How not to crack up under pressure

“We all know what it means to be nervous,” he says when we meet in the lobby of a London hotel, his bright eyes beaming. “You get it in all walks of life, at all times in human history. The problem is that we start to think about what could go wrong. We worry about the consequences. The mind focuses on being the champion and then compares that with how horrible it would be to mess up. It is no wonder that the heart starts beating too fast, the adrenaline spikes and you cannot perform.”

Alred had worked with some of the greats. He was a personal coach to Wilkinson; in fact, more like a mentor. He has worked with Luke Donald, the former world No 1 golfer, with footballers and top-level cricketers. He has also worked with business leaders and has an academy for sports students in Australia. “If you can get people to deal with pressure well, they are likely to be successful,” he says. “But if you don’t learn how to deal with pressure, life can be very tough indeed.”

I know what he means. I choked rather horribly under pressure playing table tennis at the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000, a competition for which I had spent four years preparing. I went to a holding camp on the Gold Coast in advance and had a team of support staff on hand. I also had two sparring partners who had flown over specially, one from Britain, one from Denmark. The British Olympic Association had even designed a training base with the same floor I would confront in the competition venue.

However, there was a problem. I wanted to win so much, and feared being defeated so badly, that I was in a state of nervous tension before I had even walked on court. As I stood outside the curtains, waiting to go into the arena, the tournament director told me that my opening match was being broadcast live on the BBC. I thought of my parents, my former mentors and my friends watching back at home. And then my coach said: “What happens over the course of the next 45 minutes will determine whether the last four years were a waste of time or not.”

He was trying to inspire me, but his words had precisely the opposite effect. I fell apart. Could hardly hit the ball. My heart was racing, the room seemed hyper-bright, the ball seemed like a marble, the table a postage stamp, and my opponent (a diminutive German who I was seeded to defeat) the Incredible Hulk. I lost the match in less than 30 minutes. As I took the coach back to the Olympic village, my startled brain could hardly compute that my Olympic dream was over.

Alred smiled and leant forward as I unloaded this tale of woe. “You were focusing on the wrong things,” he said, simply. “You have to narrow your focus down to the one key thing, the one controllable element. If a footballer is taking a penalty, I teach them to think almost exclusively about the contact point between boot and ball. Forget about what the press are going to say if you miss. Forget about how your team-mates will feel. Forget about the fans. If you can narrow it down to the one, crucial contact, you can stay in the moment — and deliver.

“The same applies to giving a speech. When you walk to the podium, settle yourself down by looking at the person in the back row towards the left. Then look at the person in the back row towards the right. Just focus on one thing: having the right posture or projecting your voice. If you are standing there, worried about what people are thinking, or whether people are going to laugh at you, you are never going to be able to get your speech across. Having the wrong focus can be disastrous.”

Alred’s book comes at a propitious time because the science of performing under pressure has undergone a revolution. Starting with the psychologist Sian Beilock, of the University of Chicago, academics have performed a number of studies that attempt to analyse the phenomenon of choking. Much of it centres on the concept of “unconscious competence”.

Consider what happens when you learn to drive a car. When you start, you have to focus intently to move the gearstick while shifting the steering wheel and pushing the clutch. Indeed, at the beginning these tasks are so difficult to execute simultaneously that you start off in a car park. Now consider what happens after hundreds of hours of practice. You can perform these skills without thinking about them.

In effect, experts and novices use two completely different brain systems. Long practice enables experienced performers to encode a skill in implicit memory so they can be delivered without conscious attention. This is sometimes called expert-induced amnesia. Novices, on the other hand, wield the explicit system, consciously monitoring what they are doing as they build the neural framework supporting the task.

Now suppose an expert were suddenly to find himself using the “wrong” system. It wouldn’t matter how good he was because he would be at the mercy of the explicit system. This is what happens when you have a meltdown. You are not using your unconscious competence; instead, you have reverted to being a novice. That is why it is so catastrophic.

This analysis maps on to Alred’s instruction to focus on the right things. If you can direct your attention on one tiny process, it frees the unconscious mind to get on with the delivery of the skill. It gets the often nervous, fretful, overly didactic conscious mind out of the way. As Alred puts it: “If you get your head in the right place, it liberates you to perform. If it is in the wrong place, then it can be an insurmountable obstacle.”

Perhaps the most important thing of all is not to be deterred by an experience of falling apart. Like almost everything in life, dealing with high-intensity moments is a skill that can be developed through perseverance, self-awareness and a willingness to be tenacious in the face of adversity. Far too many people, particularly youngsters, are so terrified by a single meltdown that they spend the rest of their lives avoiding situations where they will be put under pressure again.

This is tragic because pressure is an inevitable aspect of life and learning. We all face crux moments from time to time, in our jobs and beyond. Seeing these as learning opportunities, rather than as threats, is perhaps the most liberating thing of all, a point I put to Alred. “Yes, that is ultimately how we grow,” he says. “When we feel that we can exercise control of our development, we are empowered to deliver. That is as true of dealing with pressure as anything else.”

Dave Alred’s five coping strategies

1. Trick your body into thinking that you are not anxious
Don’t think of anxiety as a weakness but as a high-octane fuel for elite performance. The skill is in managing it and this starts by mastering its physical symptoms. Before entering into a stressful situation, think about your posture: try to reset your body shape in the “command posture”, with your shoulders down, neck stretched and chin held in line with your sternum. Think of yourself as a trained dancer, upright, lithe and graceful and in control of your situation.

2. Use language to make you feel confident
The skilful use of language will directly increase your self-esteem and develop confidence, which is fundamental to your ability to perform under pressure. Use affirmations — short, potent statements that refer to the goals you are working towards — and strong, vivid, productive language about your performance, your actions and your feelings.

3. Stick at things
Simply signing up or starting to do something almost always isn’t enough. It’s necessary to make a full investment so that the first time there is an obstacle you don’t walk away. Aim for regular progress on a daily basis. It will produce better results than compressing a month’s worth of practice into a week.

4. Practise “under match conditions”
If you have a job interview or speech coming up, prepare as if it were the real thing. Role play with a partner or friend and get them to test you with tricky questions as if you were in a real interview.

5. Delay sensory shutdown
When we are under extreme pressure our minds and bodies begin sensory shutdown. The trick is to delay its impact. Slow your breathing to get some oxygen in and reduce your heart rate. Comment aloud on what you’re doing as it happens to help you to stay focused.

The Pressure Principle: Handle Stress, Harness Energy, and Perform When it Counts by Dr Dave Alred MBE is published by Penguin Life, at £12.99