One of the most interesting aspects of my work is that I get to work with some extraordinary people. These are elite athletes that are in the top 10 in the world at what they do, and have to be able to manage pressure so that they can perform at their best. Together we are working on developing skills that will enable them to deal with the most pressurised environment they have to face – the Winter Olympics/Paralympics in 2026. These are skills that I am now sharing with corporate clients to enable them to more effectively cope with pressure at work and improve their performance.
#1 Accept support
The people I work with are some of the most gifted, dedicated and hard-working humans you will come across. They are in the top 1% of their sport. Yet, they are willing to accept that to be able to deal with pressure and perform at their best, it is worth investing time to work with a mental performance expert. Even if they are not prone to choking under pressure, they believe learning and developing their mental skills will be of benefit.
If you feel that you could perform better under pressure or that genuinely something that you want to change about your life and your performance, what is stopping you from reaching out to get support? If the top 1% feel mental skills training is helpful, consider what it is that is holding you back from getting the support you need. If you can get past that obstacle, then you have taken the first important step.
#2 Accept that the pressure is coming from YOU
Deadlines. Performing in front of people. Competition. Being evaluated. These are situations that we associate with pressure. However, to begin dealing with pressure is accepting that it is YOUR perception of these things that is creating the sense of pressure. Pressure is not something that exists. It is your brain making an appraisal of a situation that offers you that pressure. And I say ‘offer you’ deliberately because you can learn that you don’t have to accept it.
When you believe that the deadlines or people you have to perform in front of are responsible for the sense of pressure, then you have NO control. When you begin to realise and bring awareness to the fact that pressure is your creation, then it opens up the means to being able to manage it.
#3 What are you striving for?
Your goals are hugely relevant to the pressure that you put upon yourself. Consider the two similar goals: ‘I have to succeed because I don’t want to let people down’ – ‘I want to succeed as this is important to me and I can demonstrate the mastery of my skills.’
The first goal is an avoidance-oriented or validating goal. It is something you are striving to move away from. Whenever you think of the task associated with this goal it tends to evoke dysfunctional emotions because the motivation is to move away from something you perceive as threatening. This threat-based motivation can be an impactful aspect of adding pressure.
In contrast, the second goal is something that you want to move towards and is an approach-oriented goal or growth goal. Whenever you think of the task associated with this goal, it is more inclined to evoke functional emotions as you perceive pursuits in alignment with this goal as something you are willing to face, even though it may present challenges.
As best you can, bring to mind your goals. Write them down. See if you can identify if they are avoidance goals or approach goals. Reframe the avoidance goals to something that you move towards. These subtle differences can make a significant difference to your sense of pressure.
#4 Bring awareness to your demanding self-talk
Closely associated with your goal-orientation can be the self-talk associated with your goals. Avoidance goals are strongly linked with negative or self-depreciating self-talk. Approach goals, on the other hand, are powerfully related to positive self-talk.
Let’s consider a deadline. Something work environments offer frequently. And then consider your self-talk around that deadline. If you notice words like ‘I must’, ‘I have to’, ‘I need to’, then you are likely putting unnecessary demand on yourself. Repeatedly using demanding language tends to elicit irrational beliefs and a greater sense of pressure is a result.
I know that you may instantly be jumping to conclusions that you do have to. But you don’t. You want to. As best you can, bring to mind why this piece of work is important to you. What would you achieve by getting this work done by the deadline? How would this move you forward towards a career goal or improving your skills?
What you are doing here is skilfully changing your mindset to the task around the deadline to something that you perceive as being something you WANT to get done. As opposed to something you are doing to AVOID.
#5 Understand your brain’s negative bias
Whenever you do something that you perceive as important to you, it will evoke a stress response. In stress responses your brain will automatically want to go into self-protection mode – the brain is designed to keep you safe, not to keep you happy. Therefore, your brain will want to offer you all the potentially threatening or negative aspects of what will transpire. That not only builds the sense of pressure, but evokes anxiety too.
However, with awareness to this you can offer yourself a rational reappraisal. You can identify that these evaluations, thoughts or mental stories and narratives are inaccurate, not logical, and irrational. They are a result of the negative bias. And from this awareness, that your brain is offering you input that are simply mental creations, then you can decide to offer your own positive mental creations instead.
#6 Build the mental stories of belief in your abilities
In the next 10 seconds, come up with the 3 skills, abilities or strengths that you truly believe you have.
If you found that tough, then it may be helpful to consider building this belief in your abilities. After working with my high performance athletes and corporate executives, they know this without hesitation. They will have practiced replaying these skills, abilities and strengths in their mind so that they don’t just have a vague idea of what these are, they know these in vivid, clear detail.
Think about it. Whenever we perceive that the demands of a situation are going to test our resources, resulting in that sense of pressure, your mind will offer you very clear mental stories and inner narratives of what can go wrong. And this has become a great skill because your brain has practiced this over and over again. Understandably, as it wants to keep you safe.
In order to overcome this, and diminish the sense of pressure, it is helpful to practice and replay mental stories of when you have used your skills, abilities and strengths to overcome difficulty. To repeatedly replay stories in your mind when you used these personal capabilities to achieve and where you demonstrated them well. What you are doing is updating your brain with the information that you can deal with situations that present a feeing of pressure.
#7 Accepting that pressure will be around – and that you can deal with it
When beginning mental skills training work with high performance athletes and corporate executives, I am very clear in expressing stress and pressure are inevitable in high performance environments. The difference between those that achieve and those that don’t, is their belief that they can manage the stress and pressure and still perform well.
Therefore, a big factor in making influential change is accepting that when something is important to you these states will exist to some degree. But what we do is work on building a belief that they can manage these states. There are too many aspects of the mental skills training to go into here, but the important point is that you believe you can manage and regulate your thoughts and emotions.
Interesting research has shown that those with a strong belief in being able to manage thoughts and emotions have a much better ability to regulate stress responses and their sense of pressure. Resulting in greater performance under demand.
These suggestions are snippets from what would be a formalised program of mental skills training. These have come from evidence-based research and adapted from experience working with high performance athletes and corporate executives. If making change around being able to perform better under pressure is something that is important to you, then please seek expert advice. Considering the qualifications of who you are considering working with, and aligning with an expert means you are more likely to experience beneficial change.
Stuart Munro is a high performance psychologist and a registered member of the British Psychological Society. His journey to being a psychologist has included 7 years of formalised training and 2 major pieces of research. The research demonstrated how his intervention work significantly increased participants’ beliefs in being able to perform better under pressure, and led to elite athletes and corporate executives being more psychologically empowered. Stuart had 6 years playing semi-pro rugby in France, 15 years of high performance coaching as Head Coach of a ski racing club and has been working with elite athletes in the realm of mental performance for 7 years. Stuart’s more recent work is in expanding into executive coaching, helping leaders in business become more effective.