLUE mind is constantly interpreting our environment, breaking it down into a basic architecture of structures, categories and sequences to enable logical analysis. These attributes help with reflection, interpretation, planning and goal-setting. It allows us to understand the environment in an objective way and therefore try to anticipate and predict what happens next, based on stored information. It is not suited to new situations or operating under stress, and is more at home with using a narrow focus to detect patterns, so it can create a narrative about the past or the future.

2. Metacognition: Thinking about thinking 

  • Our BLUE mind enables us to think about how we think and feel, an extraordinary ability shared only with some primates in the animal kingdom.
  • Metacognition is critical for maintaining control over our mental responses, and for learning to perform under pressure. (It sits at the heart of the RED–BLUE tool,

3. Working memory: Our mental laptop screen 

  • Picture the mind as working like a laptop. A laptop has a lot of files stored away in its hard-drive memory, where we can’t see them. We’ve forgotten most of the files, but they’re still there somewhere.
  • Though our long-term memory has enormous storage capacity, the capacity of our working memory is tiny.
  • But in our mind they’re stored according to emotions, which constantly adjust the file contents, so that files are continually modified over time. 
  • When it comes to operating under pressure, our working memory capacity can plummet. Our working memory loses capacity quickly, so that we can only focus on one thing at a time, and have trouble accessing even basic information. We become self-conscious, just as worried about how we look as what we’re doing. And the content of our working memory changes from minute to minute, so we keep losing what we were working on.
  • Performing effectively under pressure is about keeping our BLUE mental screen clear even during significant RED mind activity.

How Our Early Years Set the Pattern

  • Attachment theory is based on the idea that strong emotional and physical attachment to at least one parent or caregiver is essential for early development. This psychological model can help us understand the impact our early years have on our ability to regulate our emotions later in life. When it’s not safe, we’re able to quickly seek contact with the parent and come back under emotional control so we can re-energise (a process known as refuelling). We learn to tolerate fear without becoming overwhelmed or lost, and to settle quickly if we do become distressed. This is called a secure attachment.
  • If the parent is too quick to soothe, the infant isn’t exposed to any fear and doesn’t learn any tolerance of stress and discomfort. Over time, the infant will develop a tendency to become agitated, restless and over-aroused. On the other hand, if the infant is looking for reassurance and it is delayed, or not provided, the infant’s distress increases. If the distress continues to rise, the infant can reach its threshold and suddenly shut down, becoming quiet and still. It learns that help and reassurance should not be expected, so it starts to isolate itself and become lethargic (under-aroused).
  • The quality of the parent–child interaction is more important than the circumstances in which a child grows up. People can be emotionally resilient despite a difficult early family life, while emotional fragility can sometimes emerge from what appears to be a solid family environment.

Memory 

  • The signals we receive from our parent and our reactions to them are absorbed into our memory and act as powerful automatic templates or ‘scripts’ for our responses to later events. By the time we’re 18 months old, encoded memory scripts are ingrained in our limbic system and automatically guide how we manage our arousal in new situations.
  • Our memories can be divided into two main types: 
    • 1. Explicit memories, which encode facts and events 
    • 2. Implicit memories, which encode procedures for how to do things 
  • An explicit memory records what happened and when, and labels it as either pleasant or unpleasant. To form an explicit memory, we have to consciously focus our attention, which requires our BLUE mind. But explicit memories are not true records of what happened, because they are also encoded with emotion from our RED mind, which makes them more vivid. We can generally recall a memory more easily when we’re in the same emotional state we were in when the memory was formed.
  • Implicit memories are unconscious records that show us how to do something, such as writing. As we’ve seen, these are formed from birth through repeated experiences. We don’t consciously have the experience of ‘remembering’: when we are writing, we just do it. Our implicit memories run automatically. The early scripts that capture how we think, feel and act in response to cues from our environment are examples of powerful implicit memories. We have no sense of recall when they are triggered; we just ‘find’ ourselves functioning in a certain way that feels entirely natural, whether it is helpful for us or not.

Shame and trauma 

  • Emotionally overwhelming events are stored in the brain as traumatic memories. Because they are processed in extreme conditions, our memory only records fragments of the event.
  • How we manage shame in early life plays a major role in how we learn to regulate our emotions. These moments are absorbed as implicit memories and become automatic procedures when similar moments are encountered later.

Changing our brain 

  • The great news is that however our RED system reacts under pressure, we can increase our BLUE control over those reactions, thanks to a property of our brain called plasticity.
  • Like a pathway through a forest, the more we use the same nerve-cell pathway, the clearer and easier it becomes. We find ourselves following the path without really thinking why we are doing it; it just feels natural. Which it is: it is now in our nature to react a certain way in difficult moments. The opposite is also true. If we stop using a particular pathway, it will become overgrown and not so easy to go down. In a high-pressure situation, every time we resist the urge to escape the discomfort by following a certain path, that nerve-cell escape path is weakened–and the uncomfortable path is strengthened.
  • The pathways in our brain are constantly being strengthened and weakened. We strengthen the impulse to escape every time we reward it by moving away from discomfort–and we weaken it every time we tolerate the urge to move away. Our performance habits are not random. If we want to change our performance under pressure, then we need to change the biology that drives it. The RED–BLUE tool is all about being comfortable being uncomfortable. Under pressure, do we give up or rise up? As someone wise once said: ‘Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.’

CHAPTER 3 BALANCED BRAIN VS UNBALANCED BRAIN

  • When our emotional regulation is poor and RED dominates, our attention becomes divided or diluted and our focus is dragged away from the present moment. We lose emotional flexibility and the ability to think clearly and our behaviours default to basic survival instincts, out of keeping with the situation.
  • In my experience the most commonly identified pattern is for performance under pressure to cause over-arousal–too much RED–rather than under-arousal. Trying to ignore or suppress our RED mind is a weak strategy, because it has evolved to never be snubbed or shut down. In fact, trying to overlook it actually powers up our RED response until it gets our attention.
  • It’s important to remember that the RED system is not inherently good or bad, any more than emotions are good or bad. Our feelings are a normal and essential part of life. Without them we would never experience the joy of close connections or the thrill of chasing goals and achieving them. The RED emotional system is what gives us drive and energy; it gets us going. It’s just when RED goes into overdrive and we lose control that we meet problems.
  • It would be a serious mistake to label RED as bad and BLUE as good. Both systems are very useful for their intended purposes. Too much RED may be more common, but being too BLUE can be just as harmful to performance. It can cause us to lose emotional connection, becoming detached, aloof and even cold.

Threat vs Challenge Threat

  • Anxiety is a secondary reaction. The combined effect of the primary painful feelings and secondary anxiety is that we experience discomfort. This discomfort doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It comes about because of a process inside of us. And it isn’t random–it’s very predictable. We will get anxious in the same types of situation, again and again, when others do not.
  • The bottom line is that performance situations stir up deeply ingrained emotions held in our body, and anxiety in the form of tension can instantly lock things down, making us uncomfortable and affecting our ability to think clearly under pressure. Performing under pressure usually means performing when we are uncomfortable.

Challenge: Going beyond threat 

  • If our RED mind is primed for survival, our BLUE mind is primed for potential. Safety comes first. If we are not safe, our RED mind is activated and dominates our thinking and behaviour. But once we are safe and the RED mind is calm enough, other opportunities open up. (It doesn’t have to be completely calm, just within the window of discomfort where you can still operate.) The BLUE mind is well suited to looking at our immediate environment, solving problems and adapting. When we’re not forced to pay attention to getting out of a situation we don’t want to be in, our mental effort can be focused on creating a situation that we do want. In modern language, we call this goal-setting.
  • When we engage our BLUE mind in pressure situations, a fundamental shift in mindset can occur: threat is replaced by challenge. Instead of trying to flee and bring the situation to an end as quickly as possible, our BLUE mind draws us towards the obstacle that’s in our way, using all mental resources at its disposal to adapt, adjust and improvise so we can overcome the challenge.
  • If we regard the situation as a challenge, we’ll focus not on the outcome but on our capacity to deal with the demanding and difficult moments. Rather than a burden to bear, we’ll see the discomfort as stimulating.
  • But the key is in the method, not the outcome. What matters is our state of mind when we perform under pressure, not whether we succeed or fail. We don’t lose heart when we don’t meet the challenge, because we appreciate that the learning we’ve just experienced is precious. Moments of failure arguably create more opportunities to get better than moments of success. The critical step is to embrace the pressure situation in the first place.
  • The big mental shift in performance under pressure comes when we can feel fear but accept deep inside that we will mentally survive the moment. Once the mental threat in a situation is contained, it loses its power to overwhelm us emotionally and shut us down, allowing us to re-energise and face the challenge. A challenge mindset means feeling the discomfort, but facing down the challenge without flinching.
  • Reflect on your mindset when you hit discomfort. 
    • What’s your habitual response? 
    • Are you stimulated by the challenge of these moments, or does the threat loom larger? 
    • Do you walk towards them or walk away? T
    • he discomfort of pressure: threat or challenge?

