7.
Flying Your Plane
It was a warm spring day in 2006 when I walked across the tarmac at Yeovilton. Perfect conditions, I thought as I climbed the steps and clambered into the cockpit of the Hawk fighter jet. A technician strapped me in, plugging the radio wires from my helmet into the sockets and, finally, connecting the air hose to the nozzle on my right side.
The pilot, New Zealander Craig Complain, who was seated in front of me – all I could see was the top of his helmet beyond my instrument panel – raised his hand and made the ‘thumbs up’ sign. I strapped the microphone to my throat and he asked over the intercom, ‘All OK back there?’
‘Yup, all fine,’ I said. And then the engines began to whine like a giant turbine.
I’d spent the previous four days as a guest of the Fleet Air Arm – the branch of the Royal Navy responsible for its aircraft – where I’d used simulators, been up in a Lynx helicopter and watched a training exercise in a simulator where a pilot and navigator investigated a suspicious trawler in the North Sea. The day before my flight I’d had a medical and been fitted with a flight suit, helmet, fireproof T-shirt, leggings and gloves, all ready for my Top Gun moment.
Now, with the engines whirring and the growing feeling that no amount of simulators can truly prepare anyone for this, we began to taxi down the runway. Craig talked me through the controls once again, which I was grateful for, despite learning them in the simulator the day before, because now it was real. Then he hit me with a surprise that the simulator hadn’t prepared me for: ‘There is a button on your right-hand side, next to your thigh, with yellow-and-black stripes.’
‘Yes, found it,’ I said. It was labelled EJECT.
‘Good,’ Craig continued. ‘There’s a pin on a chain just under the button. Pull it out and drop it in the hole next to the button. I will not use the word “eject” again unless I want you to hit the button. Understood?’
I understood all right. The jet rocked to a gentle halt and then the message came from ground control that we were cleared to take off. The engine’s whine increased, doubling the noise it had made earlier, and we started to roll down the runway, bumping over the joints in the concrete, before there was a sudden burst of acceleration and we were airborne. And then … whoosh.
We burst forward at a speed I’d never felt before, my hands balling into fists, my knuckles white. It was as though we’d been fired from a cannon as we climbed up into the blue sky. Once we levelled out and Craig had checked I was still breathing, he said he was going to show me a few moves.
The first was a loop. As we climbed I could feel my G-suit slowly squeezing my legs, and as the turn became tighter the squeeze was rising, getting tighter and higher up my thighs and into my stomach. It felt as if my insides were being completely rearranged. This was 5G.
Craig said he was going to give me a little G-force demonstration (I thought he already had) and he put the jet into a tight turn and asked me to take my hand off the controls and put it on my thigh, which I did. Then we turned tightly again and he asked me to put it back on the controls. I could not believe what I was feeling: I was hardly able to lift my arm off my thigh – it weighed a ton. At the same time, it was like my stomach was being squeezed up into my ribcage by the G-suit.
When we levelled out he offered me the chance of a lifetime: to take the controls myself. I gladly accepted this irresistible cocktail of power, speed, control and excitement. It was like flying a super-fast airborne go-kart – and it was just as bumpy a ride as it is on the dodgems at the fairground. It was an exhilarating experience of freedom, though my wings were clipped all too soon as Craig took the controls back.
Craig took us down to sea level, low enough to avoid radar detection. We then turned inland and constantly adjusted altitude with the lie of the land. Craig turned the Hawk on its side and I realized just how fast we were going: hedgerows, footpaths and sheep shot past in a barely registered blur.
When we finally headed for home, I had time to collect my thoughts. Craig had hardly stopped talking throughout the whole flight, commentating on what we were about to do even when we were in some of the more acrobatic manoeuvres. But that wasn’t what was so impressive: it was his tone and matter-of-fact manner. He was under the same pressures of the G-force as I was, but while I was convinced my insides had been put in a cocktail shaker, Craig’s voice would have suggested we were simply having a chat over coffee.
When we’d touched down and were taxiing back to the parking area, I gratefully placed the pin back in the ejector switch at Craig’s request. The ground technicians freed me from my various umbilical cords to the cockpit and as I set foot on terra firma once again, my legs hardly seemed to know where the ground was, my abdominals couldn’t have felt more strained if I’d done a thousand sit-ups, my shoulders were sore and my stomach ached from the inside out.
Shutting Down
How do people like Craig, who start out just like the rest of us, become so capable under pressure in an environment where a mistake could mean death? The answer lies in their ability to delay the impact of sensory shutdown.
