How to be flexible.
How to perform well under pressure
‘Mental toughness’ is the wrong approach. It’s a popular coping style but it can backfire by causing you to see challenges as threats.
Develop your ‘mental flexibility’ instead. This way, you’ll be better able to think on your feet and cope with the unexpected.
Separate yourself from your thoughts. We all have difficult thoughts, but when you learn to notice and accept but not respond, you stay more in control.
Practise labelling your feelings more accurately. To avoid becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions, focus on improving your emotional literacy and you’ll see this opens the way to more creative solutions.
Replace forms of self-talk that increase the pressure. Avoid telling yourself that you should do this or you must do that, and instead adopt more gentle and open language that is about opportunity and noticing.
Break some of your own rules. Switch things up in everyday life so that you find it easier to be flexible when you’re under pressure.
Identify and remember your values. Understanding your values and what truly matters to you means that, whatever life throws your way, you can become adept at moving in the direction you choose.
Why it matters.
Whether you’re a pro-athlete, an entrepreneur, teacher, artist, full-time parent or something else entirely, you know what it’s like to feel the pressure of your own expectations and the expectations of others.
Everyone has to cope with difficult situations in which they don’t feel they have the skills to succeed and meet the weight of those expectations.
I’m a life coach and I help teach my clients mental techniques to deal with this kind of pressure.
The system I use is Mindfulness.
These practical techniques and principles that I teach are invaluable to my clients from many walks of life, including business.
‘Mental toughness’ doesn’t work.
In Western cultures, people are often expected to respond to pressure is by becoming mentally ‘stronger’ or ‘tougher’. This approach will supposedly block the frustration and upset that come from feeling out of tour depth.
The ‘tough guy, special forces, battle-ready’ approach, does make a great soundbite.
The concept is widely adopted by athletes, adventurers, entrepreneurs and those in the military who talk about their journey to find it.
Companies pay huge money for keynote speeches with soundbites like this:
‘Mental toughness is spartanism with its qualities of sacrifice and self-denial, also the qualities of dedication and fearlessness and love.’
It might sound appealing, but in my work I take a completely different approach. Mindful flexibility.
The benefits of flexible thinking
The approach to coping with pressure that I teach is all about cultivating mental flexibility, also known as ‘psychological flexibility’.
Mental flexibility is vital for coping well with pressure because, if you want to perform brilliantly, you need the skills to handle whatever is thrown at you, especially the unexpected.
In work, it could be a last-minute request to join the team for a new business pitch. Cultivating your mental flexibility will allow you to better manage these kinds of moments.
A great definition of the type of mental flexibility is ‘the ability to contact the present moment more fully … and to change or persist when doing so serves valued ends’.
The mention of ‘valued ends’ is important here.
When you are rigid (or psychologically inflexible), you persist in your actions even when they are no longer effective in helping you achieve what matters to you.
With flexibility, by contrast, you can switch quickly between strategies based on the demands of each situation, and make decisions for how to act in line with your values.
In accepting rather than suppressing, a person still notices those thoughts, but they have less impact.
The things you fear then distract you less, so you can use more helpful, solution-focused thinking and fewer avoidance-focused coping mechanisms.
How to develop it.
To perform well under pressure, you need several elements in place: an ability to distance yourself from destructive thoughts and self-talk; a way to cope with overwhelming feelings; the mental flexibility to respond in the most effective way; and, finally, to know what matters to you.
Here are steps to build this approach to performing well under pressure:
Separate yourself from your thoughts
To begin, it is essential to remember that the thoughts you might have when feeling under pressure are often not actually true. When you are standing on the tennis court, you might catch yourself thinking ‘I’m useless at tennis, this will be embarrassing’ (or in the office, you might think ‘I’m useless at presenting, this will be embarrassing’) but these are not facts, they are emotionally driven thoughts. By recognising this you won’t get unhelpfully caught up in these negative thoughts and any related self-talk, and instead you will have the flexibility to make better decisions that move you towards what matters, not away from whatever you find scary.
Here’s an exercise that can help you achieve this distance from your thoughts.
First, you need to notice the unhelpful thoughts that are rattling around your head – not to dwell on them, but to become more aware of them.
