Dealing with High Pressure Situations
How simply changing our perspective sets us up for success
“Perspective is the only thing that can change the results without changing any of the facts.”
Andy Andrews
So true. Our perspective, or our mindset, can change not just the result, but how much we enjoy something and what we take away from it. The two people in the rollercoaster above are doing the same thing, but having different experience based on their perception of rollercoaster rides.
Our mindset can impact our physical performance, our emotions and our cognitive abilities. It can even impact how long we live. If we learn to reframe a situation and shift our perspective, we are in a better place to succeed and deal with challenging situations.
Say, for example, you go into a job interview thinking, “I’m not qualified, I don’t have enough experience, I’m not going to get this.” Or go to the same interview, with the same skills and experience, but feeling positive, backing yourself and thinking, “I know I have a lot to offer and I’ve got examples from my last role to show I have experience along with a willingness to learn and stretch myself.” How do you think things might differ? Would your responses to questions be different? Would the energy you bring to the conversation differ?
You’re playing tennis and it’s breakpoint against you. You tense, the stress builds and you start beating yourself up, “You always mess these big points up.” How might that impact your performance?
What is our mindset?
Our mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how we make sense of the world around us and our place in it. It influences how we think, feel, and act.
The World English Dictionary defines mindset as ‘the ideas and attitudes with which a person approaches a situation, especially when these are seen as being difficult to alter’.
It is moulded by our experience, what we read and what we are told. It can be ‘inherited’ from our parents and those we spend the most time with.
Are you a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person? Are you an optimist or pessimist? Do you think you have the ability to learn, grow and develop your talents, or that if you’re not good at something that you’ll never be good at it? Do you rebound from setbacks or do they send you into a spin? These are all forms of mindset.
Our mindset can have a substantial impact on our lives. For example, a study in published in 2019 by Lee et al. found that optimists live 11–15% longer than their more pessimistic peers. That’s a huge difference!
The first lesson in mindset that I remember to this day came in 1996 with an advert in the UK for Persil (of all things). Positive mental attitude — PMA. The acronym persisted and was regularly used long after the advert ceased and it stuck with me.
What about in more stressful circumstances? That interested me heading to my Nile expedition, with all manner of potential life-threatening situations ahead of me, knowing that I don’t always respond well in high pressure situations.
Is it a threat or challenge?
This was something I came across in a TEDx talk by Captain Tom Chaby, a retired Navy SEAL. We can look at a situation as being either a threat or a challenge.
Think about how feel when you perceive something as being a threat. You’re on the back foot, your thinking might be scrambled, lacking in focus, you may tremble and go into a ‘fight, flight or freeze’ response.
Now think how you feel when you look at something as being a challenge. You are more focused, clear thinking, feeling strong and energised and you’re on the front foot ready to tackle it.
Think back to that photo of the two women on the rollercoaster. One is seeing it as a threat, the other as a fun challenge.
Science has explored how this differing perception affects us. (Seery 2011, Moore et al. 2012, Blasovich, 2008, Jones et al. 2009.)
Threat
Cardiovascular system — increased heart rate and lower cardiac output; constricted arteries and less blood pumped
Motor task performance —task related movements are hindered
Cognition — individuals doubt they possess the resources to meet the demands; impaired decision making
Emotions — more negative emotions
Challenge
Cardiovascular system — increased heart rate and cardiac output; dilated arteries and more blood pumped, reaching muscles and brain
Motor task performance — task related movements are facilitated e.g. accuracy, effectiveness and coordination
Cognition — individuals feel they possess sufficient or nearly sufficient resources to meet the demands; perceived control
Emotions — positive emotions
Our response largely comes down to whether or not we think we can meet the demands of the task (Seery, 2011). This evaluation can occur consciously, unconsciously or both (Blasovich, 2008). More often it’s automatic and unconscious.
Putting it into practice
The first thing to do, is to try to make ourselves conscious of our response and then reframe it.