Overthinking vs Connecting Overthinking 

  • When I ask athletes to describe their worst 10 minutes in sport, one word always causes moans of recognition: overthinking.
  • Under pressure, elite sportspeople do not want to think too much or too fast, because it causes problems for their performance. A busy mind gets in the way of clarity. And that is universally seen as a bad thing.
  • When we are ‘in the RED’, we can lose emotional control, overthink and get diverted. When we are ‘in the BLUE’, we can hold our nerve, maintain our focus and stay on task.

Connecting 

  • When I ask athletes to describe their best 10 minutes in sport, the one response that stands out is that they felt connected. Instead of the overthinking that is the hallmark of their worst moments, their sense of connection with their immediate environment meant that they weren’t thinking much at all. Everything seemed so obvious and easy. They perceived, and they acted. They sensed, and they moved. They saw, and they did. The usual middle piece of thinking seemed to disappear. They were ‘in the zone’.
  • This is only possible when there’s no sense of disconnection. The most common disconnect occurs when we start to think not about how we are performing the task but how we are looking while we do it.
  • Instead of being distracted by doubt, we need to trust our ability to handle what is in front of us. This self-trust forms the RED backbone to support our BLUE focused attention. Banishing doubt and worry avoids overthinking–that busy mind that arises from an internal debate about what we’re doing.
  • But what about our discomfort, which we’ve seen is a key feature of pressure? We have to move through it. We can’t magically avoid or escape it, but we can choose not to focus on it. It just isn’t the main issue. We can make the discomfort an internal focus, leading to overthinking, with suffering in the foreground. Or we can simply notice the discomfort and let it subside into the background, while our focus returns to the immediate task. With this external focus on doing, our mind becomes still.
  • Being in the zone–physically and mentally–is an outcome. The process we use to get there is to control our attention.
  • Cast your mind back to the best 10 minutes of your best performance. 
    • How did you get into that state of mind? 
    • Was there anything deliberate you did other than focus intently on the task in front of you? 
    • Or did it just come out of the blue? 
    • Yes, that’s right. It did indeed just come out of the BLUE.

Split Attention vs Dual Focus Split attention ‘Pay attention!’ 

  • Growing up, how many times did we hear that from parents, teachers, coaches and others?! The reason why we heard it so often is that it’s great advice! It cuts right to the heart of performance under pressure, because the prime issue is our control of attention.
  • We needed to learn how to deliberately pay attention to what we were doing, to hold it there despite potential diversions, and to shift it to a new focus when needed. It’s not only important, it is core to performing under pressure. In most demanding situations this most fundamental mental ability of all–how well we pay attention–has the largest influence on the outcome.
  • Remember that under pressure, the rules change, and the capacity of our working memory plummets. When the task in front of us is demanding, we can really only focus on one thing at a time. For conscious, demanding tasks, multitasking is a myth. No problem to talk on our phone while shopping at the supermarket: two easy, almost automatic tasks. But even then, mistakes can occur–we accidentally pick up the wrong item, we miss things that were on our list. Now add some pressure–a screaming child, time pressure to get to an urgent appointment–and the errors flood in. At the brain level, RED has disrupted BLUE and our once-clear mental screen has shrunk down and clouded over.

Negative Content Loop

  • One of the most common attention traps is the negative content loop: a self-defeating, circular pattern of thinking and feeling. Instead of focusing fully on the task in front of us, we find our attention diverted towards potential or past negative outcomes, such as losing, making a mistake, or missing a deadline.
  • The reason why a negative content loop is so damaging for our focus is that it takes us out of the current moment. It diverts our attention from the present into the past (a mistake or missed opportunity) or the future (negative outcomes and the criticism and judgment that will result). Our mental horsepower is cut in half right when we need it most.
  • Our actions should always take place within the big picture of what we are trying to achieve, which requires attention to context. At the same time, we need a narrow focus on the specific task we’re engaged in, which requires attention to detail.
  • A dual focus requires a tight, constant feedback loop between the overview and the specific task, with each informing the other. At any one time, our dominant focus will be on either one. The key is to move back and forth between the two, rather than splitting attention between them.
  • Dual focus also trumps split attention because of the type of information being processed. When our attention is split, the diversion is inevitably about the negative meaning of a situation. Problems become jumbled up with solutions. When we have dual focus, we’re tightly focused on the process of completing our task (detail) while constantly reading shifts in our environment (overview). It’s about looking ahead without disconnecting from the moment.
  • Yet experts across countless fields have the capacity to switch their attention between perspective (the overview) and precision (the detail) when the heat is on. Skilful control of attention–avoiding negative content loops and maintaining their dual focus–is what separates them from the rest.
  • Under pressure, do you tend to get diverted into the RED and halve your mental efficiency, or do you do double time into the BLUE and accelerate with undivided attention? Which are you more skilled at: the situational overview or the task detail? Would other people who know you well say that, under pressure, you are both aware and accurate?

Going APE vs Deciding to ACT APE 

  • Under pressure we all fail in predictable ways. We’ve looked at how the same emergency reactions seen in animals–fight, flight or freeze–are triggered in modern-day performance situations, although usually more by social threats than physical danger. Let’s modernise the behaviours by renaming them. Rather than fight, think aggressive. Under pressure, people raise their voices, threaten, bully, confront, insult, reject and exclude. And rather than freeze, think passive. People who can’t get out of a situation may not go completely immobile, but they go quiet and look down when volunteers are requested, always letting others go first and staying a step behind, just generally going through the motions.
  • In our early years, we all develop a personal pattern that means one of these three becomes our default reaction to extreme pressure. Or it might be a combination of two, or all three. Passive–aggressive behaviour is a classic example. Recognising our personal defensive behaviour style and how it hurts our performance will show us what traps to avoid in the future. If we take this step, we are already in a 

ACT Under pressure we all succeed in predictable ways.

  • This aware–clear–task sequence–or ACT–stands in contrast to the RED-fuelled APE reactions, which are characterised by lack of self-awareness, lack of clarity, and off-task behaviours. No matter how big the moment of pressure, we are well served by an ACT approach because it leads to specific actions that create movement.
  • To be aware requires us to step back and reflect, which is a core BLUE-brain activity. Once we have a good idea of our external situation and our personal reaction to it, we can ensure we’re clear about what needs to be done first, and how to do it. Plenty of people start doing things without being aware and clear, and so the impact of their actions is diluted. There’s a lot to be gained from a deliberate process of considering alternatives and consequences before deciding to act.
  • It wouldn’t make sense to bury ourselves in the task without constantly reviewing our context and strategy. Every time we check on the context, we can adjust our strategy. Every time we adapt our strategy, we can adjust our actions. And every time we act, the context changes slightly, so we can circle back to the top. A key mental building block for performance under pressure is flexibility.

ESC-APE vs IMP-ACT ESC-APE 

  • Some moments are just too big for us. Sometimes, under pressure, we hit our threshold, and it’s then that our damaging APE behaviours emerge. Most pressure arises from our fear of possible judgment. And the key elements of judgment are expectations, scrutiny and consequences (ESC).
  • The external origins of pressure–ESC–plus the most unhelpful behaviours under pressure–APE–create the ESC-APE model. There are some moments that carry too much pressure for us to bear because of the level of ESC, and this level of discomfort causes us to go APE. Rather than thinking clearly, we act impulsively out of emotional tension. We avoid the discomfort through aggressive or passive behaviours, or by escaping from the situation altogether.

