1.
Synchronizing the Butterflies
Towards the end of 2011, English golfer Luke Donald was on the verge of making history. If he were to finish high enough in the Dubai World Championship, he would become the first player in the history of the game to top the money lists on both sides of the Atlantic – on the US PGA and European tours. His main rival in Dubai was the US Open champion Rory McIlroy, who could also still top the money list.
Luke was clearly feeling the pressure. His demeanour reminded me of Jonny Wilkinson’s before playing rugby for England: very quiet and focused. I travelled with Luke to the course daily and, before his final and decisive round, I wrote him a motivational note – to give clear, uncomplicated direction. It finished with:
Tall in execution and singularly ruthless in mind – feeling excited/nervous, maybe uncomfortable – it’s great – it’s your fuel for a great performance – a BIG performance.
That was exactly what he produced. Luke went round six under par and, as Rory McIlroy fell away, Luke finished top of the European money list – the Race to Dubai – securing his place in history and consolidating his number-one world ranking, which he had wrested from countryman Lee Westwood at the PGA Championships at Wentworth earlier in the year.
Even though his energy levels for the last two days of the tournament weren’t as high as they had been, Luke had still been fully committed in the gym and produced some outstanding numbers in practice. And then he had delivered where it mattered – an incredible achievement.
It wasn’t until the following year, when he was being interviewed at the same event in Dubai, that he revealed he hadn’t enjoyed the 2011 experience at all. He said that there had been too much pressure.
Feeling Anxious
Whether it’s the familiar feelings of Sunday night dread before a tough week at work or butterflies in your stomach before an exam, we all experience feelings of anxiety. While we often have good reason to be anxious when we are, say, expecting test results from a doctor or we’re waiting outside an operating theatre with a loved one inside, anxiety more often than not in our everyday lives involves the perception of a threat, rather than an actual physical threat to ourselves.
In his book Sport and Exercise Psychology: The Key Concepts, Ellis Cashmore details several forms of anxiety, which are all related to:
a general emotional and cognitive reaction to a particular stimulus or environment in which apprehension and trepidation are present.
It’s this reaction, based on our individual perceptions, that explains why one person could see a particular situation as an eagerly awaited test of their mettle – a challenge to rise up and meet – while another could feel threatened and subsequently unable to perform to the best of their ability to deal with it. What we perceive as being threatening differs from person to person, and it is our perceptions that are generating the anxiety rather than the situation itself.
The two main forms of anxiety are trait anxiety and state anxiety. Trait anxiety, as the name suggests, describes someone’s general level of anxiety, rather than a response to a temporary situation. Someone who experiences high levels of trait anxiety in the company of others would find a range of objectively non-threatening circumstances stressful, such as going to work every day or attending a birthday party.
State anxiety, however, is a temporary condition which describes the stresses involved when someone perceives specific situations as threatening. The anxiety usually disappears after the challenge has been faced, but it can cause a lot of problems before and during the event, which can severely compromise performance. Perhaps you usually enjoy work, but the fact that you have a big presentation in front of the board today could be making you extremely anxious indeed.
State anxiety is the form of anxiety I tackle in my work, as it is usually experienced around specific events and situations that we need to address. (Many people in the sporting world prefer the term ‘performance anxiety’.) An otherwise confident person might go to pieces on the golf course, where state anxiety strikes. Or they could be a pretty good golfer until their ball ends up in a bunker – a specific situation within the game. State anxiety usually occurs when we attempt a challenge outside our comfort zone, such as playing in a cup final or giving your first presentation to your new classmates at university.
Performance Anxiety
It is generally accepted that anxiety – the perception of a threat – produces tension in the body and can create all manner of emotional distractions that can put us off the task at hand. These task-irrelevant thoughts interfere with our thinking and prevent us from being able to perform efficiently a process we would otherwise be able to do easily. For an elite sportsman, this might mean an inability to execute a well-practised, basic motor skill and make sound decisions.
If we return to our example of throwing a ball of paper at a bin, how much would the burgeoning audience and the financial pressure have brought about an unhelpful emotional state in you? Would you have thrived under it, or would your arm have grown heavy, your mind overwhelmed by unhelpful thoughts? Would you have experienced state anxiety?
This kind of anxiety can manifest itself in many ways, including extreme self-consciousness and overthinking how you’d throw the paper ball, as well as the usual physical symptoms: the pounding heart, dry mouth and sweating. But at its core, the causes are quite simple: it’s a fear of failure.
The ‘f’ word has become an all too powerful part of our language. It allows us to paint things in black and white and, despite our best efforts, it is easy to view anything in which we don’t 100 per cent succeed as ‘failure’. Yes, failure can lead to all sorts of problems: failure in the case of your paper-ball throw would have real financial repercussions for you, while in an exam or a test, failure is usually easily defined. But ‘failure’ can mean all sorts of things in other situations and include many shades of grey. It could mean meeting a new partner’s social group for the first time when you’re nervous about it and feeling afterwards that you haven’t given a good account of yourself. It could mean volunteering to give a talk at your local school, only to have a class full of bored children horsing around and playing on their phones instead of listening to you.
