The deal review is at four. The number is short, the regional head has flown in, and the sales director who has run forty of these reviews opens his laptop and cannot find the first sentence. He knows the pipeline better than anyone in the room. For ninety seconds he sounds like he has never seen it.
I have been that sales director. What happened to me is the most studied failure in performance psychology, and it has a name, a mechanism and a fix. If you have ever wondered how to perform under pressure when you are perfectly competent the rest of the time, the answer begins with why competent people are the ones who choke.
Why skilled people choke
In 2001 Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr asked what governs choking under pressure, and tested it on golfers and on people doing arithmetic. Novices got worse under pressure because the task took attention they no longer had. Experts got worse for the opposite reason. Pressure made them attend to a skill that had become automatic, and attending to an automatic skill breaks it. The expert golfer who starts thinking about her wrist misses the putt she has made ten thousand times.
The sales director in the review was doing the equivalent. Pressure made him monitor his own performance, how he sounded, what the regional head's face was doing, instead of letting a practised skill run. The fix for an expert is therefore not more thinking. It is a routine that keeps attention on the task and off the self.
The stress mindset finding
Alia Crum, Peter Salovey and Shawn Achor showed in 2013 that what people believe about stress changes how their body responds to it. Participants who held a "stress is enhancing" mindset, the belief that pressure sharpens performance and builds capacity, showed healthier physiological responses and better performance under the same stressor than those who held a "stress is debilitating" mindset. A short video shifting the mindset was enough to move the response.
That is the first thing to change, and it is a belief, not a technique. The racing heart before the review is not evidence that you are failing. It is blood going to the brain and muscles that are about to work. Jeremy Jamieson, Wendy Berry Mendes and Matthew Nock pulled together a line of experiments in 2013 showing that people told to reappraise their arousal as helpful showed cardiovascular patterns closer to a challenge than a threat and performed better on demanding tasks. Alison Wood Brooks found the same in 2014 with a single sentence: people who said "I am excited" before singing, speaking or solving maths problems out-performed those who told themselves to calm down. Calm is a different state from the one you are in. Excited is the same state, relabelled.
Three things to do before the moment
Write the worry down. Gerardo Ramirez and Beilock found in 2011 that students who spent ten minutes before a high-stakes exam writing freely about their worries performed markedly better than those who sat quietly, and the effect was largest for the most anxious. The explanation is that worry occupies working memory, and putting it on paper frees the capacity the task needs. Ten minutes before the board presentation, write what you are afraid will happen. Then close the notebook.
Breathe in a specific way. In a 2023 Stanford study led by Melis Yilmaz Balban, a few minutes a day of a cyclic sigh, two inhales through the nose followed by a long exhale through the mouth, reduced physiological arousal and improved mood more than mindfulness meditation and more than other breathing patterns. Three to five cycles in the lift lowers the heart rate you were about to carry into the room.
Fix the first sentence. The freeze almost always happens in the first thirty seconds, because that is when self-monitoring is highest and the room has given you nothing back yet. Memorise one sentence, cold, that states the situation. "We are short by 2 crore and I know which three accounts moved." Say it, stop, and let the room respond. After that, recall returns, because you are now in a conversation rather than a performance.
In the moment: the routine that keeps attention outward
Composure under pressure is attention management. Pick one person who is listening and speak to them. Keep sentences short, because short sentences are the ones you can finish when your working memory is under load. If you lose a thread, name it in one plain sentence ("let me take that again") and take it again; the room judges the recovery, not the slip, and a calm recovery raises their estimate of you.
If you are interrupted, answer the interruption in one sentence, then return. The response signal, what a room sees when you are challenged, is the single most watched element of presence, and it is almost entirely a matter of having practised the return. That is how you think clearly under pressure: not by thinking harder, but by giving your attention one job.
Build it before you need it
Everything above works on the day. It works better for people who have trained it, because a routine you have run twenty times under mild pressure is available under severe pressure, and one you read about yesterday is not. In our Executive Presence course and in one-to-one communication coaching the pressure is rehearsed deliberately: a timed opening to camera, an interruption at minute two, a hostile question, each recorded and measured. The companion piece on overcoming stage fright before a presentation covers the specific case of a speech. If the pressured moment is a pitch, the free Pitch Scorecard tells you in two minutes whether your opening is doing the work.
The sales director's recovery, by the way, took one sentence. "Let me start again. We are short, and here is why." The regional head nodded. The next forty minutes were fine. He had simply needed the room to stop being an audience and start being a conversation. That is what it means to handle pressure at work: not the absence of the surge, but a practised place to put it.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I perform badly under pressure when I know the material?
Research on choking shows that experts fail under pressure because they start monitoring a skill that normally runs automatically, which disrupts it. The fix is a routine that keeps attention on the task and the listener rather than on yourself.
What is the best way to handle pressure at work before a big meeting?
Write your worries down for ten minutes, which frees working memory; do three to five cycles of a double inhale and long exhale, which lowers arousal; and memorise one plain opening sentence so the first thirty seconds run without recall.
Does telling yourself to calm down work?
No. Experiments found that people who said "I am excited" before a performance did better than those who said "I am calm", because anxiety and excitement share the same physiology and only the label changes. Reappraising arousal as useful improves performance.
What is a stress mindset and does it matter?
The belief that stress is enhancing or debilitating. Research found people holding the enhancing mindset show healthier physiological responses and better performance under the same pressure, and that the mindset can be shifted with brief information.
How do I think clearly under pressure when challenged in a meeting?
Answer the challenge in one short sentence, then return to your point. Short sentences survive a loaded working memory, and the room judges your recovery more than the challenge. This return is a trainable skill and the core of what a room reads as composure.
References
- Beilock, S. L. and Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: what governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701-725. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.701
- Jamieson, J. P., Mendes, W. B. and Nock, M. K. (2013). Improving acute stress responses: the power of reappraisal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 51-56. doi:10.1177/0963721412461500
- Crum, A. J., Salovey, P. and Achor, S. (2013). Rethinking stress: the role of mindsets in determining the stress response. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104(4), 716-733. doi:10.1037/a0031201
- Ramirez, G. and Beilock, S. L. (2011). Writing about testing worries boosts exam performance in the classroom. Science, 331(6014), 211-213. doi:10.1126/science.1199427
- Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144-1158. doi:10.1037/a0035325
- Balban, M. Y. et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895. doi:10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
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