IMP-ACT 

  • Newton’s first law states that an object will remain in its current state of motion unless an external force acts on it to change its momentum. We humans are the same: we only move because of pressure. It’s all about inertia, a resistance to change. Most people need external pressure to move them. But there’s a smaller group driven by pressure from within–and they’re the ones who inevitably go further.
  • Instead of someone else’s expectations, we’re driven by our own intention. Instead of being affected by someone else’s scrutiny, we have a clear sense of where we are right now, in this moment. And instead of someone else’s consequences, we are focused on our current priority. The mental recipe for internally driven people is intention, moment, priority, or IMP.
  • Start with the context: think of a current situation that’s challenging you. 
    • First, in that situation, what is your intention? Look into the future and decide what outcome you want and the way you want to operate. How it will look and feel to close observers? 
    • Second, what is the reality in this moment? What is currently working well and what isn’t? There’s probably a gap between your intent and your current reality. 
    • Third, what is your priority for closing this gap and making progress towards the desired outcome? Be specific: what will your first step be?
    • we are internally driven, we are far less affected by external pressure, because the drive from within is stronger. We are not immune to it, but it is less disturbing. Performers who are externally driven also tend to identify external factors that are limiting their ability. This is more comfortable because it makes it not their fault. Internally driven performers tend to look at internal obstacles and see their primary opponent as themselves. Being internally driven also feels different. Instead of feeling the weight of expectation coming down on us from the outside, we feel power flowing up from within. External pressure breaks us down, makes us shrink, and burdens us; internal drive builds us up, makes us grow, and energises us.
    • But the acronyms ESC-APE and IMP-ACT represent more than words, because when we follow them, they lead to different biological responses. ESC-APE behaviours follow threat, setting off our RED mind. IMP-ACT is linked to challenge, which strongly activates our BLUE mind, especially our left pre-frontal cortex, a part of the brain stimulated by goal-setting and new learning.

Overload and Overwhelm vs Overview and Overcome

  • The heaviness comes from the burden of the external ESC pressure–the expectations, the scrutiny and the consequences of judgment. When those three aspects are rolled into one dense load, the situation becomes too much for us to bear. Our thinking, our feelings, in fact our whole perception becomes overloaded. And that mental overload pitches us into a state of overwhelm.
  • The part of our mind that provides situational awareness and controls our impulses–the BLUE part–is overpowered by our RED urges and impulses. Our personal brand of aggressive, passive and escaping behaviours is released, none of which actually helps us to deal with the constant, smothering pressure. We lose problem-solving capacity and devote all our mental energy to a dire internal battle for survival.
    • Go back to those big ESC-APE moments you identified in the last section. If you can bear to, step back into one of those moments. Go back inside your body and mind to remember how they felt at the time–just as far as you want to. Mild discomfort is fine, no more than that. Look at these moments again through the lens of the overload–overwhelm experience. Remember you can step out of the situation at any point. But if you can, notice how right at the centre of the overwhelm experience there was a specific moment when you started to lose perspective and felt suffocated. Overwhelm is a full mind–body experience, not a detached mental process.

Overview and overcome 

  • When we feel trapped under pressure and struggling, changing the way that we mentally picture the situation can prevent us from being a mental captive and give us a mental release.
  • The critical thing is to take a decisive step back in our mind. This gives us the mental and emotional breathing space that we need to regain some perspective and free ourselves up for action. Rather than the situation mastering us, we now become the master of the situation.
  • We can start looking at the situation from different angles, regain the overview and overcome the challenge. This mental manoeuvre–stepping back outside the situation–is deceptively simple but powerful, because it takes an abstract concept like pressure and gives it a location in physical space. We can either stay inside or underneath the situation, or move outside it or on top of it looking down. The remedy to overload is the overview–stepping back or out to see the bigger picture and removing the mental load. Once we have the overview, we can see our options and make decisions that will allow us to overcome the situation, instead of heading in a downward spiral to overwhelm. As the overload–overwhelm partners in crime are replaced by the overview–overcome performance companions, the threat changes to a captivating challenge.

Fixation vs Flexibility Fixation: Worry and regret

  • First of all, it’s worth saying that some worrying can be helpful, because it keeps us on our toes. But worrying becomes an issue when we can’t let things go, and they start to cause us distress and interfere with our performance. The crux of the problem is being unable to accept a particular outcome–losing, making a mistake, failing an exam–which fixates our attention. Our RED mind is doing its job well, because it won’t let us ignore the threat. It’s trying to look after us. But under pressure, becoming too fixated on an outcome is a big problem.
  • If we can’t face the various outcomes of what we are about to do (worry) or have already done (regret), we set ourselves up for divided attention through a negative content loop, taking our focus out of the moment.

Flexibility: Learn, don’t judge

  • The secret lies in the mental clash between what’s ideal and what’s real. Regret is the gap between what we wanted to happen and what actually happened. Worry is the gap between what we want to happen and what will probably happen. In both cases, an ideal outcome in our mind conflicts with reality–and we struggle to accept it. How can we avoid this internal conflict? It can only occur if we are mentally attached to the image of an ideal outcome in the first place.
  • If we can’t face anything short of the ideal, then we are sentencing ourselves to constant worry and regret. The solution is to stop avoiding the painful feelings linked to loss and disappointment, and walk towards them instead. Avoiding reality stops us from learning and getting better, and will only bring us more pain sooner or later.
  • The place to start is with ourselves, because if we are vulnerable to judgment from others, the chances are we are even harder on ourselves. It’s easy to underestimate how much disapproval, criticism and scolding we put ourselves through.
  • But indifference is not the alternative to winning or losing. To free ourselves of this kind of fixation on the outcome, we need to adopt a mindset of mental flexibility in the moment. Our focus should be on learning from our performance instead of judging it.
  • Curiosity replaces judgment. We are mentally free, because we’ve faced the situation and tried to find a way, rather than becoming defensive through fighting, fleeing or freezing.
  • Confusing the time to perform with the time to learn is not a good formula for performance. We need to commit totally to perform in the moment, then learn from it afterwards. Judgment fires up our RED mind, but learning activates our BLUE mind.
  • If we feel we have nothing more to learn, we lose our inquisitiveness and become closed-minded. Zen philosophy speaks of ‘beginner’s mind’, in which we focus on learning and assume that others will know things we don’t, which leads to humility. The open mind is seen as more advanced than the closed mind because it requires more mental strength and security not to feel a need to demonstrate our knowledge to others. With less need to impress, we are more open to learn.

Hot-Headed vs Cold-Blooded RED hot-headedness

  • But anger can overrun us and take us into survival mode when it is not required. When that happens, our emotional reaction interferes with clear thinking and there’s a risk of ‘hot-headed’ behaviour, which is impulsive and rash. We will become fixated on a threat, lose situational awareness and develop clouded judgment.
  • Though our RED system can be a source of great energy, our emotional thermostat can also overheat and blow a fuse.
  • Controlled accuracy beats impulsive roughness.

Threshold and Resilience 

  • When we hit our limit under pressure, our fall can be dramatic. We call this limit our mental threshold, the level of pressure at which we lose our capacity to remain functional. Our threshold is the moment when our RED mind–previously regulated by BLUE control–starts to over-dominate, and unwanted, irrational and impulsive behaviours take over. What everyone else sees is the erratic fight-or-flight behaviour when we get too aroused, or the flat, passive freeze response when our arousal is too low.
  • Anything outside our performance that drains us emotionally can lower our threshold. This could be a major life event such as a change in our relationship, job, living arrangements or physical health. Or it could be doing something else that’s demanding right before we perform. If we deplete our energy reserves before we even step out to perform, we shouldn’t be surprised if our threshold is lower than usual.
  • But just because we hit our threshold and start to mentally unravel doesn’t mean that it’s a one-way street. We can mentally wobble but not fold.
  • We can call this ability our mental resilience. It relates to our ability to tolerate emotional distress, and, if we do descend into unhelpful behaviours, the time it takes to regain control. We can bend, but we don’t have to break.
  • One interesting aspect of the RED–BLUE story is that what we might think is our threshold actually isn’t; we are probably capable of more. When it comes to discomfort, our mind gives up before our body.

