In part 1 of this guide, we talked about ways to manage pressure over the long term. We explored strategies around maintaining perspective, building in recovery, and managing uncertainty. When dealing with pressure over the course of a season, whether it’s 17 games, 82 games, or 162 games, these strategies work to keep us appropriately calibrated to the moment.

That’s all fine and good until we get to the big game. High performers have to get comfortable with the fact that some performances do matter more than others. A playoff game is more important than a regular season game, no matter how much we try to approach them as though they’re all the same (and there’s merit to trying to keep it as similar and predictable as possible). When the big day is here, we need a different set of strategies to help us perform under pressure, in addition to the set we developed in part 1.

Strategy 1: Make it predictable

The single best thing you can do to manage pressure for the big day is to make it predictable. That means two things: practicing and preparing psychologically.