Under Pressure

How often has a client chalked a personal or professional challenge he’s facing up to “pressure” during a coaching session? For that matter, how often do you feel pressure in your own life and work?

Unlike stress, which can be beneficial, pressure is never helpful. Pressure adversely impacts cognitive success tools, such as judgment, decision-making, attention and memory. Emergency room nurses under time pressure, for example, make critical omission errors in charting. Students’ performance on math and English tests worsens when pressure to do well is increased, and chess and bridge players make more blunders in tournament play than in practice play.

Pressure also impacts team performance. Heidi K. Gardner, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, has demonstrated what she calls the pressure performance paradox: When teams face significant performance pressure, they tend to eschew innovation for safe, tried-and-true solutions, deferring to high-status members instead of using the subject-matter expertise of lower-status team members. Pressure can derail interpersonal communication, causing us to stammer, forget crucial facts and perhaps speak in anger. Pressure can even challenge an individual’s ethical code: Consider the top student who cheats on her final exam or the manager who distorts his team’s performance during his annual review.

For coaches, understanding how to identify pressure moments and support proactive responses can be an important step toward supporting clients who struggle in pressure moments to succeed.

The Clutch Myth

It’s a popular conception that there are people who are particularly gifted at exhibiting grace under pressure—those who always rise to the occasion, whether it’s by hitting the clutch three-point shot in the final seconds of the game or making the sales pitch that nets their team’s biggest account yet. We believe these people have nerves of steel and are made better by pressure.

In fact, nobody “rises to the occasion” in a high-pressure situation. Some of us are just more skillful at not succumbing to pressure. We often see examples of this in the world of professional sports. Former Major League Baseball shortstop Derek Jeter was often called a “clutch player.” However, Jeter’s lifetime batting average (310) equaled his playoff batting average. Jeter didn’t “rise to the occasion” during playoff games and deliver better-than-average (for him) performances. His edge was that he didn’t turn in a below-average performance under pressure.

The clutch myth is dangerous, because it represents an unattainable ideal—and causes a hit to individuals’ self-esteem when they can’t reach it. By helping your clients to understand that the clutch myth is just that—a popular narrative with no empirical support—you can empower them to pursue their goals unfettered by this common, damaging source of false comparison.

A Natural Reaction

It’s inevitable that your clients will face instances of pressure en route to achieving their goals, and it’s likely that they’ll want to avoid them. After all, humans are hardwired to avoid distress. It is easy to understand why pressure is inherently threatening when you consider that in humankind’s early “pressure moments,” failure to perform could be fatal: If you didn’t make the leap from one mountain ledge to another, there was no second chance. The notion of “succeed or perish” was not far-fetched.

In today’s world, most pressure moments won’t have life-or-death consequences. Furthermore, the emotional responses that helped our ancestors stay alive (e.g., fear and anxiety) can actually deter your client’s ability to perform effectively and achieve her goals.

Often, individuals threatened by pressure will make excellent progress toward their goals, until the moment in which they must “deliver the goods,” and take the step that will yield a true change (e.g., confronting a teammate, quitting a job, filing articles of incorporation for a new business). Perhaps you’ve had a client say, “I know what I have to do; I just have to do it.” This roadblock may represent an attempt to sidestep pressure rather than meeting it head on. As a coach, you can support your client in reframing action as an opportunity or challenge, thereby increasing the likelihood that she’ll successfully move forward and achieve her goals.

Understanding Pressure Moments

Pressure moments are situations where individuals perceive that something at stake is dependent on their performance. Pressure moments typically share three characteristics. Recognizing and understanding these characteristics can help you and your client recognize pressure moments and respond accordingly.

Pressure moments are associated with situations your client perceives as very important: The higher the perceived importance, the greater pressure your client is likely to feel. The more (or more urgently) your client brings up a particular situation during your coaching conversations, the more likely it is that she’s assigned a high level of importance to it. Pressure moments are also associated with situations where there’s an element of uncertainty about achieving desired outcomes.

Finally, pressure moments are associated with those situations where a client feels that the burden of responsibility for the outcome is hers alone—whether or not this is in fact true. Recognizing these common denominators of a pressure moment and educating your client about them can lead to powerful new insights about why and how she experiences pressure in a particular way, and what she can do to address the experience proactively.

Relief Valves

Earlier, I used the example of shortstop Derek Jeter, whose lifetime and playoff batting averages demonstrated his consistency in the face of pressure. However, Jeter was an exception rather than a rule. The reality is that many individuals do choke under pressure and perform below their average capacity. One reason for this is the development or “worry cognitions,” or thoughts that spur immense self-consciousness (e.g., “How am I doing? What is my supervisor thinking? What will happen if he doesn’t agree with me?”). These thoughts can take an individual off-course by monopolizing working memory space and causing him to forget crucial information or lose a train of thought. Additionally, the distressing feelings pressure generates, such as anxiety, fear of failure, stress and embarrassment, can disrupt every aspect of performance.

If your client can minimize these distressful feelings and rid himself of distracting worry cognitions, it’s more likely that he’ll be able to stay focused and increase his chances for success not only in the pressure moment, but every day.

There are dozens of evidence-based strategies that can help individuals reduce distressful feelings associated with pressure moments, stay focused and guide their behavior toward a successful outcome.

Sian Beilock, a professor in The University of Chicago’s department of psychology, has demonstrated that writing down a list of anxieties and fears the night before an imminent pressure situation will yield better performance. This “structured worry” exercise helps clients get worries out of their system in advance, reducing the likelihood that they’ll surface in the pressure moment.

Clients can also use holistic word/image cues to enhance their performance in pressure moments. At the University of Hong Kong, researcher Wing Kai Lam found that young basketball players taught to associate free-throw shooting with the image of putting a cookie in a cookie jar performed better in a free-throw shooting contest than those who were given an explanation of the shot’s mechanics. Your client can achieve a similar benefit by focusing on a single word that she wants to embody during the pressure moment (e.g., “cool,” “relaxed,” “fun”).

Invite your clients to engage in creative brainstorming to identify other tactics and strategies they can use to thrive in (rather than succumb to) pressure moments.

COTEs of Armor

Today, we associate confidence, optimism, tenacity and enthusiasm (COTE) with individuals’ psychological capital. However, long before the rise of positive psychology, these traits were psychological adaptations that arose to help humans be effective in the face of everyday threats.

From an evolutionary perspective, these attributes are the natural tools to combat the injurious effects of pressure. Individuals with high levels of self-confidence do not see pressure moments as threats; they see them as challenges and opportunities. A highly enthusiastic individual is more likely to embrace a new decision than feel anxious about it. A highly tenacious individual is more likely to move forward despite setbacks, and someone with a high level of optimism will believe that a goal is reachable, even in the face of significant obstacles. Someone who possesses all of these attributes is dressed for success in a COTE of armor.

Frequently, clients who report seeing pressure as a threat and choke in pressure moments also report lower COTE. Thus, supporting clients in cultivating these attributes can have a secondary benefit of enhancing their response to pressure.

Although most pressure moments don’t have life-or-death ramifications for your clients, this doesn’t mean they won’t feel that way. However, by enhancing your own awareness of what pressure looks like and how it operates, empowering your clients to do the same, and fostering strategies for addressing pressure proactively, you can support positive, effective responses to pressure moments.