The best performers, coaches and athletes alike, have mastered managing pressure over the long term. Seasons are long, wins and losses accumulate, and the demands of performance evolve. What doesn't change is the approach the best in the world take to sustaining excellence under pressure.

But first, what is pressure? Put simply, pressure is just stress in the context of an outcome we care deeply about, that has real significance to a performance domain in our life. That means you can feel pressure as a parent (assuming you care about raising your kids), a coach, an athlete, or an executive. As long as there's an outcome you care about in a domain you want to do well in and that relies on you doing a specific thing to achieve success, you're a performer - and that means you're susceptible to pressure.

Pressure can come in 3 forms: long-term, short-term, and acute. In this piece, we'll cover what it means to succeed under long-term pressure.

Now, let's dive in.

Long-Term Pressure Requires Recovery

Let's start with the most important element of sustaining success under pressure over time.

Recovery.

Without any recovery, stress and pressure can become debilitating. From a scientific perspective, we know that without recovery, stress does not lead to positive adaptation. With recovery - sometimes as little as 5 minutes of breathing after an intense bout of effort - we see positive adaptation in sometimes as little as 4-6 hours.

That's pretty remarkable.

In a technical sense, recovery is anything that promotes allostasis. That can mean things like talking to loved ones, deep breathing, reading, and even sometimes mild-moderate exercise. What matters is that the activity is built into your long-term pressure management system. Without this focus on recovery, the other tactics and strategies are meaningless, because they can't prevent you from growing, quite literally, sick and tired.

Keep it in perspective

Remember being in college, where every midterm and final exam felt like the sky was falling? Or, if that wasn't you - watching your friends behave as though the world was coming to an end?

It's easy to lose perspective with something so large looming.

I don't know about you, but over a decade out of undergraduate classes and half a decade after my doctorate, I can't recall a single time I have ever been asked directly about:

• A grade

• An exam score

• Something specific I learned in a specific class

• My GPA

• Any other academic metric

Yet, for the 10+ years I was a professional student, I experienced intense pressure over my performance in these big-time events. I thought they'd define or shape my future. I thought they'd matter.

I had lost perspective.

Now, this doesn't mean that these moments aren't important, or that we shouldn't take them seriously, or not give our best effort. We absolutely should. We just shouldn't confuse important with life-changing. For many long-term pressure situations, the experience is compounded by our manufactured stress that each milepost along the way is cosmically significant. And yet, for most of us, these mileposts end up going just as quickly as they came.

A simple strategy for maintaining perspective is the 10/10/10 rule.

Ask yourself:

• Will I care about this in 10 days?

• How about 10 months?

• What about 10 years?

If the answer to any of these questions is "no," that's a surefire sign you can tone it back down and return your attention to doing your best. Which is what we'll turn to now.