A visual way to think of this is to imagine your life as a train. You are the driver, the direction of travel is set by your values, and the passengers are the thoughts or feelings that might try to direct you down the wrong roads.
Your job as the driver is to stay focused on the direction of travel and not be distracted by the noise and chatter of the passengers – but you can’t kick them off the train or stop them from speaking.
So, the way forward is not to try to block them out, but to notice what these passengers (your thoughts) say, nod along as if you are listening, all the while staying focused on the road and where you want to go.
A way to create an even greater sense of separation from your thoughts is to repeat them in an amusing voice – something like your favourite cartoon character, or the voice of the blockbuster movies narrator.
This will help you to suck out the negativity and power from the thought until it is clear it is just an unhelpful distraction.
If the voices idea sounds too silly to you, another approach is to try ‘distanced self-talk’. For example, in your tennis match, instead of thinking ‘I’m always weak with my first serve,’ add some distance, such as ‘I am thinking that my first serve is weak.’ A step even further away from negativity would see you get to ‘I am noticing that I am thinking that my first serve is weak’ (and to create even further distance, try referring to yourself with the second-person pronoun ‘you’ or by using your name). Creating distance in this way takes the sting out of the thought and allows you to flex around the belief, such as focusing on a strong serve, rather than being beaten up by it.
Practise labelling your feelings
When you’re under pressure, you might feel overwhelmed by your feelings and notice aggressive, unforgiving language bouncing around your mind, such as ‘I’m furious’ or ‘I’m terrified’.
It’s as if the passengers on your train are using very emotive language as they try to get your attention. Interpreting your feelings in this way can trigger your automatic fight-or-flight response, which evolved to help you survive danger, but is highly unhelpful to performance in many situations in modern life.
Instead of catastrophising about these feelings or trying to suppress them outright, a more mentally flexible approach is to increase your emotional vocabulary so that you can describe your feelings with more accuracy and nuance (psychologists call this ‘affect labelling’).
This is important because most of us tend to be fairly lazy in our language and rely upon six to eight basic emotional descriptors (usually focused around joy, sadness, acceptance, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation). When you use more precise words that better describe your actual feelings (there are actually hundreds of emotion words.
For example, say you’re feeling under pressure because a colleague got the promotion you wanted. If you decide you are ‘angry’, then you will be more likely to respond in an aggressive or avoidant way, which is likely to be counterproductive.
In contrast, if you notice that, actually, you are envious (one of the anger emotions), then you can actively pick out whichever element of the situation is making you envious and put in place more positive actions like arranging a personal review with your manager.
Identifying the envy means you can be clearer in your own goals and work more proactively towards achieving them.
Break the rules…. your own rules!
Overly rigid thinking and routines can all increase feelings of pressure. Increasing your mental flexibility is the antidote, and one way to do that is by deliberately challenging your usual way of doing things. This sounds super-simple, but if you like rigid routines and have come to rely upon them, you will find it difficult.
To complete this exercise, then every day for the next week, aim to do something you never normally do. It can be trivial – maybe washing up straight after dinner rather than leaving it until morning, or trying a completely different route home from work.
hen the next week, aim every day to stop doing something you always do (maybe stop wearing your watch if you usually do, or avoid making the bed first thing if your usual routine is to make it each morning). You get the idea. Just shift things up. The activity should not be anything dramatic, but something that makes you just a little uncomfortable. Breaking your own rules in this way will teach your brain that you are able to escape routine and that you can be agile.
This newfound mental flexibility will carry across the next time you are dealing with a high-pressured situation in life – for instance, rather than falling back on methods or strategies that aren’t working any longer, you’ll be more willing to try out alternative solutions, or you’ll interpret the potential outcomes of the situation with a more open mind.
Values. Values. Values.
The most valuable:) step to performing well under pressure is to know why the performance matters in the first place – this is where your values become critical.
It’s necessary to make a distinction between values and goals.
Your goals are your long-term aims, your values apply in every moment. For instance, you might have a goal to become the highest earner on your team, but your business values might be to never sell someone more than they need.
When you are very clear on your values, you can spot when they could be stepped on and you can also use them as a measure for how to respond when you feel under pressure, so that you stay consistent with them.