Not all of these ‘failures’ have huge, negative consequences. Some of them are learning experiences and, most interestingly, it is quite often the case that ‘failure’ in our own minds isn’t even detectable by others, who might think everything went fine. Your partner might say, ‘You were great – who wouldn’t be a bit nervous and uncomfortable with a room full of strangers basically interrogating them?’ An experienced teacher might simply smile and say, ‘Welcome to my world!’
Again, this is all pointing to our perception of a situation. We’re negatively reinforcing (our own) subjective opinions rather than objective truths. Unfortunately, once we perceive that we’ve failed, we’re more likely to be anxious about doing it again, and for some people that then means they start trying to avoid the situation – avoiding the possibility of failure.
When we see this on the sports field, we talk about teams and players looking to evade defeat rather than striving for victory. And once these kinds of thoughts come into play, it exerts a different kind of pressure, more difficult to manage.
Don’t Miss!
I regularly work with Kevin Shine, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s lead fast-bowling coach. We were putting the England performance squad bowlers through a test in which they had to hit a target that was marked as a slot on the floor six yards from the stumps. The slot was two yards long and twelve inches wide. For each hit the bowler scored a point. By the end of the session, all eight of the bowlers were hitting the targets and there was a fair bit of competitive edge between them.
We then changed the contest so that, instead of being rewarded for hitting their target, the bowlers were penalized for not landing their ball in the target area, the two-yard by twelve-inch slot. This proved to be a much tougher test, with the bowlers having to adjust from a proactive task, to make a conscious act to avoid an outcome. The key for the bowler was to replace the conditions we had created and convert the task in their minds to hitting the target, rather than not missing.
The new contest was simple: miss the two-yard target and you were out. We had two sudden-death rounds, with a victorious bowler left at the end of each. Whereas before there had been a good sense of camaraderie and competition, now the atmosphere shifted and the banter became subdued. The players afterwards spoke of how they had felt much more pressure. The pressure caused the bowler to experience an increase in tension, which made the swing arc tighter and smaller. Of the fourteen balls that missed the target, thirteen were bowled short.
The difference between moving towards something – wanting to achieve it – and moving away from something – not wanting to fail – can have a significant impact on the way we think. When it is applied to an event or even a single action, such as a specific ball being bowled, then trying not to miss pollutes the brain with the idea of the ball missing its target. Trying not to muck up your exams, your presentation, the interview you’re about to go on – it’s all planting the idea of failure in your mind. It is far more effective to visualize yourself successfully completing your exams, presentation or interview.
Successful people are more able in the heat of competition to visualize what they want and have the confidence in their technique to focus on what to do, rather than allowing thoughts of what to avoid distract them.
Any Road Will Take You There
A team languishing near the bottom of the Premier League – take Sunderland from 2013–14 or 2014–15 – that has spent almost the entire season down there, suddenly starts putting an immense winning streak together, somehow beating teams near the top of the table in quick succession to avoid relegation. And then what happens when they are safe? Results drop off, performances fall away – and it’s hard to escape the feeling that those very teams will be back in the mire again the following season.
At the beginning of February 2016, Sunderland – who won back-to-back games for the first time all season in their last six games of 2014–15, losing just once, when safety was all but secured – were back near the bottom of the table.
So how can such teams briefly demonstrate the kind of form that would see them safely near the top of the table if they maintained it throughout a season?
Those who are motivated by avoidance – who wish to move away from trouble, stress, discomfort or pain – tend only to perform when these threats are near at hand. The further away from the source of discomfort they move – in this case relegation – the less impact it has upon them. They played quite consistently throughout the season and then, when the threat was at its most acute, their motivation increased dramatically; they played out of their skins to save themselves from the ignominy and (relative) poverty of Championship status. Once the threat was gone their motivation went back to its pre-threat levels.
Of course, that’s not to say that this kind of performance isn’t worthy of merit. Those teams that successfully avoid relegation from such a position are able to perform better than those who are actually relegated when this kind of pressure is on. It is no coincidence that Sunderland had pulled off an even more remarkable escape in the 2013–14 season, leaping from bottom of the table with only six games remaining to win four and draw one of their next five, beating the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United on their own grounds in the process. And it’s not just teams at the bottom of the table: if you look at a club like Arsenal’s ability to perform when their Champions League qualification is under threat, you can see a similar avoidance motivation (i.e. they’re motivated not to finish outside of the top four) which is shown in their improved performance when the pressure is on and the fact that they haven’t finished outside the Champions League places since the 1996–97 season, when they finished third and only the top two qualified. They are used to finishing there, and they have the experience to draw upon to help them.
Those with a primary motivation to avoid distress and unfavourable outcomes invariably suffer from increased anxiety and stress levels, either individually or as a team. They don’t become proactive until the pressure is at its absolute peak. Sound familiar? Many of us are similarly motivated in our day-to-day lives: did you always leave that essay at school until the night before? Do you find yourself preparing for an interview on the way there? Are you up until the small hours filling in your tax return as the deadline is hours away?
It would be much better, in terms of both our health and our performance, to react earlier to these situations, when we would have more practical options available to us. But some people genuinely can’t seem to do this – they need the motivating pressure to force them into it, despite the fact that doing so cuts down their options.