In my experience, people are surprised when they suddenly grasp that everything they’ve invested time and effort in in the name of performance was about making themselves feel more comfortable. The most common request I get is for techniques to take away anxiety and tension. It comes as a revelation when I suggest that it’s not about trying to reduce the level of discomfort but about learning to face it. For those used to pursuing the comfortable life, walking towards discomfort (running is too scary) opens up a new world. When we appreciate the power of being more comfortable being uncomfortable than others, we actually become energised by the challenge of discomfort. Adopting an approach of walking towards the pressure–embracing it–does not mean that we like the pain and stress, just that we appreciate that pain and stress will definitely stop other people–which will allow us to be the one who remains standing.

Purple Mental State

  • We can instead see purple as our ideal mental state. For performance under pressure, we require both the energy of RED and the clarity of BLUE to reach our potential. We need to operate out of our mental purple patch. At the biological level, this means that our RED limbic system is active but under control, and our BLUE rational system is providing a beneficial feedback loop. Despite a degree of discomfort, our emotional system is regulated. Our RED and BLUE mental circuits are in sync.

CHAPTER 4 THE RED–BLUE TOOL

  • If we’re not mentally prepared for pressure, we’re vulnerable. We’ll either restrict ourselves to performing only when conditions are favourable, or we’ll be playing a dangerous game. To perform well under pressure, it’s essential to have the right mental techniques.

The RED–BLUE Tool RED or BLUE? Decide. Do! 

  • This is a three-step tool that we can use to develop stronger emotional self-control and to feel and think clearly under pressure.
    • Step 1: ‘RED or BLUE?’–mentally step back, see the RED–BLUE line and where you currently sit on it, and point yourself in the right direction. 
    • Step 2: ‘Decide’–frame the scene, zoom out, see the bigger picture and decide on a more effective response. 
    • Step 3: ‘Do!’–mentally re-engage and step into the situation, paying attention so you can take effective action.
  • The first step of naming and recognising her mental state avoided an ill-judged, emotional response. The second step of reframing the situation helped her avoid getting tunnel vision, or being caught in two minds. The third step of resetting and the transition into action helped her avoid becoming stuck and wasting time.
  • The first step is crucial, because if we lose emotional control, the next two steps become impossible to do well. The final step–a commitment to act with conviction–focuses us on the quality of our external behaviour and gets us moving.
  • Instead of being hesitant and trying to convince ourselves we can do something, we need to jump straight to decisive action.
  • We can act with conviction no matter how we’re feeling. And once we get moving, the external picture changes quickly and our feelings soon follow. In this context, ‘Fake it until you make it’ is good advice.
  • Positive action is much more powerful than positive thinking at clearing our head. We’ve seen that RED cannot be switched off in the face of threat, and trying to ignore it with simplistic BLUE thinking just gives it more fuel. Instead of trying to think ourselves into feeling something we don’t, we need to skip to action and get on with it.
  • The RED–BLUE tool leaves us in control, because it doesn’t tell us what to do. It just returns us to a good mental space by allowing better emotional control, better information, and better actions.
  • So when should we use the RED–BLUE tool? 
    • First, when we notice we’re physically tense or mentally stressed and our emotional temperature is too high (too RED). 
    • Second, when we notice we’re slow or passive and our emotional temperature is too low (too BLUE). We can use it as often as we like–we can never have too much emotional regulation. Whenever we feel like we are acting too fast without perspective, or too slowly without commitment, the time is right.
    • We can also use the RED–BLUE tool to prevent a slow build-up of emotional tension by running regular checks on our mental state during the day. When we are familiar with the tool, our unconscious mind can run the process for us as long as we kick it off.

Mental Movement: Step Back, Step Up, Step In 

  • A great way to ingrain the RED–BLUE tool in your memory is to add an imaginary physical movement for each step: Step back, step up, step in. 
    • Step 1: step back and see the RED–BLUE line, and where your reaction to the situation currently sits on it. 
    • Step 2: step up to a higher performance plane, gain an overview of the situation. 
    • Step 3: step in onto the higher plane and take action.
  • Step back, step up, step in counteracts the RED behaviour patterns of fight, flight and freeze. Stepping back neutralises our urge to confront someone or something, or simply to flee the situation. And stepping in is ideal for forcing ourselves into action when we’re frozen or passive. The movements highlight the fact that we are mentally stuck and not moving, and therefore actively not performing. To counteract what can be a very strong physical urge to react or stay still, we can make our mental movements equally sharp and forceful to snap us out of that state. Meanwhile, stepping up reminds us that to improve, we have to move from our current plane to a higher level.

How the RED–BLUE Tool Works: Rename, Reframe, Reset

  • Rename requires us to name whether our emotional state is more RED or BLUE. Second, we have to step back and think about our own state of mind, which activates our powerful metacognition function (thinking about thinking). And third, naming the colour activates our language function.
  • The second step–reframe–requires us to picture an expanding frame around our situation to deliberately reverse the tunnel vision of a RED emotional state. RED activation causes us to narrow in and fixate on the threat, at the expense of awareness of our broader environment. This state of mind doesn’t help most performance scenarios. Moving quickly from a small RED frame to a larger BLUE frame means we will naturally see two or three angles re-emerge, so we need to trust that they are relevant. They were probably always there; we just lost sight of them through tunnel vision.
  • The third step–reset–requires us to get out of our head and into action, but in a more constructive way than previously. It’s a reminder not simply to default to our standard behaviour and repeat what we were going to do in the first place. Resetting engages our BLUE mind in planning and goal-setting, to further restore our RED–BLUE balance. It also slows us down if we were too aggressive, frantic or impulsive, and speeds us up if we were too passive or were procrastinating.

Breathing Routines

  • While chest breathing is linked to our hot-headed RED system (through our sympathetic nervous system), belly breathing stimulates our soothing BLUE system (through our parasympathetic nervous system). If you’re in a room full of people under stress, you’ll notice shallow, rapid breathing all around you. Some people even unintentionally hold their breath when they get very tense. In contrast, belly breathing can quickly dissolve tension and clear our mind.
  • One common unhelpful breathing pattern under pressure occurs when our in-breath is longer than our out-breath, which over-inflates our chest. To reverse this tendency, time your breathing so that your out-breath is one more count than your in-breath.

The eyes–hands–feet breathing routine

  • On each out-breath, shift your attention to focus on a different body part. First, your eyes: as you breathe out, soften your focus and look into the distance so you have a wider view of your surroundings, taking in the background and peripheries all at once. Second, your hands: as you breathe out, notice which set of fingers is tingling more–right or left? Third, your feet: as you breathe out, notice which set of toes feels more connected to the ground–right or left?

Exercise: Self-Awareness

  • Top performers choose their reaction to any situation, rather than feeling like the situation is forcing them to behave in a certain way. The last thing we want is to give up our power to choose. If we’re not self-aware, then how can we alter our reactions? It’s often far more comfortable not to be, but that isn’t the pathway to performance under pressure.
  • Imagine you are a corporate leader; your stuff-up cascade for an important team meeting might involve: • having no agenda and completely winging it • not addressing the purpose of the meeting at the start • mixing up facts and opinions in a random manner • jumping around between topics • seeing team members as threats • attacking anyone who disagrees with us • taking any form of debate as a personal slight Has anyone who works in an office environment never been in a meeting like that? Creating a humorous stuff-up cascade allows us to stay detached from such a horror show–while recognising that we regularly do a lot of these things for real. If we can put together a stuff-up cascade so easily, how come we can’t prevent ourselves from doing those same things when it counts? We know all about what to do and what not to do in theory–so why doesn’t it play out that way in real life? The stuff-up cascade is most useful when we get a fuzzy mind and start losing our bearings. It gets us back on the right track in a hurry by showing us the pathways we definitely do not want to go down. It helps to declutter our mind. It also alerts us to two common mental blocks in performance under pressure: being vague, and being passive. If we are vague about what we want to improve and how we’re going to do it, we shouldn’t expect to build anything to admire in the mental space. Likewise, if we routinely adopt a passive position and see unfortunate things as happening to us instead of arising straight from our personal decisions, we will always be on the back foot and never reach our full potential.

