The Complete Guide to Performance Under Pressure Part 1: Long-Term Pressure

Sustaining success over time

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.

Eschew the outcome

Nobody is saying the outcome isn't important. In sports, the obvious objective is to win. It's just that, except under very specific circumstances, focusing on individual outcomes tends to backfire.

Instead, figure out what is a meaningful unit of time you can break your performances into, and focus on that. For example, you might find that it's reasonable to take it one day at a time, or one week at a time. There's not a right or wrong answer. But the goal is to make it manageable and process-oriented, and then, to just do the best you can.

In fact, there's a whole line of research on "as good as you can" and "do your best" goals that basically suggest we'd be better off ignoring specific milestones, like completing a half-marathon and instead focusing on just doing your best. What the researchers have found is that this emphasis on effort and doing your best helps people detach from the importance of a specific marker and can ultimately lead to even better performance, because the performer is focused simply on doing their best, moment to moment.

Reality test the importance

When we're dealing with pressure over the long term, it can be easy to lose sight of what really matters. We come to treat every practice, meeting, or other activity as though it's all the same. This is a lie we tell ourselves.

Now, I'm not saying to buy the adage "if everything is important, nothing is important"... but I am saying, you can lower the pressure by figuring out what is actually important. What can you give 80% on, and what warrants your full 100%. We've all heard of the Pareto Principle by now, and yet, under pressure, we lose sight of that.

This isn't to say to turn in mediocre work or not do your best. It is to say that, if you can figure out what truly deserves your best effort, and what would be a nice to have, you can better manage pressure over the long term, by lowering the stakes on the stuff that doesn't quite cut it.

Rigorously cut crap

The final way we can manage pressure over the long term is to cut the crap. High performers tend to have an insidious belief that they can do it all - and this leads to taking on too much, or trying to make the simple too complicated. Think of the coach that takes his superstar athletes and now tries to draw up elaborate plays because the talent is better, instead of executing a simple system with high fidelity. The more complexity we introduce, and the more crap we have to manage, the higher the pressure.

This doesn't mean to be ruthless when cutting grap. This distinction between rigorous and ruthless comes from Jim Collins' Good to Great, in which he remarked that rigorous requires deliberate intention, a scientific approach, and thoughtfulness, and ruthless lacks all of the above. We're not advocating that you just start shelving things. We are advocating for you proactively taking stock of your life, identifying what you need to keep, what you can stop, and what you should start on a regular basis to make sure the pressure you feel is in service of the right things.

Make your world more predictable

As we’ve touched on several times before in this newsletter, the brain is a prediction machine. It’s constantly generating and testing hypotheses against the real world, and then updating the hypotheses to best reflect the actual state of affairs.

If you want to make that process less taxing, and thus leave more energy for the critical parts of performance, you’d do well to make your world more predictable. Think:

• Routines - wake up routine, bedtime routine, pre-performance routine… you name it.

• Habits - meditating, HRV training, reading

• Simplified decisions - leaving your gym clothes by the door, wearing a similar outfit every day

Feel free to make this your own. But, the more you can make your experience predictable and repeatable, the lower the load you’ll experience, and the easier it will be to use your energy for the things you need most.

Build your foundation

When people are under a lot of pressure, one of the first things they cut is taking care of themselves.

This is a big mistake.

Beyond the recovery time we mentioned above, there are several things you can do to make sure your mental fitness foundation is strong. This includes:

• Playing more

• Spending time socially

• Practicing mental skills

• Building self-awareness

While you’re under long-term pressure, it’s critical to not lose sight of the things that will allow you to actually continue functioning at a high level. We don’t want to get to the end of the long run and be completely burnt out. The goal is to weather the storm, succeed, and then continue on our journey of progress. By integrating these practices into your life regularly, you can ensure greater longevity and prosperity.

Bringing it all together

If you want to perform well under pressure over the long term, here’s a recap of what we recommend:

• Prioritize recovery

• Keep perspective

• Do your best and let the results take care of themselves

• Reality test importance

• Rigorously cut crap

• Make your world more predictable

• Build your foundation

With these few tools, you can position yourself for sustained success. In the next part of the complete guide, we’ll cover performance under pressure in the short term

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