When the pressure we are under increases, it is natural for our awareness to decrease. This change might be almost imperceptible at first, but as the pressure increases, our peripheral vision narrows and so to does our hearing, and, as a result, so does what we are thinking. When the pressure really racks up we are virtually shutting down and our awareness has narrowed to a tiny window. Now, this is a great help to us when we are in imminent danger, with our body diverting all its resources to dealing with this one problem – run for your life, get out the way of that oncoming vehicle – but it inhibits us when performing in the instances when we are perceiving a threat.
For the pilots, their training involves a great deal of work on delaying the impact of sensory shutdown, so that they can behave more efficiently in their highly stressful environments. As Craig demonstrated in the cockpit, a trained fighter pilot is able to maintain a higher level of awareness under pressure than a civilian. (That isn’t to say it doesn’t drop to some degree – just not as much as it did for the likes of me.) There are three key elements required to achieve this: awareness of the environment; decision-making skills, often in an unpredictable and hostile situation and accompanied by a dislocation of expectation; and the functional skills of flying and navigating the plane.
After working with the training officers, I produced the Pilot Sensory Shutdown model (Figure 3), based on the sequence the pilot trainers explained to me. Every pilot goes through a sequence: fly, navigate, communicate, administrate. Which is to say: fly the plane; navigate using the horizon as well as the instruments; communicate with control centre and other aircraft; and administrate through checking the instruments for the status of the aircraft. I’d noticed during our flight that Craig had constantly been moving his head and this was because he was continually repeating the sequence.
When a trainee pilot is working in the simulators and the pressure increases, the first thing to drop out of the sequence is administration. It’s the least immediately vital element, and as we begin to feel the effects of pressure we’re programmed to hone in on the most task-relevant aspects of a process. As pressure increases on the trainee, communication is the next to suffer, then navigation – so that, finally, the only thing the trainee is concerned about is flying the plane. The last stage is one in which the plane is flying the pilot, rather than the other way round.
So how does the trainee improve awareness and effectiveness under pressure? Firstly, it’s a question of familiarity with pressure, which is why so much time is spent in the simulators dislocating expectations. The only way to get used to the pressure of dislocated expectations is to continually be in an unpredictable environment.
I sat in on one such training operation in which, soon after take-off, the location of a trawler the crew had to investigate was suddenly changed, which meant that all their original planning and flight paths had to be discarded. Then the weather in the simulator changed from the predicted clear skies to low cloud and rain, meaning that the trainees had to fly much lower.
These changes in expectation aren’t just random. They are deliberately targeted to increase pressure while testing awareness. Other dislocations might include an engine malfunction, which should be quickly noticed if the ‘administrate’ part of the sequence is being performed diligently.
The training officers created situations far more testing than those likely to be encountered in a real operation, at least in terms of pressure to make decisions and the degree of dislocation. This echoes Chapter 1, where we saw that going beyond where we need to be – beyond where it feels comfortable – helps get us closer to the J side of the C to J continuum, so that when it comes to performing for real, we’re ready and comfortable with the adjustments required of us. This is match practice that goes beyond the intensity of the match itself.
The concept of sensory shutdown isn’t limited to pilots. We see its effects when we watch sports stars perform in big events and we feel it in our own lives when we are under pressure. If you are suddenly given a major project at work with a challenging deadline – a dislocation of your expectations when you started the day – what in your own sequence is the first to suffer? It’s probably your admin, just like the pilot, as that is put to one side to concentrate on the most important thing in your environment. Your communication would likely suffer too, with less opportunity to check your email or retrieve messages, perhaps missing regular briefings too – all part of your own personal sequencing. Last to go would be your navigation, the coordinates of your routine, as you were forced to cancel social engagements, stop exercising and let your day-to-day work drift to get the big job done. Now you’re just flying the plane – or rather the plane is flying you.
We’ll return to this idea shortly, but in the meantime let’s look at an aspect of sensory shutdown we all have to deal with when performing in a pressure situation: making a decision when the adrenaline is flowing and your heart is pounding.
The Combat Zone
My experience with Craig showed me just how fit you have to be to fly a fighter jet: my body felt like it had been through a pretty intense workout. Craig told me that he did a lot of his own fitness and stability work and I knew he was a keen rugby player. He admitted that, even in his excellent physical condition, he would find three flights a day very tough on his body, even though it’s a job that can be done sitting down. Formula 1 drivers have much the same problem. It’s easy to think, Well, they just drive round a circuit. Why do you need to be fit for that? In fact, motor racing at that level is hugely demanding physically, with similarly extreme forces exerted on the driver’s body. A high level of fitness is required to perform and function well.
Figure 4 demonstrates how decision-making capability and the ability to execute skills effectively reduce as heart rate (HR) in beats per minute (bpm) increases.
A healthy person’s heart rate is a good indication of general level of fitness, because the fitter someone is, the lower their resting heart rate is and the longer it takes them to reach their maximum heart rate. As Figure 4 shows, this is crucial when it comes to making decisions and performing under pressure. A fighter pilot’s heart rate needs to stay as close to the optimal zone as possible, because the higher it gets, the worse the ability to make decisions becomes.