Reflective Listening: BLUE–RED for Others

  • Our best strategy in this situation is to try to sensitively activate the other person’s BLUE system, because it will help cool their RED emotions.
  • Here’s a healthy, robust approach: we reflect back to them a brief description of the situation (which activates BLUE) and their reaction to it (which recognises the presence of RED). The BLUE comment comes first because BLUE activation will help cool their RED intensity, and separate their reaction from the overall situation.
  • The BLUE–RED sequence is the key to helping the other person move into the BLUE. Making a standalone RED comment–‘You seem angry’–deprives them of the cooling effect of BLUE on RED, and can easily provoke an even more intense reaction.
  • We focus on listening and watching carefully instead of arguing, so there’s a much better chance that the other person will feel heard. By inviting the other person to respond we give them space to process their own emotions–and often to ventilate–rather than trying to do it for them. We assist them in processing their emotions until they move to a more reflective position. And we hold our ground by not engaging in impulsive explanations or accusations, or hasty apologies. When the other person is still emotional, the time is not yet right for our logical opinions.
  • A useful rule of thumb is that it often takes three emotional comments from an individual before they lose enough intensity to make the BLUE shift.
  • The BLUE–RED reflective technique avoids the common mistake of immediately trying to fix the situation by taking on responsibility for the other person’s feelings. Their feelings belong to them, and they are the ones who have to feel them before they can let them subside.
  • Another trap is trying to be too clever or specific by interpreting our colleague’s emotional state.Telling someone who is emotional that we understand how they feel is asking for trouble. Simply ask what their view was about the issue, or how they saw it. This is a discussion, not therapy. Also, try to listen carefully and reword what they say to avoid simply parroting back their words, which can be seen as patronising.

Part 2: Preparing to Perform – Laying the Groundwork

Chapter 5 CREATE THE GAP The Performance Gap

  • Here are three questions to answer. Just go with your initial gut response for each. 1. Do you want to get better at what you do? 2. Have you reached your full potential? 3. Do you have a clear picture about what your next level of performance looks and feels like?
  • These three questions are a quick way to create the gap between how we are functioning now and the level at which we ideally want to function at some point in the future. Saying we want to get better shows our intent to improve, and saying we haven’t reached our full potential identifies that a gap exists in our mind. But if we don’t have a clear picture of what the next level looks like for us, our chances of getting there are slim.
  • But if we genuinely do want to improve, we need to stop being sensitive about looking at our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Instead of seeing it as a negative thing, we need to recognise that a gap between where we are now and where we want to be is mandatory for movement.

Technical vs mental factors

  • On the other hand, leading performers tend to look towards internal factors to work out where they need to improve. These internal factors could be either technical or mental.
  • Ironically, the margins on technical matters are usually small, and the outcomes are relatively visible, concrete and predictable. The technical factors often don’t fluctuate much from day to day, or even week to week. Meanwhile, the human factors–intangible and variable mental skills like making a critical decision or seeing the next move in the heat of the moment–are often underappreciated.

Feedback vs feed-forward 

  • The obvious method is to start with our current reality then look at our future potential. And the best way to look objectively at our current reality is to take on board the feedback we receive from others.
  • But what if we worked backwards? What if we started out by focusing on our future potential–our next level of performance–then looked at the current reality–what is already working well, and what is missing? Because this approach involves looking into the future first, it has been called feed-forward. The feed-forward process is a powerful alternative to standard feedback. One key difference is the different underpinning biology. As we’ve seen, the feedback process triggers our RED mind from the outset, driving defensive reactions. However, the feed-forward process activates our visual, forward-thinking BLUE mind by constructing a positive image of how we want our future to look and feel. The second difference is in the way feeding forward helps us see our current reality. Once we have a solid, appealing picture of our future, looking at current obstacles that are holding us back is not just more tolerable, it’s actually energising. An effective feed-forward leaves us uncomfortable with the status quo and restless to get moving. If we want something deeply, and we can identify what is holding us back from achieving it, removing those obstacles becomes a priority. Discomfort with where we are now is converted into energy to move. And combining the BLUE image of our positive intention with our RED discomfort in staying put provides the magic. When it comes to creating the gap, feed-forward trumps feedback.

Part 3: Performing Under Pressure

Never confuse movement with action. Ernest Hemingway, author (1899–1961) CHAPTER 7 PRE-PERFORMANCE TECHNIQUES

1. The three circles technique–use in the days before you perform 2. The ICE technique (intensity, clarity, execution)–use in the days or minutes before you perform

The Three Circles Technique

1. Take a blank sheet of paper, draw a circle in RED on the left-hand side and write CAN’T CONTROL above it. For one minute, make a list inside the circle of factors within your next performance that you can’t control. These could include the weather, the traffic, sudden emergencies and other people’s reactions. 

2. On the right-hand side of the page, draw a circle in BLUE and write CAN CONTROL above it. For one minute, make a list inside the circle of factors within your next performance that you can control. You might include your emotional reaction, your mental focus, your preparation, your response to unpredictable events, your ability to adjust to small changes in your environment, and your review process afterwards. 

3. In the middle of the two circles, draw a third circle in black and write CAN INFLUENCE above it. For one minute, make a list inside the circle of the factors in the CAN’T CONTROL list that you can influence, even if you can’t fully control them. Add in any other factors you can influence but not control that come to mind. You’ll probably find you’re able to include several things you initially thought you couldn’t control in the middle circle. For example, you might leave the weather in the CAN’T CONTROL circle, but put other people’s reactions in the CAN INFLUENCE circle, because you can influence other people’s reactions by the way you behave towards them. If you move an item from CAN’T CONTROL to CAN INFLUENCE, cross it out in the CAN’T CONTROL circle.

  • Highlight the three factors in each circle that you consider most important, then choose the single most important item from each circle for your next performance. Finally, step back and reflect on how much time you spent focusing on things you couldn’t control before and during your last performance.

The ICE Technique: Two Minutes and You’re Ready to Go 

The two-minute intensity, clarity, execution (ICE)

1. 1. Intensity–controlling our level of RED arousal 2. 

2. Clarity–getting a clear BLUE overview 

3. Execution–performing efficiently with RED–BLUE balance

1. Intensity (Body): In the first set of three breaths, focus on your level of RED arousal and tension. As you breathe in, imagine a concentrated ball of white light forming in the core of your abdomen. As you breathe out, visualise it spreading through your body as hot RED light if you need more energy, or cool BLUE light if you need more calm. As the light flows around your body, try to feel the temperature change as it reaches your face, fingers and toes. (It might help to imagine you are breathing air in, then pumping it around the body, as if you were using a bicycle tyre pump.) Run through this sequence three times. With these three breaths, you’re switching on your RED ‘body’ system, which runs on physical sensations, to give you a feel for the intensity you’ll need during your performance. 

2. Clarity (Mind): In the second set of three breaths, focus on an especially challenging moment you anticipate in your performance. As you breathe in, picture yourself as a spectator, sitting in the perfect position to see the whole situation evolving. As you breathe out, imagine watching yourself deal with the situation in a decisive way to produce the perfect outcome. Run through this sequence three times. With these three breaths, you’re switching on your BLUE system, which runs on images and thinking ahead, to give you mental clarity for your performance. 

3. Execution (Body–Mind): In the third set of three breaths, focus on a crucial timing moment within your performance. As you breathe in, imagine that moment is unfolding right now. As you breathe out, imagine performing the task with perfect timing, silently marking the precise moment with a mental ‘click’. Run through this sequence three times. With these three breaths, you’re tuning into your RED and BLUE mind systems through the use of timing, which you can only achieve when both are in sync. Timing engages your RED and BLUE systems simultaneously, ready for the seamless execution of your performance. Once you’ve repeated the full nine-breath cycle, go through the same process again, but this time double the vividness of each step. At the completion of the second sequence, silently say the word ‘Trust’. (‘ Trust’ is a ‘feeling word’ that anchors and connects all three elements, reminding us to let our balanced RED–BLUE state of mind run things naturally and intuitively.)

CHAPTER 10 MASTERY 

My definition of mastery is ‘effectiveness in all conditions, external and internal’.