This method of dealing with pressure has its limitations. Those who are generally motivated by avoidance usually spend so much time and energy on moving away from the situation that they don’t have the resources to plan and work through methods to improve themselves in the long term. I have known of Premier League footballers manipulating situations so that they are able to dodge a specific challenge – choosing the easy pass instead of exposing themselves to potential derision or failure – at a crucial point in the match.
In the workplace, say you struggled with public speaking. If you are motivated by avoidance, you might find yourself doing everything in your power to move away from situations where you’d be required to do it, perhaps avoiding volunteering for potentially career-furthering projects or not applying for a job you might covet, or even delegating public-speaking responsibilities to a junior, which might save you from the short-term threat you perceive but does little to enhance your standing in the eyes of your peers. The energy and effort and the attendant anxiety and stress involved may help you in your short-term goal (avoiding public speaking), but are they making the problem go away? Surely it would be far better to use all that effort to make improvements to your public-speaking skills, to face your problems and take on even a little of the responsibility you’ve spent so long avoiding.
Avoidance-motivated people spend so much time concentrating on what they don’t want, rather than what they do, that they have nothing to aim for except staying out of the way of the same things they have always avoided. This will be discussed further in a later chapter, but in the meantime it is safe to assume that the likes of Sunderland will be spending the season with one simple motivation: not to get relegated. And, if you’re that way inclined, I don’t doubt for a second that you’ll be up late again doing next year’s tax return so that you do not miss the deadline.
High Octane Fuel for the Body
It was June 1997 in South Africa, with the British Lions about to play the crucial second Test against their hosts. The changing room was alive with the sounds of metal studs clattering on the concrete floor, of colourful language and shouts of, ‘Come on!’ from pumped-up players preparing to go into battle … and of the unmistakeable sound of retching from the toilets.
Welsh full-back Neil Jenkins would often vomit before games. His state anxiety would see him worked up to the point of having to be sick before the match; however, once on the pitch he was an ice-cold operator, exhibiting no sign of what had been going on before. This Test was no different.
We had worked very hard on Neil’s kicking for touch in the week leading up to the match, as we expected a lot of penalties to be awarded. Neil was perfect in his goal kicking in the match and was able to give us the territorial advantage to go for goal more often than the South Africans could kick at ours. Although they scored three tries, Neil put away five penalties to lead the Lions to an 18–15 victory – and with it the series.
The effects of pressure are often not pleasant. As Luke Donald said at the start of the chapter, sometimes they can be so severe that they completely take away the enjoyment of even a successful event. However, in my experience most sportsmen and women wouldn’t trade these pre-match emotional responses – the blood racing through the veins, the bouncing off the walls, even the vomiting – for anything.
There is a negativity associated with anxiety and nervousness, and we seem to have the idea that such feelings should be avoided and that they invoke shame. You wouldn’t want your colleagues at work or your opponent on the sports field to know about your nerves, to be aware of your ‘weakness’. But I believe this is a completely misguided approach. There is another, perhaps more surprising way to approach state anxiety, and that is to embrace these feelings.
Adrenaline can be your best friend if you understand how to harness it and learn to accept that it is part of a great performance to come. I have worked with innumerable athletes who maintain that, without anxiety, they wouldn’t be able to perform to their potential. So, despite their not being very pleasant, the impact of these feelings before a big event – and it could be an Olympic final, an office football competition or your first day of work after leaving school – can, with effective management, become not only helpful but vital for you to perform much nearer to the best of your ability.
How is it possible to be courageous if you’re not at first afraid? It is perfectly natural to experience fear; we have all felt it at some point in our lives and professional athletes are no different, despite what they might claim. But it is not perfectly natural to allow fear to have mastery over us. What often separates the best from the rest is courage. Not the audacious acts of bravery more suitable for the silver screen, but rather the smaller, everyday kind that demonstrate the ability to control our fear. And I’m not just talking about sportspeople. No entertainer at any level will ever do well if they can’t control their stage fright. No nurse or doctor will last long if they cannot manage their anxiety about making quick, life-or-death decisions. No one working in a pub or restaurant can get through a busy Friday night if they cannot tame their anxiety when faced with groups of unpredictable people.
It is not the amount of fear that is important, then, but the amount of courage we possess to address this fear and utilize it. It is vital to see anxiety as a positive aspect of performance. As Olympic basketball coach Jack Donohue so eloquently expressed it: ‘It’s not a case of getting rid of the butterflies, it’s a question of getting them to fly in formation.’
When I was coaching rugby with England, the goal kickers would practise every day in the week leading up to a match. The kicking practice at the beginning of the week concentrated entirely on accuracy, quality of strike and technique rather than distance. Towards the end of the week, when anxiety levels were increasing in anticipation of the looming match, the kickers would start naturally achieving longer distances, in large part due to the increase in adrenaline. The players called this anxiety ‘juice’. They used it as a fuel. We hadn’t concentrated on distance earlier in the week as it could have resulted in the players over-exerting to kick the ball too hard, which would interfere with their technique, so a particularly long kick then would be admired because it was ‘without juice’. These players – the best in the country – understood implicitly the need for anxiety to fuel their performance.
While state anxiety can be harnessed to enhance performance in the heat of battle, it’s not to say the effects prior to the event won’t be unpleasant. Neil Jenkins might have been sick before taking the field, but once on it he was a fantastic performer, using his anxiety to improve his play in big games. Someone else who knows a thing or two about performing under pressure, eighteen-time major winner Jack Nicklaus, said:
I don’t know how you can play well if you are not nervous. Nowadays I don’t get nervous unless I’m in a major and in a position to win. If I could only learn to concentrate when I am not nervous, so I could get into a position to win, I would be fine.
