We all experience pressure in our everyday lives. Some of us go off like a pressure cooker at the smallest of things and some of us stay relaxed in even the most difficult situations. While most of us credit natural genes to capabilities of certain individuals to stay calm under extreme pressure, there is a simple technique to be able to cultivate the same.
Most of us in the last decade and a half have seen for ourselves how Mahendra Singh Dhoni perhaps India’s most successful cricket captain, has continued to maintain his composure while leading India and the IPL team Chennai Super Kings through successive victories.
I was watching this interview with Rahul Dravid a few days back where he was joking that if we could probably get inside Dhoni’s head under those pressure situations and understand how it actually works it would help a lot more people stay calm in critical situations.
Unlike what most of us have believed there are various techniques which also can be used to help more effectively manage such pressures.
What these pressure handling techniques do is
- Reduce feelings of anxiety, fear and embarrassment
- Avoid distractions
- Regulate your arousal levels which is very often what creates the stress and pressure
- Guide behavior and body movements
- Help stay focused on the critical issue at that point in time
While there are several such techniques the technique about which I am writing about today is something that I have found extremely useful personally.
Recall yourself at your best and your best achievements in earlier situations.
We have very often seen how in critical individual sports the players who are considered all-time greats raise their levels of performance to a totally different level in crunch moments. This is what separates all-time greats from equally good players and helps them perform at their best levels for a longer period of time. Have seen this happening from childhood starting with Martina Navratilova, Pete Sampras, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic.
I was watching an interview of Novak Djokovic about how he manages to do the same in such crucial moments and he was sharing about how he recollects the various success that he has had in his life and reaffirms that if he has done it before he can do it again.
Very often we compartmentalize our experiences based on where they have occurred like at work or in family and so on, but this compartmentalization only happens in the conscious mind while 99% of our functions are driven by our unconscious mind which doesn’t have any such differentiation.
Djokovic also shared some of his childhood struggles growing up in a war-torn then Yugoslavia and how some of these experiences also give him strength in such critical situations.
While the above was about raising your performance at those crucial crunch moments there would also be situations where we need to consistently be at our best over a long period of time. For example, if we are launching a new product or entering into a new geography or creating a new channel, we will have to consistently keep our levels of performance at a very high level over a sustained period of time. The same technique can also be used to maintain our efficiency and energy levels at a very high level for a period of months that the project is going on.
For us to recollect what good and successful things that we did we also need to reinforce these in our minds. One of the practices that most successful leaders do is to recollect their day at the end of each day and note them down in a journal or diary. Of course, the action items for the next day would also evolve out of the same. This practice also helps reinforce the successful and good things that we did during the day and helps identify the gap areas to work on for the next.
One of the best methods that is suggested to do this is to relive the experience using all your senses to relieve the experience. The subconscious mind records these experiences better when all the senses are used for the same.
To help build up this technique so that we can use the same as and when we need it we would need to do the following
- List out 5 or 6 earlier occasions in our life where you did and successfully completed something which was difficult and where you felt your performance levels were at a much higher level.
- Relive these experiences using all your senses.
- Whenever you face a situation where you feel pressure or when you are feeling low consciously relive these experiences.
- After doing this consistently this will become an automatic routine for you
The above quoted technique is just one of the techniques which can be used to overcome high pressure which creates stress and prevents us from operating at our usual high-performance levels.
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