Even when the heart rate gets into three figures, fine motor skills – hand–eye coordination etc. – begin to deteriorate. Think about what that would mean for a surgeon manipulating instruments in a delicate operation, or for a marine whose finger was poised over a hair trigger. The benefits of having a lower resting heart rate to begin with, achieved through a good standard of fitness, are obvious here.
There are, however, possible ways to control your heart rate. Before any tricky procedure, slowing your breathing to get some oxygen in and reduce your heart rate will help you to execute the skill better. It’s an approach I’d recommend to anyone, whether you’re about to play a tough shot on the pool table in the local pub or preparing to walk into a room full of strangers on your first day in a job: slow your world down with some deep breaths and slower exhalations.
A heart rate of 115 to 145 bpm puts you in the combat-performance zone. This is where football and rugby players spend most of their time operating. While the fine motor skills are suffering, complex motor skills – the coordination of muscle groups to perform a series of movements at the right time – are at their peak here. For the footballer this might be dribbling, shooting or passing while running; for the rugby player it might be handing off or passing the ball while dodging tackles and running. The body is in its most effective state for these skills, as the visual and cognitive reaction time is good, so that the player can pick out a teammate with a pass, avoid an opposition player and have a good sense of the relative geography of the pitch – where the goal and touchlines are. Footballers and rugby players are ‘in the game’ here and feel pretty comfortable. Their high levels of fitness allow them to operate in this zone for prolonged periods, while for most of us our heart rates would be off the scale after a few minutes of frenetic high-level sport.
However, once the heart rate gets above 155, these complex skills start to deteriorate. If you’ve ever watched a footballer run half the length of the pitch with the ball at his feet, powering past the opposition, with teammates either side unmarked and in great positions to receive a pass, and instead he mishits a shot at goal, sending it ballooning into the stands, you might have thought, What on earth happened there?
The answer might well be sensory shutdown. As the player runs flat out, the increased physical exertion raises his heart rate, which in turn causes his complex motor skills to decrease, which would be a factor in his poor shot. When the heart rate gets up to around 175 the impact of sensory shutdown affects his awareness, with the peripheral vision and hearing decreasing. The player with the ball might well have been completely unaware of his teammates: in that state he couldn’t see or hear them as well as he would have done had his heart rate been much lower.
In extreme conditions of mental and physical stress, where the heart rate gets above the 175 mark, fight-or-flight mode can enter the equation. This area is good if we have to run flat out or defend ourselves. It is in this region of almost blind intensity where we are on the edge of completely losing control. This is where people can feel the ‘red mist’ descend, which, so long as we remain on the verge of it, can be useful in a particularly aggressive sport such as boxing. But it can be a pretty unedifying sight on the rugby or football field when punches are being thrown. This tends to happen after a late tackle, when the player gets up and launches into an irrational and violent reaction. This rarely helps a team: usually the player will end up being sent off.
You will undoubtedly have experienced your own ‘red mist’. When we’re under pressure and absorbed in dealing with the source of it, with our heart rate raised and our awareness narrowing, it’s all too easy to snap at our colleagues, friends, partners or even children who interrupt us. Once we’ve reached this stage, our decision-making skills have deserted us, as most of us would realize that, just like the footballer getting an early bath, there’s little point getting angry at other people – particularly when they’re on our side.
Match Fit
The importance of physical fitness, then, cannot be understated. Fitter people, with lower resting heart rates, take longer to get into the zone that adversely affects the task they’re attempting. They are capable of making better decisions under fatigue and pressure, a vital skill in occupations such as the armed forces and the emergency services.
Consider two armed police officers chasing a suspect, one fit, the other not. They eventually corner their quarry and draw their weapons. The fitter, ‘match fit’ officer’s heart will be beating less fast, further from sensory shutdown and allowing fine motor skills to operate more effectively. That officer would be in a better position to make a correct decision about whether to open fire than his or her less-fit colleague, whose heart rate might already have crossed the 175 barrier into red mist territory, where a rash decision could result in lives lost and ruined that might otherwise have been spared.
We might not be called upon to make life-or-death decisions ourselves, but fitness is still important. Doctors preach the importance of exercise as a stress buster, and we’re all familiar with the concept of using physical exertion to let off steam, whether it’s storming off for a brisk walk around the block or letting it all out on the punch bags in the gym. Lowering your resting heart rate through a regular structured exercise routine not only helps in these individual moments of stress, but also more generally it keeps us in a constant state of readiness, just like the marines, to deal with high-pressure situations.
Exercise is also said to be good for mood improvement and boosting self-esteem, which shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, bearing in mind our discussion about the body’s power to inform the mind and vice versa. Feeling good about ourselves can be an invaluable aid to combating stress.