  • The key is flexibility: being able to adapt to changing circumstances quickly and efficiently. We’ve seen that master performers are willing to look at both external and internal factors that might be holding them back. They see them not as constraints, but as challenges.
  • Loss of confidence is one of the most common things that sets standard performers apart from masters. When someone says they lack confidence, they are in effect saying that how they perform depends on how they feel.
  • Masters appreciate that others will blame their lack of progress on external obstacles when the real offender is their internal reaction. They appreciate being extended in different ways, especially if they have to cope with moments of doubt. The internal challenge is to deal with the doubt–the loss of confidence–and remain effective despite that state of mind.
  • If we aspire to be exceptional, we need to learn to rise up when we don’t feel confident.

Pioneering: Being First 

  • Pioneers are captured by the idea of being first–by entering new territory. Those who follow may match their achievement but being there first is psychologically special. We all know who broke the four-minute mile, but few can name the next runner who performed the same feat six weeks later.
  • Pioneers understand the risks posed by new terrain, but they are deeply driven by the challenge. In their mental world, it’s better to explore new ground and fail than not to have tried at all. The exploration of new territory becomes the core source of their satisfaction. What happens is part of the story, but the outcome is less important than the exploration itself.
  • The pioneer is totally absorbed by the process, and curiosity keeps the focus on moment-to-moment adjustments. A surfer taking on a new wave is fully engaged in the micro-detail of their immediate environment; the result, and how they look to others, are irrelevant in that moment.
  • The best way to break new ground is to be deliberate. Clarify our context of pressure, so we know where we’ve already been. Define our reality to shake off the vague and overly generous view we often have of ourselves. Set our intent so we understand the limits of our personal exploration.
  • Pioneers are known for their mental toughness. Being able to tolerate sacrifice and hardship comes with the territory they choose to enter. They need a certain level of ability, but the mental side of performance determines their durability, and it’s this quality that sets the pioneer apart.
  • To venture into new territory, we have to understand our abilities, but more importantly our vulnerabilities. If we don’t identify them beforehand, the new territory will do that for us. And that means taking a look on the dark side. The more we want to stand out among our peers, the more we will be drawn to the part of us that holds unwanted, painful truths. Elite athletes often refer to their internal battle to overcome their doubts and anxieties–their dark side. Addressing this side of us will always be uncomfortable, but this is the only way of pushing beyond our current limits. When darkness descends around us, it takes courage to look within us. To become a pioneer, we need to embrace inconvenient facts so that we are brought to life by the dark side. Breaking new ground doesn’t happen by accident–we need to put in the preparation if we want to fulfil our potential.

Wait or Take The old saying holds true: reputations are generally earned, not made.

  • The secret lies in using the wait or take mindset to power up our performance through ramping up the time pressure. This will challenge us to break free from procrastination and hesitation. Wait or take is a variant of the complain or complete and defend or discover mindsets we looked at earlier. All three share brevity, simplicity and a focus on taking the initiative.
  • The fastest way to gain a reputation is to show ‘respectful disrespect’ to those who already have reputations. Top performers privately admire those who are not intimidated and go after them single-mindedly. The true champion will recognise the take mindset, because they probably have it themselves. Those with false or inflated reputations will be found out. Reputations can be hard earned but lost in an eye-blink. They are there to be taken.

CHAPTER 11 FOR LEADERS 

  • The art of leadership is to use pressure wisely. When we’re in a leadership position, we influence the environment our people perform in, and the level of pressure we introduce is a particularly important part of this. If we don’t apply pressure wisely, it means our team or organisation will not have demanding goals or appropriate supervision.
  • An important question for us to ask ourselves as leaders is whether we see our role as pushing people along, or creating an environment that pulls them forward. Pushing people along means that we take responsibility for their motivation. Developing a culture where improvement is expected, then leaving it up to the individual to translate that into action, creates a very different dynamic. It becomes clear who is driven from within, who needs to be motivated externally, and who doesn’t really want to do much or might even be interested in blocking movement.

Create the Gap: Generating a Performance Culture

  • A performance culture can be boiled down to a single, simple idea: everyone is focused on getting better than they are now. Just because a team or organisation is getting better as a group, it does not mean that you are getting better as an individual. And that means everyone in the team or organisation–without exception–needs a performance gap.
  • Another indicator of a non-performance sporting culture is the swagger we see when players have the air that they’ve ‘arrived’. If they have a performance gap, they have–by definition–not arrived. Ironically, the players who do see a gap and are driven to get better are the ones at the very top.
  • If individuals want to get better, their mindset must be about learning, not defending their status.
  • A common trap is to assume our performance has got better simply because we’re ‘more experienced’. But if there hasn’t been a serious intention to improve, the chances are that we haven’t improved as much as we would like to think. Otherwise, we’d get an accurate picture of true ability simply by ranking people according to age. We shouldn’t dismiss experience, but we should scrutinise harder: what kinds of experience have we gained? What is the evidence that we have been learning from it?
  • If everyone in our organisation has a performance gap, we have a performance culture. If only some people have gaps–usually the junior people–we don’t have a culture of performance, we have a culture of privilege. So the change must start with the organisation’s leaders.

Bridge the Gap, THEN Create the Gap: Using Pressure Wisely

  • Pressure comes from expectations, scrutiny and consequences (ESC). As a leader, we can use these three factors to encourage better performance. But rather than doing this haphazardly, we need to adjust the level of pressure to our group’s ability to respond–and that’s where the mental blueprint technique comes in.
  • To find the right level of expectations, scrutiny and consequences to apply, he engages the group in a frank discussion and asks them a series of questions: 
    • What standards do they think will give them the right level of challenge? (Expectation) 
    • How do they think their performance should be measured against these standards? (Scrutiny) 
    • What should happen when they meet the standards they want to apply, and when they fall short? (Consequences)
  • Every leader wants to resource their team properly and set them up to succeed. Introduce pressure first–before we’ve developed our team’s ability–and we shouldn’t be surprised to see aggressive (irritation, complaints), passive (complaining, doing the training but not changing behaviour) and escape (being busy elsewhere, sick leave, transfers) behaviours emerge. If we upgrade our team’s mental blueprint before we introduce pressure, our team will remain engaged and thrive.

The Art of Prioritising: Subtract, Don’t Add

  • Adding more and more ‘priorities’ creates an impossible situation. It crushes quality, it saps energy, and eventually it makes people burn out.
  • When adding a new task, good leaders subtract something first. There’s a strong correlation between the number of things people have to focus on and the quality of their focus on each one. Doing a small number of things very well, and focusing on one thing at a time, is a much stronger strategy than superficial multitasking. People enjoy doing things well. So let them.
  • The fast leader decides on the longer-term vision, then quickly works backwards to define a concrete 12-month mission, and shorter-term milestones to get there. The milestones are broken up until they’re down to tasks that can be completed daily using a five-minute micro-performance. Larger projects are redefined in terms of smaller tasks until they become enticing and the shackles are off. People like to tick off tasks, but if they know how these tasks feed into a bigger, captivating mission, their motivation doubles.

Putting It All Together: Streamline Your Way to Movement

  • Rather than considering whether our team is ‘aligned’, we should ask ourselves some tough questions about whether our team is streamlined.
    • First, each person needs a clear performance gap in place that recognises the external and internal factors holding them back. Unless we create the gap, there’ll be no space in which to move.
    • Second, we need a team mental blueprint that includes long-term direction and short-term priorities to bridge the gap. But to drive the point home, the blueprint must feature a time element, to bring to light any factors that might slow things down. This is where the next two steps come in. 
    • Our third step is to power up the ‘to do’ list by giving people clear priorities to focus on. 
    • Fourth, we use fast leadership to instil a completion mindset. Fast leadership targets any friction that will be slowing down movement, and the impact on team spirit leads to interdependency and a shared drive for excellence and efficiency.
  • When there’s no agreed direction, fast leadership becomes next to impossible, because there’ll be no agreement about which task to focus on first. Different team members will inevitably be working towards different ends. In these circumstances–which are more common than not–teams and groups default to business as usual and people become busy rather than streamlined. Streamlining reveals what’s working smoothly and what needs improving to cope with turbulent conditions. The search for obstacles or points of friction becomes a helpful process, because removing these blockages and brakes causes more progress than refining something that’s already working quite well. In a streamlined operation there’s a clear understanding that teamwork will speed progress, while personal agendas and dramas are not acceptable.
  • The clearest sign of a streamlined team is that colleagues work hard to make each other look good.
  • The ultimate test of your leadership lies in what happens when you’re not there. When you’re away, do the members of your team know how to use their performance gap to succeed under pressure? Does your team know what to focus on first, and how to work together to accomplish shared goals? If you were invisible and went for a walk around your workplace, what would the evidence say–is your team busy with actions, or streamlined for movement?