To a skilled performer, anxiety can be essential. The physical symptoms, such as the increased heart rate, sweating and muscle tension as a result of adrenaline, are the ‘juice’ to produce that extra bit of distance, slightly faster speed, extra reach, harder punch – that ability for someone to reach into themselves for a little more. Without this, complacency can set in. I remember one occasion with the England rugby team, after the final meeting and getting on the team coach to head to the ground, discussing with the rest of the staff whether the players were up for it. Were they experiencing the anxiety to fuel a big performance?
The release of adrenaline readies the body for fight or flight, and it is the skilled performer on any stage who has the ability to channel this mode through the execution of a precise, well-rehearsed series of skills, while the less-practised will not be able to focus so accurately to utilize this surge of adrenaline. As Donohue said: ‘If your focus is in the right place – for example, on reminding yourself of your best task focus and then on riveting yourself to that task – the butterflies will fly in formation.’
But how exactly do we get them to do that?
C to J – Easy as 1, 2, 3?
Picture a city at rush hour: the sun is beating down; cars are gridlocked, bumper to bumper; horns are blaring – no one is going anywhere fast. Now look at the drivers: they’re over their wheels, with hunched, tense shoulders, their chins forward and a look of exasperation on their faces. No wonder tempers are short!
When we’re under pressure, we often aren’t immediately conscious of the effect it has on our minds – and even more often, such as in situations like a stressful rush-hour traffic jam, we aren’t aware of the impact it’s having on our bodies. The physical effect of long-term stress is well documented, with the likes of hypertension and heart disease the potential consequences, and most of us would like to think we’d recognize the immediate impact of short-term anxiety on our bodies. If I asked you to show me what a stressed person looks like, you’d probably adopt a pose like the drivers in the traffic jam: tensed shoulders, hunched over, head down. You’d take on these characteristics and it would feel like a pronounced shift in your body. But if, on another occasion, you were genuinely stressed and I put a mirror in front of you, the chances are you’d be shocked by how much your appearance resembles your impression of a stressed person without your even being aware of it.
When we’re under pressure, our heart rate rises and our attention narrows to become consumed by the source of our stress. As a consequence, our awareness of our environment, and especially our self- awareness, plummets, so that we can be hunched over, head down, shoulders clenched, displaying all the symptoms of the physical impact of anxiety without even realizing it. So, this is the anxiety in our mind having a subconscious impact on our bodies, affecting our body language. But what we are usually not so blissfully unaware of is just how much the body then, in turn, informs the mind. There is a reciprocal relationship going on, with a stressed mind resulting in a stressed body, the stressed body then making for an even more stressed mind, and so on. The worst of it is, we usually have no idea this is happening, so lost are we in our problems.
This is where the C to J concept comes in. It is a tool I have developed, initially in rugby goal kicking and now use to help manage the physical impact of anxiety in the people I work with. I have used it with everyone from golfers to judo players, from Premier League footballers to polo players and from students to salesmen. At its heart, it is about giving someone the power to use their body language to ‘talk’ to their mind, raising the awareness and producing a set of characteristics in the body to better reflect a more positive state of mind, all of which should help mobilize your butterflies.
The C to J concept’s name comes from its origins as a kicking tool. If you look at Figure 1, drawn from above, you’ll see the difference between the C-shape and the J-shape. On the left is plotted the path the foot of a C-shape kicker would take when kicking the ball, in which only a small part of the swing moves through and in the intended direction of the ball. On the right, however, the J-shape plots a kick where the path of the swing goes from curved to straight, spending more time in the intended direction of the ball. The fundamental principle of kicking in all sports is applying power through the ball in the direction in which you want it to travel, for which the J-shape is clearly more effective.
One of the most notable J-shape models is footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, who has a powerful, upright posture and kicking technique. Former England captains Steven Gerrard and David Beckham, on the other hand, are more towards being C-shape kickers.
While all these players have been very successful, it is the J-shape that is more effective for pressure situations. When anxiety starts to have an impact on a player, their muscles naturally begin to tighten. Unchecked, the player is likely to lean towards the C-shape, which produces a more inconsistent strike because the foot’s path is going towards the target for only a very small part of its swing. Top players such as those I’ve mentioned are usually able to deal with the effects of anxiety very well; however, J-shape kickers are more likely to be able to maintain their technique even under extreme conditions. With muscles tightening and movements shortening, it doesn’t affect the path: a line is still a line, even if it’s shorter, whereas when a circle gets tighter, it changes the path.
Clearly, there are many highly accomplished and successful C-shape kickers in the upper echelons of the games of football and rugby, but I believe they could still improve their consistency. Someone with a ‘no-limits’ mindset would always believe in their capacity to improve.
Through using the C to J concept in kicking initially and then expanding it into other sports – such as golf, particularly in regards to the swing – and then into areas like business, I have developed a comparison of physical characteristics that are influenced when we experience anxiety (see Table 1).
