The Peak Performance Expert

As major-league baseball moves relentlessly towards playoff season, we all have the opportunity to see which team can survive the pressure.  The ability to stay poised and self-assured, even in high stakes situations is a valuable quality.  How well do you perform in high pressure, competitive situations?

The first step in improving your composure is self-awareness.  So you can ask yourself, when have you lost your composure?  What happened?  And also, when are you the most composed?

One way to ensure composure in high stakes situations is to be adequately prepared for those events.  Mental preparation is truly the key to success.  In preparing for a big talk or an important meeting, you might focus exclusively on the content and the organization of what you’re going to say and neglect the mental preparation.  This is a big mistake.

In oder to maintain composure, it’s useful to know how to control your body and control your thinking.  In today’s blog I’ll talk a bit about steps you can take to control your body’s response to stressful situations.

When we perceive something as threatening our body responds in particular ways.  Typically, your heart rate increases, your respiratory rate increases, and your muscles tense up as you prepare to run or fight.  This is fine if you are in fact going to run or fight.  However, usually, these responses undermine your performance. 

A quick way to reduce the negative impact of this is to focus on your breathing.  As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, don’t try to take a big deep breath, if you are in a stressful situation and you’re already tense, it can be very difficult to take in a nice deep breath.  You’re much better off focusing on your out-breath.  So exhale as slowly as you can, and notice how you begin to relax.  Now you can train your body and your mind to respond in any way you wish.  So why not train your body and mind to respond in a way that allows you to perform at an optimal level even in those high stakes situations.

Here’s one technique that I teach, and it’s called the Self Calming technique:

Find a quiet spot, sit upright,  and close your eyes.  Just notice the rise and fall of your breath for a moments.  And now exhale slowly, as slowly as you can, three times.  You might say to yourself, “With each out-breath I’m relaxing more and more.  As you relax, put your hand on your chest and notice the warmth from your hand spreading over your chest soothing you and calming you.  Continue to focus on your out-breath, telling yourself with each out-breath you’re relaxing more and more.  Be aware of the warmth from your hand as it contributes to your relaxation.  And you can say to yourself that in the future, whenever you’re in a stressful situation, all you have to do is exhale slowly three times, and put your hand on your chest in order to reconnect with these positive feelings of calm and relaxation.

If you practice this technique several times, it can be helpful to you in the heat of the moment.  So in a high-stakes performance situation, you can simply exhale slowly three times or even once and surreptitiously put your hand on your chest to reconnect to these positive feelings of calm and relaxation.

So this is just one example of a technique that you can incorporate in preparing for a high pressure, high stakes situation.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Deep breathing techniques, Mental Rehearsal, Mental Toughness, Relaxation techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.