CHAPTER 12 AFTER WE PERFORM

  • First, we want to regain any RED–BLUE balance we may have lost during our performance, especially if we became tense or worked up. Our recovery is as important as our preparation–but often it takes us hours to wind down after an event. It pays to be able to recover quickly and efficiently, or we’ll end up in a chronic RED state and prone to burnout.
  • Second, if we’re serious about improvement, we need to learn from our performance–otherwise we’ll be missing an invaluable opportunity. If we don’t review and reflect on our performance, we’re just pretending to train or training to train.
  • We want an efficient but probing process that keeps us moving and improving. Ideally, we want a review process that we look forward to using.

Switching Off: The Offload Technique

  • The RED–BLUE tool and techniques–and the defend or discover mindset in particular–encourage us to balance performing with periods of experimentation and learning, and plain enjoyment. But there’s also a place–especially after performances–for relaxation and recovery.
  • The offload technique is a eight-minute relaxation exercise that allows us to locate, activate then dissolve our tension and discomfort, by increasing our awareness of space. It’s hard to allow our body to relax when our mind is still racing, so the place to start is with our BLUE brain, closely linked to our thinking. Mental tension often feels as if it’s attached to our thoughts, which dominate our attention. Once our thinking has calmed down, we can focus on relaxing our body–closely linked to our RED feeling system.

THE OFFLOAD TECHNIQUE

  • Attention is the mechanism that connects our mind and body. The main objectives of the offload technique are to use our attention to localise and feel stress, stimulate it further, then release it through merging it with a broader awareness of space. The process of going towards stress and dissolving it takes us out of our performance overdrive and into a more balanced mental and physical state.
  • Typically we try to avoid paying attention to mental and physical discomfort, which is the surest way to make sure they persist! Trying to deny them only gives them power. It feeds them through fear and gives them energy through emotion. Paying attention to tension in a different way–going towards it, feeling it, activating it, then releasing it–reverses this process. As the fear and emotion are felt, they naturally diminish and the tension dissolves.
  • The Offload technique uses the same principles that are built into the RED–BLUE tool: it renames mental stress as physical tension; it reframes our focus on space instead of objects; and it resets the balance between our thinking (BLUE) and feeling (RED) minds. Changing the way we pay attention is the single most powerful relaxation tool we have.
  • If we actually want to improve, our debrief needs to create a gap between our future intent and our present reality. Then we need to bridge the gap using the mental blueprint technique so that our next performance will be more streamlined in that direction.
  • first. Is our mindset defensive, or is it one of discovery? We need to be in a position to explore and apply learning opportunities, and we know that our capacity to look at potentially sensitive areas will be compromised if we’re too RED.

Setting the tone: Feed-forward to create the gap 

  • To set up the review effectively, it pays to use a feed-forward rather than feedback. Feedback has a very different feel, and often holds us back; just ask anyone on the receiving end of cutting criticism.
  • We start by looking at the pressure context in which the performance occurred, because without that, analysis loses its meaning and we run the risk of not appreciating/ respecting the conditions in which the individual or team had to operate.
  • Next we remind ourselves of our intent–how well we set out to perform under the pressure. If we don’t restate our intent, we have no reference point for assessing where we succeeded and where we fell short. Often this brief review of our intent highlights a lack of attention to this area before our performance, a good lesson in itself.
  • But instead, because our performance has already happened, we’ll need to review the mental blueprint for what we wanted to happen. How does the mental blueprint we prepared compare with the mental reality of what actually occurred?
  • Mental blueprint meets mental reality 
    • So our next step is to apply the reality questions–what worked well and what held us back–to the three building blocks of the mental blueprint technique. This means reviewing how we performed emotionally (mindset), mentally (system) and behaviourally (skillset).
    • We need to look hard for moments when we had good emotional control and also when we lost control of our emotions, when our RED system hit overdrive and we went down the aggressive-passive-escape (APE) track. we need to look hard for areas in which we were both smooth and efficient and inaccurate and inefficient.

The RED–BLUE Debrief: The Mental Blueprint with a Twist 

  • We always start with what worked well, then consider where we fell short of our intent. This protects us from looking more at the negative more than the positive.
  • Searching for improvement: Strengths, weaknesses and blind spots
    • First, look for the areas in our mental performance in which we met or exceeded our intention. We should be specific about what worked well to reinforce effective mental performance and to consider if these strengths can be developed even further.
    • Second, to look for areas in our mental performance in which we fell short we can ask ourselves what the inconvenient facts were in our performance. They often carry emotional overtones, which cause us to take the more comfortable road and skip over them. But labelling them ‘inconvenient facts’–as opposed to something like ‘brutal truths’–keeps our review more objective and stops us going into the RED.
    • Third, deliberately look for blind spots. We ask ourselves: ‘In this situation, what information did I miss, ignore or assume?’ Often it’s the very things we least want to acknowledge that are holding us back the most. When we’re willing to ‘see’ these uncomfortable truths, we’re in a much stronger position to identify what we should attend to first. 
      • We can use the Mental blueprint with a twist approach to ask ourselves what we should keep doing? (strengths); stop doing? (weaknesses); and start doing? (blind spots), for each of mindset, system and skillset. Aiming to have one main action point for each point of the triangle–something that we will continue, stop or start doing–will keep our RED–BLUE debriefs energising, lean and practical.

Conclusion

Re-mind Yourself-  The single biggest mental weapon we have is our attention. Brain science shows us that if we focus our attention consistently and specifically, that mental pathway is strengthened. And if we ignore less helpful pathways, those pathways gradually become less efficient and less enticing. They are replaced.