I use this table primarily as a checklist to see if and how pressure is affecting someone’s physical demeanour. Of course, not all of these characteristics are relevant to every activity, just as not all of them are relevant to each individual – people exhibit the physical effects of pressure in many different ways. It isn’t a case of the C-shape being inherently bad and the J-shape being good. Very few will have a profile entirely in the C or J column. The point is to use it more as a loose guideline to make people aware of their reactions to the pressured environment, and thus how to manage them. Without awareness first, we cannot make the butterflies fly in formation.
C-shape  J-shape |
||
| Hunched, curled | Posture | Upright, angular |
| Small | Body | Big |
| Quick, snatched | Speed | Controlled, in command |
| Appears rushed | Time | Time to see, decide and execute |
| Rotates | Pillar | Shifts to target |
| Straighten | Legs | Knees flexed |
| Adduction | Principal action | Flexion |
| Flit | Awareness | Grounded |
| Anxiety | Emotion | Excitement |
| Note: It’s important to realize that C- and J-shapes aren’t absolute but a continuum: someone tending to the J side might move more towards the C side when pressure strikes. | ||
Body Language and Posture: Taking Command
As we’ve discussed, when we move into a stressful state we aren’t always consciously aware of it. As we come under increasing levels of pressure, our awareness diminishes and our natural reaction is to become more tense and tighter, and as a result our movements become physically smaller.
Before we enter into a stressful situation it is always worth resetting our posture. With a rugby goal kicker, a footballer about to take a penalty, a cricket batsman about to face a delivery and a golfer lining up a shot, I always make it part of a player’s pre-shot routine to set their body shape in the ‘command’ posture and to make themselves as physically big as possible. I advise anyone in a stressful situation to adopt the same approach.
Command posture involves having the shoulders down and packed, with the neck stretched and the chin held in line with the sternum. Despite the title ‘command’, think less of a military-style standing to attention and more of a trained dancer, upright, lithe and graceful: you are in control of your situation, not standing to the attention of someone or something else.
There are two little experiments you can do in the gym to experience the feel of command posture. The first is to sit on a bench in a crouched position and then put a lightly weighted bar – no more than five kilos to start with – across your shoulders. Keeping your legs and hips still, rotate your pillar (the area from the crotch to the top of the head) to the left and then the right. You’ll notice how limited and awkward your movement is. Now, with the weights still in place, adopt an upright posture and see how much further you can turn and how much more comfortable supporting the weight becomes.
The second experiment is about awareness. A common piece of apparatus in a gym is the leg-extension machine, on which you sit with your knees bent and your feet hooked behind a padded bar. You extend your legs forward against the resistance you have selected. Once you’re warmed up, you should set the resistance so it is difficult for you to move – but not impossible – and attempt to move the bar up. Notice what happens to your pillar: as soon as you apply power through your legs, it naturally straightens to get into a strong and stable position for your legs to work from. This stability and physically strong pillar position – your command posture – allows you to apply your power most effectively.
Next time you enter into a situation you suspect will be stressful, try to take a second before you enter the fray and reset your posture in this manner.
Four-legged Friends
It was late spring a few years ago when the concerned mother of a sixteen-year-old girl approached me. Her daughter was a very talented horse rider, but she had a round-shouldered posture that was costing her points when she competed in the dressage. What made things worse was that, as she became aware of it, she started to feel more pressure in the event, which in turn only made her posture worse. Also, like most sixteen-year-olds, she was spending most evenings hunched over her books or her laptop, revising for her impending exams.
I met the mother and daughter at a café and asked the girl to sit up straight as if she were on a horse and to imagine she had total control of everything in her field of vision. I could see that she was physically capable of command posture, when her mind was set to assuming it, but it wasn’t something that came naturally and she didn’t have much spare time to practise. I had an idea.
Remembering my previous work with the England polo team, I gave her a figure-8 band to wear over her shoulders and asked her to sit on a stool as if riding a horse again. Perfect posture! I had devised a training regime for her and all she needed was a kitchen timer and a Swiss ball (the type found in gyms). She would train while doing her homework by sitting astride the ball as if on a horse, wearing the figure-8 in command posture. She’d initially do fifteen minutes per session and increase the time by five minutes after every three sessions until she was doing all her revision and homework in command posture. The great result, as her mother explained to me, was that not only did her dressage and posture improve – so also did her concentration on her homework.
Now, this might read like a modern-day equivalent of young ladies at finishing school balancing books on their heads, but the fact is that it worked in this case and it could work for you. You might feel a bit silly sitting at your desk wearing a figure-8 band, but sitting in command posture will have a positive effect not only on your body – no more slumped shoulders and the attendant effects on your neck and back – but also on your state of mind, especially when you’re under pressure. You’ll feel more alert, more poised. Just fifteen minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon to start, increasing from there (use your phone as a timer), and you’ll soon see the benefits. Once you’ve practised enough for it to become a natural posture, you can discard the figure-8 band. Even if you’re on your feet all day, working in a shop or warehouse, the effects are just as beneficial. You could even do it when driving to avoid the classic hunched pose in a traffic jam.
Becoming Big
When I work with goal kickers in rugby on a technical issue and the player is becoming increasingly stressed and frustrated as they struggle to get it right, I will often ask the player to ‘become big’ with their body and then attempt the kick again. This allows them to reset and take the next kick much more slowly and deliberately, and there is usually a corresponding improvement in the accuracy and control of the kick.
