Performance Under Pressure. Ceri Evans
thinking much at all. Everything seemed so obvious and easy. They perceived, and they acted. They sensed, and they moved. They saw, and they did. The usual middle piece of thinking seemed to disappear. They were ‘in the zone’.
This intensely positive experience of connection is an example of complete absorption with our immediate environment. It’s when our connection with the external environment is so complete that we can effortlessly pick out small details that are overlooked by others, and act upon them decisively. It feels simple to get the timing right; in fact, time seems to slow down, allowing us to easily anticipate events and respond to them.
This is only possible when there’s no sense of disconnection. The most common disconnect occurs when we start to think not about how we are performing the task but how we are looking while we do it. We can only be completely on task when we lose our self-consciousness. The key is to commit all our attention to the external world, rather than splitting it between the external environment and a struggle within our internal world.
Instead of being distracted by doubt, we need to trust our ability to handle what is in front of us. This self-trust forms the RED backbone to support our BLUE focused attention. Banishing doubt and worry avoids overthinking – that busy mind that arises from an internal debate about what we’re doing.
But what about our discomfort, which we’ve seen is a key feature of pressure? We have to move through it. We can’t magically avoid or escape it, but we can choose not to focus on it. It just isn’t the main issue. We can make the discomfort an internal focus, leading to overthinking, with suffering in the foreground. Or we can simply notice the discomfort and let it subside into the background, while our focus returns to the immediate task. With this external focus on doing, our mind becomes still.
When our external environment is more captivating than our internal concerns, RED and BLUE can be in sync, which makes us feel single-minded as we go about our business.
In some cases this sense of connection is so complete – and the self-consciousness so absent – that the barriers between the individual and the environment seem to disappear, and performers say they feel completely at one with their setting.
Some activities are so dangerous – doing BASE jumps, surfing huge waves or free-climbing vicious rock faces – that they demand full attention to the external world. Any major internal diversion risks serious accident or tragedy. During these activities, extreme athletes need to be completely in the zone.
The zone isn’t something that we can simply think our way into, but we can certainly think our way out of it. If we’re completely absorbed by our environment and responding intuitively, then thinking is the last thing we should be doing.
Most athletes can recall one or two times when they were in that perfect zone. But most of us don’t perform in a situation where we need to focus so completely on the external world, or in dangerous physical environments where our physiological state is heightened, or else! Is the zone – that perfect sense of connection – even a reasonable target? If the zone makes things seem effortless, then making an effort to get there feels like the wrong thing to do.
Perfection – aiming for the zone – can be a trap. Instead, let’s return to the simple idea of trying to connect with our external world and removing our focus from our internal world. Let’s put more emphasis on the process of how to get where we want to go, and less on how we feel about where we are at the moment. Let’s regard being in the zone as something we may, or may not, achieve.
Being in the zone – physically and mentally – is an outcome. The process we use to get there is to control our attention. We set our external target, lock on to it and maintain our focus of attention, with full acceptance of our internal world. If we become diverted by internal discomfort, we just notice it then return to the task at hand.
When it comes to dealing with turning overthinking into connecting, acceptance beats resistance. Being deliberate about our external focus and allowing the discomfort to subside kick-starts our BLUE mind and allows us to find our RED–BLUE balance and get moving smoothly. And occasionally, very good things can happen.
Cast your mind back to the best 10 minutes of your best performance. How did you get into that state of mind? Was there anything deliberate you did other than focus intently on the task in front of you? Or did it just come out of the blue?
Yes, that’s right. It did indeed just come out of the BLUE.
Split Attention vs Dual Focus
Split attention
‘Pay attention!’
Growing up, how many times did we hear that from parents, teachers, coaches and others?! The reason why we heard it so often is that it’s great advice! It cuts right to the heart of performance under pressure, because the prime issue is our control of attention.
But as sound as it is, this advice is so familiar that it washes over us. We hear it all the time and so we stop hearing it. How ironic that the single best piece of advice we can receive for performing under pressure – ‘Pay attention!’ – doesn’t get our attention!
All those adults saw what was going wrong inside our head: we had lost our focus. We needed to learn how to deliberately pay attention to what we were doing, to hold it there despite potential diversions, and to shift it to a new focus when needed.
It sounds so straightforward because these are everyday mental processes that we take for granted. Surely something so basic and commonplace cannot be so important for performance?
It’s not only important, it is core to performing under pressure. In most demanding situations this most fundamental mental ability of all – how well we pay attention – has the largest influence on the outcome. If we don’t get that part right we are definitely going to struggle.
The emphasis on attention is important because it is arguably our greatest limitation. Our capacity to pay attention seems very big but it is, in fact, very small.
Remember that under pressure, the rules change, and the capacity of our working memory plummets. When the task in front of us is demanding, we can really only focus on one thing at a time. For conscious, demanding tasks, multitasking is a myth. No problem to talk on our phone while shopping at the supermarket: two easy, almost automatic tasks. But even then, mistakes can occur – we accidentally pick up the wrong item, we miss things that were on our list. Now add some pressure – a screaming child, time pressure to get to an urgent appointment – and the errors flood in. At the brain level, RED has disrupted BLUE and our once-clear mental screen has shrunk down and clouded over.
When we take on a demanding task but our attention is split, we go downhill fast. Doing two tricky things at a time – such as playing the piano while reciting verse – makes our performance deteriorate not just a bit, but dramatically. The fall-off is more a cliff than a gentle slope. I often tell athletes that when their attention is divided, they are half the player.
The magical question to ask ourselves when reviewing our performance under pressure is: ‘What were we paying attention to in that moment?’ Paying attention in performance situations is our most powerful – but vulnerable – mental tool, and so understanding what disrupts it is a revealing starting point. One of the most common attention traps is the negative content loop: a self-defeating, circular pattern of thinking and feeling. Instead of focusing fully on the task in front of us, we find our attention diverted towards potential or past negative outcomes, such as losing, making a mistake, or missing a deadline. We see threat in the situation, our negative perception of the threat sparks an emotional response, and our emotions lead to unhelpful behaviours. Those behaviours reinforce our negative perception, starting the loop off again, causing a self-reinforcing, downward spiral.
Remember Tony? He’s running late for another important meeting; this time he’s due to present an important pitch to senior colleagues. In his mind he can already imagine the looks of judgment as