Why is it that some people seem to perform better under pressure than others? Is it in their DNA? Is it something they are born with? Can it be trained? These were all questions I had on my mind as I began reading Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have To, written by Sian Beilock. I myself have struggled with handling pressure-filled situations in the past. That is not something that is easy for me to admit. We all want to seem as though we have everything under control at all times, and I am no different, but the reality is none of us do. I wanted to read this book to see if I could uncover some tactics that would allow me to better handle pressure situations and also to help others learn how to handle these situations better themselves.
(Roger Federer always seems to be cool under pressure)
The book was split up into three different themes. First, there was the classroom. The author looked at why some students fail on big tests such as the ACT or the SAT when they have spent endless hours practicing and SHOULD be ready for the test. The second was the business world. Why do some business people demonstrate exceptional ability to get their ideas across to large groups of people while others never seem to say exactly what they want to say? And finally the book looked at athletics and why some athletes appear to thrive under pressure while others experience diminished skill in the times it counts the most. While the first two were interesting, we will focus on the last aspect for the purpose of this blog.
To start, I think we need to understand there is a fundamental difference between performing an activity in practice and performing that same activity in a real live situation. Hitting a baseball off your buddy who is throwing BP to you is much different than hitting off an opposing pitcher that is trying to get you out while your family is sitting in the stands. There are a variety of details in the second situation that are going to create different circumstances and different amounts of pressure for each player. Those pressures simply aren’t there in the first situation. The thing is, we can’t change the pressures that occur in that second situation. So what can we do to manage them?
“Paralysis by analysis” may be a term you have heard before. Often it is referring to an athlete that thinks too much about his technique and can’t seem to ditch it and “just go play”. They take every little detail of their movements with them into their performance and it ends up hurting them more than it helps them. It turns out there are a variety of reasons this paralysis occurs, one of which is pressure. When an athlete is feeling more pressure to perform, they will begin to worry more about “getting it right”. While worrying in and of itself is not an issue, at least when it comes to athletic performance, it tends to lead to other issues. The athlete begins to think they have to control every little movement they make just to ensure things don’t get out of wack and go wrong. Unfortunately, the opposite usually ends up happening.
In the classroom, worrying in itself tends to be the issue. Figuring out the correct answer to problems requires working memory. The more working memory an individual has available, the greater their ability to successfully solve the problem. Worrying takes up a lot of working memory. However, there is a key difference between performance in the classroom and performance on the athletic field. The classroom requires conscious thought. The athletic field does not. If possible, we actually want the working memory to be busy when we are performing athletic tasks. Too much available working memory affords us too much ability to think about what we are doing. In the heat of competition, we want the exact opposite! If all worrying about your performance does is take up working memory, we should be fine, right? Not so fast. As I hinted at earlier, worrying about your performance tends to force you to overanalyze your performance. You want it to look good and smooth, so you try to force that on the playing field. What that ends up doing is bring a skill that has become an unconscious activity for you, back into your consciousness.
When learning a new skill, we need to be conscious of our movements and what we are doing so we can tend to the mistakes we are making and get better. As we improve on this skill, it begins to become more and more automated. Your body now understands what it is supposed to do so it takes much less conscious effort to perform the task successfully. When you begin to worry about your performance, which in turn causes you to try and control your performance, you slip back into that beginners stage. You lose much of the benefits you should be reaping from your practice because you are now back to consciously trying to control your movements, taking your skill level down to the same level it was at when you were just beginning to learn your skill. In a nutshell, that is what happens when you let pressure get to you in a so-called big moment.
So over-analysis causes choking on the baseball field, good. Not good in that it causes choking but good because we now know what causes it and have something to work with.
There are several ways we can approach a pressure filled situation:
1) Get Used to the Pressure
While we will never be able to fully replicate the pressure you may feel in a big situation, we can certainly create pressure in our practice that will allow us to figure out a way of dealing with it before that big situation comes up in a game. The research in this book seems to indicate that even if we cannot match the pressure of a game, just performing with pressure in practice will help us perform better when it matters. The easiest way to do this is to compete in your practice. Make everything a competition of some sort, even if you are by yourself. You are competing in a game and that is what creates most of the pressure. Get used to that and figure out a way/routine to deal with it. (Hint: breathing should probably be a part of that)
2) Use Distractions
I thought this one was pretty nifty when I read it. If you don’t want the pressure of a situation to get to you, focus on something else. For instance, the author talked about having golfers sing to themselves when going to make a short putt they have made a thousand times. This does two things: takes up their working memory, which we know from above is advantageous in such a skill, and doesn’t allow them to think about their own movements as they go for the putt. If you are focused intently on a song, you won’t have the ability to think about what your own body is doing as you move. This sounds counterintuitive, I know. We have always been taught to “focus on what we are doing”. There are certainly times for that, this just isn’t one of them. I encourage you to play around with this. Create a pressure situation in your next hitting or throwing session. Try focusing on what you are doing and try distracting yourself from what you are doing. In which situation do you perform better?
3) Relieve the Pressure
This was also (and still is) a big one for me. At the end of the day, what we do on the field should not define who we are as people. When people feel pressure it is because they feel like people are watching and judging their performance. And they’re right. People are watching and judging your performance! The thing is, that shouldn’t matter. If someones opinion of you changes because of what you do on a baseball diamond, you should probably stop hanging around that person. I know for a lot of people this is going to sound very backwards. It is something I am still struggling with myself. But once you understand that baseball isn’t who you are, much of the pressure that you felt before leaves, no matter who is watching. I realize this is a much bigger “life” question and I don’t really have the ability to help you with it, but I encourage you to think about it. Why do you feel so much pressure when playing a sport? Shouldn’t it be fun and be part of what you do instead of who you are?
That’s where we will wrap things up for today. If dealing with pressure is something you struggle with I encourage you to face it head on. What you will find is that putting the problem up front and in the open allows it to be solved. Without that acknowledgement you’ll never solve the problem.
Thanks for reading today! Have questions or comments? Please leave them below or shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.