The Complete Guide to Performing Under Pressure Part 3 - Coming Up Clutch

How to win when the stakes are highest

When the game is on the line and we’re facing acute pressure, we have two choices: clutch or choke.

We know clutch when we see it. It’s the game-winning shot from Michael Jordan in the playoffs, the put to seal the win from Tiger Woods at a Major, or the final serve from Roger Federer to seal a win at Wimbledon. We chalk these moments up to superior athletic ability, divine-given talent, and years of training.

And we know choke when we see it - it makes us cringe. It’s the kicker missing the game-tying field goal, the putt two inches to the right, or the shot that clangs off the front of the rim. Between feeling bad for the player that screwed up, we question whether or not they truly had what it takes to be at the top of their game.

Too often we leave clutch or choke to choice. The truth is, there’s a formula for clutch - for performing well under pressure when the outcome is on the line and really matters to you - that we can borrow from the world’s best performers.

Taken from a line of research differentiating between flow and clutch states, the science suggests there are 3 levers to pull when you need to activate a clutch performance:

• Set a clear goal with the end in mind

• Consciously choose to elevate your effort

• Choose to appraise the stress as a challenge

Let’s take them one at a time.

Set a clear goal with the end in mind

Clutch performance only happens in the context of critical outcomes. You can’t be clutch on the opening drive of a football game, and it’s hard to be truly clutch throughout the game, except at critical moments, like a big 3rd down reception. Where clutch tends to happen most is at the end of games, and for good reason. The outcome is clear - win, or go home.

If you want to become more clutch in your own life, then you have to start looking for a clear goal. This is the outcome you are after, and are unwilling to settle for less. Setting this goal allows us to narrow our focus, ratchet up the effort (more on that momentarily), and will allow everything else to fall by the wayside. The only thing that matters is what’s right in front of us.

Activating clutch mode starts here - with recognizing that there’s an outcome you want, and deliberately setting the goal to get there.

Without this clear goal, you’re floating in the wind when the game is on the line.

Without a goal in mind, the other two elements of the clutch formula are rendered useless. The goal becomes the primary motivator and driving force. It allows us to better consider what we’re going through as a challenge. And it helps us elevate our effort, which is what we’ll turn to now.

Consciously choose to elevate your effort

Humans have a special capacity to choose how hard they try. Despite the background of evolving for efficiency and the economic theorists who posit that we are wired to regularly take the path of least resistance, we have the ability to override that with a simple decision. We don’t do it often, but it’s an ability we can access when we need.

It’s challenging to make this decision, however, because our brains and bodies start sending us signals early in a difficult process that quitting is going to be the easier option. We start to perceive pain during physical exertion when we’re nowhere near our actual physical capacity. This makes good evolutionary sense. We should be motivated to not get hurt, to stay healthy, and to do as little as possible so that we can maintain our well-being in the case of a future threat.

In our performances this signal backfires. When the outcome is on the line, there’s no future threat you need to be saving your energy for. This is why focusing on what you can learn from failure and having a growth mindset actually undermines your performance in clutch time. It’s not helpful to be thinking about what you can learn if you lose. That’s the path to reducing effort, taking your foot off the gas, and trying again next time. And it’s not helpful to reduce effort generally here. The sooner you let up, the sooner you lose.

If you want to be clutch, the second part of your formula is consciously elevating your effort. This can take many forms, but two simple ways to activate this effort are through productive self-talk and using your breathing to generate additional energy. We often have more in the tank than we think.

Nobody ever had a clutch performance by taking it easy. Tom Brady’s game-winning drives don’t involve slow jogs down the field and no sense of urgency. Performing under acute pressure requires shifting our state from survival to going all out, for a short period of time, toward that defined end goal.

See stress as a challenge

Just like our conscious ability to control our effort, we also have the ability to change the way we perceive a particular circumstance. When we’re under pressure and trying to come up clutch, the best choice we can make is to see this challenge as an opportunity to perform well, demonstrate our skills, or showcase our strengths.

The alternatives are to allow stress to be seen as debilitating or for us to just will our way through. Both of these options are sub-optimal.

If we perceive our stress as debilitating, it’s only a matter of time before our performance suffers. We end up overwhelmed by the moment and crumble under pressure. Our performance tilts toward doing anything necessary to reduce our stress, which often looks like the worst possible outcome here: quitting.

If we just try to will our way through it, a peculiar thing happens. Our individual performance tends to be fine - though not optimized - but our performance with teammates or others suffers. It’s hard for us to see why other people can’t just will their way through it too. And without a focus on what we can do at this moment, but instead on just accepting and getting through, our performance is oriented toward executing our best possible skills.

In contrast to these alternatives, seeing the pressure as a challenge and opportunity unlocks our creative abilities and motivation to execute our skills at a high level. We reorient our attention toward leveraging our strengths and doing anything possible to win.

And as a bonus, this framing works nicely with the second part of the formula.

If we see this moment as a challenge, it’s easy to recognize that rising to meet a challenge requires just a little more energy and effort. If we’re after a worthy goal, we’ve now got the full formula working for us, pushing us toward clutch performance.

Bringing it together

Mastering these 3 parts of performing under acute pressure takes time and practice, but the skills are simpler than we think. Though the GOATs suspend reality regularly and seem to complete the superhuman comeback time and again, the psychology underpinning those elite performances are states we all have access to. The reality for the best performers is that clutch is a choice they make, and you can too.

Performing under acute bouts of pressure boils down to keeping the goal in mind, elevating effort, and choosing challenge. This formula helps us to stay focused on what we can control and positioned to win. In a world where outcomes are all odds-based, giving ourselves the best chance is the best we can do.