Focusing on ‘being big’ allows us to take a moment to appreciate what we are doing physically. In a pressure situation, when the natural, often subconscious impulse is for the body to become smaller, crouched and more tense, just like the rush-hour commuters earlier, consciously ‘becoming bigger’ allows you to stretch out the body and counter these physical inhibitors.
As mentioned earlier, Cristiano Ronaldo’s technique as a J-shape kicker gives him the stability to strike the ball so effectively – his upright posture is simply a more powerful physical position. But the advantages of command posture aren’t just physical; there are huge mental benefits to be gleaned from adopting it.
Sports commentators regularly talk about body language – ‘Their heads have dropped’ – demonstrating the link between mental surrender and body language. We see this kind of thing most clearly when there seems to be little chance of winning. But it’s a two-way street: just as the mindset of a losing team or competitor can inform body language, so too can the reverse be true. Working on your posture can have a dramatic impact on your state of mind as you prepare to deliver under pressure.
With the England Cricket Performance Squad I have often seen Kevin Shine ask the bowlers to be as ‘big as you can be’ during the delivery to try to dominate the batsman mentally. Indeed, there is always a contest between the batsman and bowler to control the exchange and body language plays a huge part in this. With each player looking for a chink in the armour of the other, it is often their body language that betrays them, especially when the execution of their shot fails to match their intention, showing that they are not in complete command of the situation.
Under pressure, many athletes from all types of sport consciously set their posture as part of their routine. If you watch tennis player Rafa Nadal before he serves or receives, he has a lengthy routine he goes through before he is mentally and physically ready to play. Jonathan Trott, the former England cricket batsman, was another with quite a pronounced routine – but all players run through a sequence to set themselves. It’s particularly noticeable in golf, where players deliberately set their posture and body position before each shot – back straight, neck extended.
Consistently in Command
Command posture isn’t only of use as a means to reset your body language before a specific event. It is advisable to maintain this posture throughout whatever you’re doing – be it a sales conference or, say, the 2012 BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.
It was during this tournament – and in the lead-up to it – that I worked with Luke Donald to help him concentrate on maintaining his command posture not only during his shots, but also throughout the entire four rounds. We put particular emphasis on keeping it up between shots, when it is easier to switch off, even for a moment, and fail to adhere to it, in the hope that it would become second nature.
It was a tough week. Luke was bidding to join Nick Faldo and Colin Montgomerie as the only players ever to defend the title successfully, which he did when he pulled away from Justin Rose after the ninth hole in the final round. In an interview afterwards Luke said that his calm on the course was due to the work we had done with his posture:
It’s helped me to really be aware of my posture and how I outwardly project that feeling of positiveness. It helps me send that message to whoever I’m playing with. He [Dave Alred] is certainly always on at me again about keeping the shoulders back and not getting down on myself, staying positive not just mentally but physically and through my body position. So I think I’ve done a lot better job of it since I’ve been working with Dave. He’s always reminding me.
When I first started working with Luke, in January 2010, one of the first things we worked on together was getting him to show ‘inevitability’ – imagining that his shot would perfectly match his intention – in his body language before the shot, during the shot and after the shot, while the ball is in the air. Luke quite rightly asked: ‘How do I physically show it?’
Think about how you would feel if you knew you couldn’t fail in performing a particular feat. If the penalty you were about to take was sure to go screaming into the top corner. If the presentation you were about to make was certain to end in a standing ovation. The expressions you’d use to describe the feeling after the event would be things like ‘feeling ten feet tall’ and ‘walking on air’, but such statements would almost certainly not reflect your posture prior to the event if you were feeling nervous and anxious.
It’s a question of reframing your thoughts to believe that there is an inevitability about what you’re going to do: if you know you’re going to perform brilliantly, then your anxiety before the event will become excitement; your nerves will become anticipation. You can adopt your command posture and assume an air of confidence because you know you’re going to be successful. It’s inevitable. Those who expect you to be exhibiting more signs of tension and apprehension might even construe your manner as arrogance, because a ‘normal’ person, one without a command posture that shows inevitability and feelings of excitement instead of anxiety, ought to be nervous.
This is the challenge to us: as pressure increases and we naturally become tense and tightened, we need to remember and practise resetting our posture the way top athletes do – not only resetting it before a big occasion, but also maintaining it throughout. And we need to use the confidence this gives us to feel a sense of inevitability about what we’re doing – this is going to be a great success, I’m going to feel ten feet tall – so that those feelings of anxiety can start to be welcomed as a natural and expected part of what is to come: a great performance.
The Laws of Speed and Time
We are all familiar with the well-worn vernacular describing footballers who ‘appear to have so much time on the ball’ or the cricketer who ‘sees the ball early’ or the snooker player who ‘makes the right decisions under pressure’, and it’s easy to be lulled into the idea that, through their own precocious gifts, such people are naturally blessed. But is this really true?
I regularly conduct management training days in which attendees have to react to pressure and perform both as a member of the team and as a leader. The day is composed of a series of games and activities, with the delegates split into teams and a different person being the leader on each activity. The person in charge is not only responsible for their team’s performance, but also needs to coach their team members in the skills and tactics for a contest with the other teams.
