Certain people always seem to come through in pivotal, make-or-break moments when many of us would buckle under the stress. The New York Times reporter Paul J. Sullivan wanted to figure out how these “clutch performers” do it — and whether it’s a skill that can be learned.
As a reporter, he has access to the greatest clutch performers around, including star athletes, corporate titans, military officers and top trial attorneys. He discovered that the ability of clutch performers to remain calm and confident under fire doesn’t come naturally. They work hard to develop it by using specific coping techniques — techniques that you can use, too, to make sure that you come through when the heat is on…
The more experience you have performing under pressure, the better you will do because it becomes familiar and less intimidating. The trick is to prepare for your own personal high-stakes situations by approximating the pressure you will experience. Make your practice as close to the real thing as possible. For instance, when I go to the golf range to practice my game, I typically hit 20 shots with my driver, 20 with my four wood, 20 with my three iron and so on. But that’s not how the pros practice. Every shot they take is part of an imaginary scenario that they might face in real competition — I’m in the rough on the 14th hole, two strokes off the lead, trying to clear the bunkers to the left of the green. The pros experience the reality of these scenarios so intensely that when they are faced with similar shots in a real tournament, they’re confident because they’ve “been there” before.
Pressure situations cause our physiological responses to quicken. The heart beats faster… muscles tense… but the ability to think rationally declines. In such situations, clutch performers use brief routines to slow down and regain their composure. It doesn’t matter what your personal routine is — a mantra you whisper to yourself… a brief prayer… even just readjusting your tie — but it’s important to repeat it regularly, even in practice, so that it becomes ingrained.
Example: The US Olympic riflery team hired a world-renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Ari Kiev, back in the 1970s to help them understand why they couldn’t shoot as well in competition as they did in practice. Dr. Kiev (who died in 2009) realized that the athletes needed a routine they could concentrate on to give them an ongoing sense of discipline and control. He focused on their breathing and suggested that they pull the trigger in the stillness between breaths. Shooting between breaths improved their scores in competition and has become widely adopted by competitive shooters.
People make mistakes under pressure because they get distracted by a flood of thoughts, causing them to lose concentration on the task at hand. They typically obsess about their performance so far or about how this performance was better or worse than previous efforts or about how they will look to others if they succeed or fail.
Clutch performers realize that all this extraneous emotion raises internal stress levels, so they make a conscious decision to stay in the present. They decide what’s most important to focus on at that moment and let all other distractions recede.
Example: I spent time with David Boies, the renowned trial attorney who participated in some of the most scrutinized court cases of the past two decades, including Bush versus Gore during the 2000 presidential election and the federal government’s antitrust case against Microsoft. Once a trial starts, Boies’s focus puts him into a bubble. He spends little time worrying about whether he’s winning or losing the overall trial, and he never stops to congratulate himself on a particularly deft cross-examination or berate himself over mistakes. His concern is the task at hand — is the current argument working? Will it hold up to scrutiny from the opposing lawyer? This helps him ignore his nervousness and not be compromised by the crushing intensity surrounding his high-profile trials.
Stubborn pride is an often overlooked reason for why we fail under pressure. It acts like a smoke screen, keeping us from making the right choice at the right time. Look at how CEO Tony Hayward dealt with oil giant BP’s catastrophic spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When initial plans to stem the spill didn’t work, Hayward appeared to have choked. He seemed to blame others and seemed to refuse to admit the magnitude of his mistakes and be slow to take a new direction.
Clutch performers don’t worry about being right or wrong — they focus on being effective, and they quickly readjust their plans when pressure renders them ineffective.
Example: The US Marines pride themselves on resilience and flexibility. I met a colonel, Matthew Bogdanos, who earned a Bronze Star in combat. Back in 2003, Bogdanos took an elite group of 100 soldiers to Iraq to stop the looting of the National Museum of Iraq. His plan was to round up the culprits, but he soon realized that that was a foolish priority, compared with recovering the thousands of stolen rare pieces, many of them dating back more than 5,000 years.
Bogdanos swallowed his pride as a military man and decided to let the thieves off the hook. He put the word out that no questions would be asked and that no one would be prosecuted when items were returned. An Iraqi came forward and returned a Syrian vase and a copper bas relief of a bull from 800 BC. Bogdanos arranged for the man to be interviewed on local television, hoping that this would show the Iraqis that American soldiers kept their word. It worked. Many of the artifacts eventually were recovered.
Most of us would rather forget how we messed up in pressure-filled moments and not relive the embarrassment or disappointment. But you need to examine your performance to gain perspective about what happened. In fact, clutch performers are obsessive about reviewing videotapes of themselves under pressure and asking knowledgeable observers for their opinions. That’s because we tend to choke in the same way again and again.
Understanding how you personally react to pressure can help you break these patterns. It’s important to reach out to others for feedback, in addition to analyzing your own performance, because we often misperceive what we did wrong.