Glossary

  • BLUE (pages 27–31) The system in the RED–BLUE model most closely linked to thinking. It involves a broad range of mental activities, including language, calculation, logic, reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, judgment, and the ability to think about thinking (metacognition). Although these functions are distributed across both the left and right sides of the brain the most advanced mental functions are more closely associated with our frontal lobes, especially the left pre-frontal cortex. (Also see RED.)
  • Bridge the gap (pages 152–178) Once we’ve created a performance gap between our desired level of performance and where we sit now, we need to work on moving towards that new level. This is called bridging the gap, and is done by using the mental blueprint technique to increase our capacity to perform under pressure. (Also see Create the gap, Mental blueprint technique.)
  • Comfortable being uncomfortable (pages 40–44) This core idea says we can still be effective when we’re uncomfortable, instead of needing to be physically and/ or mentally comfortable to perform well. If conditions are comfortable, it is anyone’s game and everyone can perform. But for those training to win, the comfortable being uncomfortable mindset provides an edge, because as others fall away with the discomfort of pressure, they will be left
  • Complain or complete (pages 208–212) An approach to performance in which we give ourselves a choice between complaining about our situation, and completing a task within a limited time in order to increase pressure. Often this means using a five-minute micro-performance to complete an uncomfortable task–the one we keep avoiding on our ‘to do’ list–before midday. If it’s a bigger task, we can break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Completing a task creates a positive feeling; complaining saps energy. The goal of the completion mindset is to get the job not only started, but also finished. This mindset is one of the building blocks of a performance culture. (Also see Defend or discover, Micro-performance.)
  • Create the gap (pages 129–151) The mental process of looking at our pressure context, then setting a performance intent and contrasting it with the reality of our current performance level, to create a performance gap. If we have no performance gap, it’s much more difficult to see where we have space to improve. (Also see Bridge the gap.)
  • Creative micro-performance (pages 219–225) A version of the five-minute micro-performance in which the emphasis is on creative thinking. We rename our creative problem in terms of a puzzle, then use a micro-performance to reframe it as a diagram, and reset our focus by generating different questions, angles and perspectives. This is followed by an incubation period in which we release our conscious mind from the task, and finally by a second micro-performance in which we revisit the puzzle and come up with solutions. The creative micro-performance is intended for busy people who have to be creative in relatively short timeframes. (Also see Defend or discover, Micro-performance.)
  • Defend or discover (pages 216–225) An approach to performance in which we give ourselves a choice between defending our current performance and remaining on a plateau, and deliberately setting out to discover new insights and learn from them. A good balance can be achieved by using the defend or discover approach after midday, to balance the complain or complete approach we used in the morning. Discovery creates energy through stimulation; being defensive drains energy through tension. Discovery or learning is a building block of a performance culture. (Also see Complain or complete, Creative micro-performance.)
  • ESC-APE (pages 69–75) An acronym that describes an unhelpful way to perceive and react to pressure. ESC stands for expectations, scrutiny and consequences, the process by which others judge us. Expectations are placed on us before we perform, scrutiny is placed on us while we perform, and consequences are placed on us afterwards–creating a cocktail of externally imposed pressure. APE stands for aggressive, passive, escape, three ways of responding to pressure that are parallels for the natural survival reactions, fight (aggressive), flight (escape) and freeze (passive). Under pressure, ineffective performers have an external focus on the judgment of others, and react unhelpfully; while effective performers choose to have IMP-ACT through a more internally driven and helpful response. (Also see Face and find, Fight–flight, Freeze, IMP-ACT.)
  • Face and find (pages 92–94) The top level of the Mental strength sliding scale describing a state of mind and body in which we feel secure enough to face a challenging situation and find a way through it. This state is adaptive rather than defensive, which allows us to remain engaged with the challenge, consider options and adjust our responses, meaning that we are mentally free. (Also see Mental strength sliding scale)
  • Fast leadership (pages 254–256) Using micro-performances and the complain or complete approach in leading a team or organisation, to remove friction that is slowing down progress. The focus is on setting compelling targets and identifying the human factors that are blocking movement. Fast leadership is not about frantic behaviour; it’s about producing a streamlined team or organisation. (Also see Complain or complete, Micro-performance, Streamlined.)
  • Feed-forward (pages 133–134) An alternative to traditional feedback, this focuses on future potential first, then on present-day reality. We can use it to create the gap between our current level of performance and where we want to be. Traditional feedback–which often focuses on current weaknesses from the outset–can make people defensive, so they’re less likely to take the information on board and less motivated to improve. (Also see Create the gap.)
  • ICE (pages 190–197) An acronym that prompts the three steps of a short, structured visualisation technique we can use to mentally prepare to perform from days to minutes before an event. The first step focuses on adjusting our level of intensity by imagining we are ‘heating’ or ‘cooling’ our bodies. The second step focuses on getting clarity by imagining an overview of a demanding situation and ‘seeing’ ourselves act in a decisive manner. The third step focuses on fine-tuning our execution by mentally picturing and feeling ourselves carry out an action with perfect timing. The ICE routine is deliberately brief to match the fast-moving nature of many dynamic performance situations, to encourage short but repeated mental practice, and to help us quickly and reliably prime ourselves to perform when time is short.
  • IMP-ACT (pages 69–75) An acronym that describes a helpful way to perceive and respond to pressure. IMP stands for intention, moment, priority, an internally driven focus on our intention to improve, the way we’re performing at the moment, and our next priority for improvement. ACT stands for aware, clear, task: once we’re aware of our situation and our response to it, we can be clear about what we need to do, and start our next task. Under pressure, ineffective performers are swayed by external factors and ESC-APE, while effective performers with an internal focus stand up to the moment and have IMP-ACT. (Also see ESC-APE.)
  • Inconvenient fact (page 147) An uncomfortable truth about our performance that we avoid because of the emotional response that it triggers. Rather than trying to identify brutal facts, which encourage aggressive feedback, looking for inconvenient facts–factors that we would rather not have displayed but unfortunately were there–seems to be more tolerable and keeps us emotionally intact. Inconvenient facts are intended for constructive honesty and uncovering of potential performance gains, not as a weapon or permission for destructive criticism.
  • Micro-performance (pages 203–207) A mental technique in which we imagine someone is holding a stopwatch next to our shoulder and gives us five minutes to start a task–or not. It is closely linked to the complete or complain mindset and is designed to put time pressure on us to complete a task that we’ve been avoiding. Most of us function on a performance plateau and make few definite attempts to improve. The micro-performance is a brief period when we reverse that general trend and step up to become focused, efficient and effective for a brief period. (Also see Complain or complete, Creative micro-performance.)
  • Performance culture (pages 243–245) A culture in which everyone is committed to improvement. This requires top-to-bottom understanding, appreciation and use of the Create the gap and Bridge the gap philosophy within the organisation. The inconvenient fact is that although most people say that they want to get better, most people are, in fact, on the performance plateau: they do not substantially improve after a relatively brief period of time within their performance field.
  • Pressure (pages 13–15, 135–139) External conditions that make us feel like we are being mentally and physically ‘pressed’. Pressure is defined as high stakes + uncertainty + small margins + fast changes + judgment. Defining our pressure context is the first building block in creating the gap between our current and our potential level of performance. (Also see Create the gap.)
  • PRIME (pages 211–212) An acronym for the combination of the Create the gap, Bridge the gap, and Complain or complete techniques. PRI stands for Pressure-Reality-Intent, the basic structure of the Create the gap technique (although reality and intent are reversed here for the sake of the acronym). M stands for Movement, which is driven by the Mental blueprint technique. And E stands for Energy, which is activated by the Complain or complete technique. If we can quickly sketch out the components of the PRIME acronym, we are mentally primed for performance. 
  • RED (pages 21–26) The mind system in the RED–BLUE model most closely linked to our feelings and impulses. It monitors the state of our internal and external worlds, and our physical and emotional reactions. Broadly speaking, the RED system is associated with the brainstem and the limbic system, and with the right hemisphere of our brains–though this is a simplification, because both hemispheres of the brain are generally involved in processing information at any one time. (Also see BLUE.)
  • RED–BLUE debrief (pages 267–274) An approach to reviewing our mental performance that makes use of the Create the gap and Mental blueprint with a twist techniques. The ‘twist’ is provided by the use of Inconvenient facts and MIA questions to gently probe for information that might be personally sensitive and therefore defended rather than discovered. The RED–BLUE debrief is designed to quickly uncover some areas of our mental performance that can be adapted and incorporated into our preparation for our next performance. (Also see Create the gap, Mental blueprint with a twist, Inconvenient facts, MIA questions.)
  • RED–BLUE tool (pages 99–125) A three-step tool we can use during our performance to help us gain emotional control, think clearly and act decisively under pressure. In Step 1 we ask ourselves ‘RED or BLUE?’ and assess whether we are mainly in the RED or the BLUE. In Step 2 we tell ourselves ‘Decide’, look at the bigger picture and make a decision to act. In Step 3 we tell ourselves ‘Do!’ and step straight into constructive action. You can move through the three steps at different speeds depending on your situation, but with practice it can be timed to be completed within three breaths, or about 15 seconds. By guiding you to quickly identify your emotional state and regain control (‘ instant mindfulness’), regain situational awareness, and re-engage with constructive action, the RED–BLUE tool allows you to Hold your nerve, Find your way, and Make your mark. (Also see Rename, reframe, reset; Step back, step up, step in.)
  • Rename, reframe, reset (pages 109–111) A way of using the RED–BLUE tool that describes what we’re doing at each stage. In the rename step we relabel our state of mind as more RED or more BLUE. In the reframe step we picture an expanding frame around our situation that gives us an overview. In the reset step we set a new focus and get out of our thoughts and into action. (Also see RED–BLUE tool; Step back, step up, step in.)
  • Scale of mental intent (pages 139–142) A scale setting out levels of intended performance, possibly originating in sports psychology several decades ago. The scale contrasts the mindset and associated behaviours for the Training to train, Training to compete and Training to win levels. It is useful to add a further level above training to win to represent those individuals or teams who are driven to remain at the top of their field. Although initially related to sports, the wording can be adapted for other performance fields (and for sporting pursuits where the language doesn’t fit well) by using fresh terminology, for example, by replacing Training to dominate with ‘Training to lead’ or ‘Training to master’. The Scale of mental intent is a useful approach for establishing the fit between an individual or group’s stated ambition, and their actual performance culture.

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