The Staffordshire University conference on resilience in sport and business is this week, and it reminded me of the flip side of this. What happens to us when we freeze under pressure or give sub-optimal performance on the 'big day'?
A great place to explore this topic is by reading Sian Beilock's book, 'Choke'. It's packed with research on why people, who are more than capable of performing, fail to live up to their potential when it really counts. Beilock gives examples from sport, music and education, to name a just a few.
Choking isn't random - it happens under certain circumstances and will happen more to some people than to others. The key element is what we do with our part of the brain that governs working-memory (the bit that keeps information on a 'mental scratch pad' while we process it). It turns out that when we feel the pressure, our anxiety takes up valuable resource in our working-memory, leaving less capacity for us to use for performing well.
If our performance also involves a motor skill, we can also fall prone to what Richard Masters calls 'reinvestment'. Reinvestment is where we start to concentrate consciously on something that we had previously rehearsed so much, we didn't need to think about it at all.
Reinvestment makes the unconscious conscious and when we do this, we try (in vain) to control our muscles and movements, leading to sub-standard performance.
The good thing is there are things we can do to prepare for these situations and Beilock's book contains many useful techniques to help you prepare for the big event. Rehearsal, re-intepretation and even distraction tasks like singing a song to yourself, while you (don't) concentrate on the main task, can all help.
The conference on resilience is at Staffordshire University, 26th March 2015. Watch this blog to get a summary of the day.
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