I was in Uganda before kicking my Nile expedition off. I have a fear of the rapids and on this trip there were set to be big rapids and with them the risk of our raft capsizing and being thrown into these turbulent, potential lethal, waters. I saw them as a threat. I decided to go on one of the local commercial rafting trips to get some experience and have a crack at changing my perception.
I told myself this was going to be fun and an adventure. That I was choosing to be here and was more than capable of doing it. We had some big Grave V rapids to contend with, but the approach of treating it as a challenge worked and I loved it.
Later in the trip I found the limit of seeing rapids as a ‘fun challenge’. The following is an abridged extract from my upcoming book, ‘Paddle the Nile: One woman’s search for a life less ordinary’. We were in Tanzania and had come into some rapids. We had three channels to choose from and two were too big to run, so without much choice, we set off on the third option.
‘We rounded the right-hand corner, and to my horror there was a massive drop to our right with water gushing over it. My stomach did an almighty flip. Once again, as my adrenaline levels spiked, the sensation of pure primal fear spread through my body.
Peter calmly and confidently told us to turn around and forward paddle, to try to get us into an eddy close to the left riverbank and avoid being sucked over this monstrous rapid. Koa, in his manoeuvrable kayak, had been able to make it to an eddy, so he could only sit and watch our desperate attempts to get to safety.
We made it to the river’s edge, but the current was too strong, and we were being sucked towards the edge of the waterfall. Paulo in his panic tried unsuccessfully to grab onto branches.
During the rafting trip in Jinja, I’d managed to switch my mindset from feeling threatened by a large rapid to seeing it as a challenge, and as a result love it. Here I was totally in threat mentality! I was on the back foot and definitely didn’t want to be there. My decision-making skills took a total dive to those of a two-year-old as my amygdala took control — I went into flight mode.
I stood up, looking for options to jump off the back of the raft onto the bank. I wanted out. There wasn’t a hope in hell that I would have made it. My deeply flawed plan was cut short by Koa yelling, ‘Sarah, GET DOWN!’
I promptly obeyed, turned around, got into the bottom of the raft and hung on as we plunged over the falls.
We hit the water, went under, and I felt the pressure of one of the food barrels on my head as the raft buckled and bent in half on impact. We popped up and started careering down the rapids with no idea what was ahead.
Thankfully, we made it through the rapids into calmer waters.
Now the fear was replaced with pure relief washing over me. We got off the river, pulled the raft up and laughed and shared our own versions of the events.’
This approach can have its limits. Had I spent more time training in big white water and being thrown in it, my confidence would have been greater and I would have been able to hang on to my ‘challenge mindset’ for longer.
As they say in the SEALS,
“When you’re under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.”
I still take this threat vs challenge approach to be a valuable tool and one I used during the expedition and since.
Have you ever tried this? If not, do you think there are situations that you could use this? It could be anything from doing a presentation at work to winning that break point in a game of tennis. Is there a fear you could confront with it, or bigger challenge or goal you could go after using it?
Remember, our perspective can change the results without changing any of the facts.
Sarah x x
References
Lee et al. 2019, L.O. Lee, P. James, E.S Zevon, E.S. Kim, C. Trudel-Fitzgerald, A Spiro III, P Grodstein, L.D. Kubzansky, Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women, PNAS 116 (37) (2019), 18357–18362
Blasovich, 2008 J. Blascovich, Challenge and Threat A.J. Elliot (Ed.), Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation (2008), pp. 431–445
Seery, 2011 M.D. Seery, Challenge or threat? Cardiovascular indexes of resilience and vulnerability to potential stress in humans, Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev., 35 (7) (2011), pp. 1603–1610,
Jones et al., 2009: M. Jones, C. Meijen, P.J. McCarthy, D. Sheffield, A theory of challenge and threat states in athletes, Int. Rev. Sport Exerc. Psychol., 2 (2) (2009), pp. 161–280
Moore et al. 2012, L. Moore, S.J. Vine, M.R. Wilson, P. Freeman, The effect of challenge and threat states on performance: an examination of potential mechanisms, Psychophysiology 40 (10) (2012), pp. 1417–21