The first activity is a simple possession game, not unlike netball, with five players per team. The object is to complete as many passes as possible between players on the attacking side, while the defending side’s job is to win the ball back. The complicating factor? The defending side can field only three players to the attacking side’s five, so that when the attacking side loses possession they have to take two players off – an added challenge for the respective leaders.
Without exception, the start of the game is always absolute chaos. Everyone charges around after the ball, people scream for it to be passed to them, the ball is dropped, passes go astray – it’s like watching a game in a school playground played by hyperactive children. The players, excited and pumped on adrenaline, have usually lost track of the score by now and any other information not relevant to the one thing they’re doing: chasing blindly after the ball.
After about sixty to seventy seconds of pure pandemonium, the game is halted. In a simple five-versus-three game like this – a bit like basketball with one team having had two players sent off – the simplest and most effective tactic for the offensive team is to have one player in the middle and one in each of the corners, making it impossible for the defending team to mark everyone so that there is always someone to pass to. Once the players absorb this concept, the game seems to slow down and the players find themselves with more space in which to operate, and consequently more time to make decisions, as long as they are disciplined with their positions on the court.
The next task is an extension of basically the same game but with one important adjustment: no verbal communication is permitted – only eye contact. This, thankfully, makes for a quieter game, but it also leads to a dramatic increase in the players’ awareness of the position and spacing of their own team members. By the end of the day, the teams have improved no end from the unrestrained chaos of the start to showing a massive increase in awareness, communication, empathy and control – and eventually posture and composure.
With a bit of understanding and a series of specific practices, every player has left the rushed, time-cramped side of the C–J continuum and is now able to make less hurried and better decisions. In just one day the people on the training course had become markedly better at making effective decisions under pressure. They appeared to have ‘more time on the ball’, to ‘see it all earlier’.
Leading sportspeople, then, aren’t just ‘naturally’ able to appear this way – it is a skill that is the result of practice. While the players at the start of the training day can’t even keep track of who’s winning, top sports stars are always aware of the score, the time, the position – of their opponent(s) and team mate(s) and the ball – who they might be marking and the tactical options available, and constantly have to make pressured decisions based on combinations of these factors. But they aren’t just born with this skill. They have done hours and hours of deliberate practice. The professionals live it – practising all the time they’re not playing, while the rest of us no doubt go to work all week and just play in our spare time. Not only that, but they have acquired lots of big-game experience that has enabled them to get better and better. The great news is that, as the training day makes clear, you too can improve.
Keeping in Sequence
Another well-worn sports cliché is of the player whose kick, throw, shot or whatever appears to be effortless. The usual explanation of this particular ability is ‘timing’. While this is certainly part of it, there are other factors involved that relate to speed and the ability to be controlled in your movements rather than snatching at them.
If you’re partial to a round of golf, or even if you’ve just unwillingly been dragged along on a company golf day, consider the difference between the smooth action of a professional’s swing with a novice trying to hit the ball as hard as he or she possibly can. The novice will use his arms and wrists to try to generate the power – and more often than not will snatch at the ball to some degree. The professional, on the other hand, with a stable lower body, will initially take the club back in a wide arc while turning at the waist and creating a tension in the pillar with his back facing the target. The swing into the ball will start with the legs moving, then the pillar uncoiling as the arms swing down and then the wrists release the club through the ball at well over ninety miles per hour. None of the movements in themselves are quick, but the sum of them produces acceleration and seemingly effortless speed. The difference lies in the sequencing of the individual events that make up the swing.
In 2002 David Rath of the Australian Institute of Sport produced some research on the drop punt in Australian Rules football, in which he produced a precise visual interpretation of the kicking sequencing that produces the fastest speed – a tool that can be applied to other sports such as cricket, football, rugby, throwing the javelin, the shot put … the list goes on. Rath believes that the basic principle behind effective sequencing is to use the biggest muscle group to start a movement, then recruit the next biggest and the next before finishing with the smallest.
Imagine you are on a train travelling at 60 mph. You run along the corridor at 8 mph, meaning you are now travelling at 68 mph. As you run, you bowl a ball, during which your hand travels at, say, 40 mph. With your running speed and that of the train involved, the ball is now travelling at 108 mph. Similarly, when a fast bowler in cricket releases the ball, his running speed allied to the speed his pillar turns and then his arm and then the speed his wrist moves forward determines the speed of the ball.
This sequencing can be applied to plenty of things outside sport too. To lift a heavy weight, you bend your knees to recruit your legs, your strongest muscle group, straightening your pillar and only then using your shoulders and arms for support.
For sequencing to have the greatest impact it is essential that each movement in the sequence starts when the preceding movement has reached its maximum speed. To go back to the train, if you were to start running too early and the train was only travelling at 40 mph then, even if you forced some extra effort from yourself and ran at 10 mph and threw the ball at 45 mph, you would only be able to propel the ball at 95 mph. We see this with novices on the cricket pitch and the golf course when they compromise the other elements of the sequence and try to achieve all of the power through the arm(s). Only once you’re proficient in the sequence of events can a ball be thrown, kicked or hit with the appearance of so little effort – and so much velocity and control.
However, even an experienced pro can face sequencing issues when the pressure is on. Pressure-induced tightening and shortening of the muscles can, as already discussed, compromise an action a sportsman is making. It changes the movement and stops the sequencing being as efficient as usual. Rather than addressing their sequencing from the ground up, as a performer would usually, someone affected by pressure might concentrate on the extremities – the arms and legs – and as a result become unbalanced, losing both control and accuracy. In effect, they revert to being more like a novice who, as discussed, would try to derive all their power from either their legs – for a kicker – or arms – for a bowler, golfer, tennis player, thrower. A breakdown in sequencing can produce a novice-like behaviour, which causes a player to become very inefficient.
In 2014 I was working with five elite rugby goal kickers: England’s Jonny Wilkinson (Toulon) and George Ford (Bath); Ireland’s Johnny Sexton (Racing Metro 92 in Paris) and Paddy Jackson (Ulster); and Wales’s Rhys Patchell (Cardiff). Each of them was under pressure for different reasons.
When a player under pressure hits the ball hard, there is a tendency to hit at it, rather than through it. I asked the players to visualize a speed ‘swoosh’ – the trace of the path of the kicker’s foot – which started as a green colour and, as it increased in velocity, became yellow and then orange and, finally, in the last twelve inches or so, at its fastest speed, became red. Most importantly, this ‘red zone’ occurs beyond the ball, not towards the ball. All five players found this image helpful in improving their kicking through the ball rather than to the ball, which in turn improved their control, power and accuracy. By the end, it looked effortless – but a lot of hard work had gone into getting their sequence just so.
Awareness: The Importance of Being Grounded
When I started working with Luke Donald, I noticed a slight difference between his iron and wood shots; on the latter, he had a tendency to rise up out of his shot – straightening his legs in the process – and I believed it was just a question of awareness. We worked a moment of consciously grounding himself into his pre-shot routine. The process was a simple case of thinking about his feet as being four points on the ground – the heel and toe of each foot – and being aware of these four points as he sank his studs into the earth. This allowed him to have the most stable base possible for his shot and it’s very common to see golfers grounding themselves similarly. If nothing else, it’s a moment to be consciously aware of the stable platform they’re creating – and it’s something you could certainly do to centre yourself before a pressure situation of your own.
From Anxiety to Excitement
The C–J concept, although sport based, is a highly useful tool to help you understand and diagnose the potential pressures that can affect people in any activity. My hope is that you will find it a useful checklist to look out for when you try something under pressure – be it your golf swing on the company golf day or your posture and body language when you’re sitting at your desk with a pile of work that just won’t go away.
The most effective way to learn or improve anything is to apply a method I like to call the ‘dentist effect’. Most of us have had an anaesthetic injection before the dentist starts drilling and, afterwards, with our faces feeling like there’s a huge gobstopper wedged in there, and unable to sip a drink without dribbling it down our fronts, have looked in the mirror only to see there is hardly any swelling at all. It just feels that way.
To make a change in our method or technique when doing something different, we initially need to exaggerate the change so that it feels substantial and alien. You’re changing to a point way beyond where it should be. If you’re a goal kicker and you want to improve your follow-through, instead of doing what you usually do and then adding on a follow-through, try jogging through the kick a good two or three yards further than necessary; if you’re a golfer trying to extend your swing towards the target, try swinging the club and playing further forward through the shot, scuffing the bottom of it on a spot on the grass beyond your front leg – well past where you need it to be; if you do a lot of presentations at work, during which you tend to mumble and look down, try projecting louder than necessary and puffing up your command posture to a point that feels a bit awkward.
If you exaggerate these changes when you practise, then when it comes to doing it for real, when the pressure bites and the muscles tighten, you will have the feeling in your memory of running through your kick or extending your swing through the ball or adopting your command posture and loud, projected voice in front of a busy room. It may feel a little different or awkward when you’re doing it for real – it should still feel like you’re beyond where you’re comfortable – but, as with the phantom swelling after your trip to the dentist, it won’t appear so to an outside observer. When public speaking, a very good idea is to practise in front of the mirror with your command posture: you may feel self-conscious with your shoulders back and neck realigned, but in the mirror you should just appear confident.
By making these changes and feeling the ‘dentist effect’, you will find yourself moving away from the C-side, the potential physical effects of pressure, towards the J-side of the table, where you will be better able to manage the physical impact of anxiety. As you approach the right-hand side, your feelings of anxiety, the pre-match butterflies, may still express the same symptoms – think of Neil Jenkins throwing up before a match – but they are more likely to be welcomed and expected – to become excitement. The excitement that Jack Nicklaus would do anything to experience again in the early round of majors – the excitement that is a high-octane fuel for a great performance.
Anxiety isn’t a weakness. We need to reframe the way we feel about it and understand that adrenaline production is a natural bodily response to an impending pressured event. This is our famous ‘fight-or-flight’ mechanism, evolution’s gift from our ancestors for whom it was a vital response to danger, but which today is applied to many modern situations we face that aren’t literally dangerous. So, through practice and self-awareness we can move towards the right side of the C–J table and take some degree of control over our feelings of anxiety. With practice, we can manage these effects of pressure and turn them into excitement, something to be welcomed. And if we can do this, then we can better begin to perform to our potential under pressure. Our anticipation of a highly pressured event should not be one of dread, it should be more like a child’s excitement on Christmas Eve.