Command Posture (Again)
While we’re talking about the body informing the mind, it’s useful to reiterate the importance of posture. When we’re under pressure we tend to become hunched – think back to the people in the traffic jam, leaning over their steering wheels, honking their horns. Sensory shutdown makes us less aware of what we’re doing. So, when you’re stressed and your posture is hunched and your body language poor, you probably don’t even realize it.
Adopting command posture, making yourself bigger, will have a number of benefits. Firstly, as you’re consciously adopting the posture, it will heighten your awareness of what you are doing and so combat the effects of sensory shutdown. And this posture, with your feet rooted to the ground, keeping yourself upright, will give you a stronger feeling of control, instead of your environment being in control of you, so that you feel more confident and positive about the challenge you’re facing. It’s no coincidence that Craig and I were strapped in to the Hawk in command posture, the best position in which to heighten our awareness and to be able to scan our environment. A person who is hunched and stooped forward because of pressure is looking up to a problem. A person who stands tall, in command, can look down on a challenge.
Match Commentary
Trainee pilots practising in the simulator say the sequence, ‘Fly, navigate, communicate, administrate,’ aloud, over and over again until it becomes ingrained. This is their simple conscious process key, their cue card to tap into the processes they need to implement. In this respect it’s similar to the ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ self-talk used when learning to drive. To start with, we might say the key aloud, but then it will be something we say in our head and eventually it will be something we simply do implicitly. And it’s the same for the pilot: by the time they’re experienced and flying for real, they won’t be using self-talk; they will just be doing it. Fly, navigate, communicate, administrate will have become a learned behaviour.
Self-talk can be an extremely useful aid to development. Trainee pilots’ voices are recorded in the simulators and analysed not just for what is said but also how it’s said. The trainers can gauge vocal stress, particularly any changes in response to unexpected situations – dislocated expectations. Also, knowing that they are being recorded creates a useful kind of self-consciousness in the trainee, because they need to show that they’re in control. Being forced to show control in your voice – much like showing confidence in your body language – makes you feel more in control, a kind of self-fulfilling expectation.
Such real-time commentary can boost concentration and create a sense that time has slowed, enabling the next event to be anticipated rather than simply reacted to. This is a useful tip in an activity like driving, where it’s easy to become complacent practising an implicit skill. Commentating on what you’re doing as it happens can give a sense of focus that might otherwise be lacking, provided you aren’t dredging up too much unnecessary detail. So verbally noting the things you’re consciously doing – ‘Turning left here … traffic slowing down ahead’ – can anchor your thoughts in your deliberate actions and keep you focused. Commentary while driving is used in the emergency services, both in training and when the sirens are on and they are responding to an incident at speed.
But back to ‘Fly, navigate, communicate, administrate’. To a pilot suffering the effects of sensory shutdown, particularly when they’re relatively inexperienced, this commentary can provide a welcome way to anchor their thoughts and remind them what they need to be doing, just as a newly qualified driver experiencing stress when driving on a busy motorway for the first time might use ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ self-talk to regain focus.
Scanning Sequence
When we’re in a pressure situation, which raises our heart rate and releases adrenaline, our peripheral vision begins to narrow. As we get higher up the heart-rate chart, so our peripheral vision narrows accordingly. Here, the scanning sequence for the pilot becomes vital. Remember that Craig’s head was moving constantly throughout our flight; with his eyes seeing less, it was the continual movement of his head that allowed him to keep a good level of awareness while he repeated his internal ‘Fly, navigate, communicate, administrate’ sequence.
Recall from Chapter 2 the ‘Crossbar, touchlines, crossbar’ self-talk, which gave rugby players a greater awareness of the dimensions and spaces of the pitch. Scanning sequences like this are easy-to-remember prompts that help to counter the effects of sensory shutdown and enable us to execute things we’d do naturally in less pressured circumstances.
When public speaking, for example, a sequence of ‘Cue cards, audience, speak’ would describe what no doubt usually happens implicitly, but when you are suffering from sensory shutdown, when it feels like you can’t recognize a face in the crowd and your vision is tunnelling down to just the prompts on your cards, it can be useful to take a moment to remember your sequence: look up after the cue card, make eye contact with someone at the back of the room and then speak.
Such prompts can be utilized to help us cope with any pressured period. We used as an earlier example the office worker suffering growing sensory shutdown after taking on a huge project, first abandoning their administration and then, once the pressure increased, neglecting meetings and emails (communication) and then eventually personal aspects such as exercise and family time (navigation). By creating personal ‘sequences’ to anchor our routine (‘Attend gym session at lunchtime, clear inbox and write report by 6 p.m., home by 7 for an hour with the kids before their bedtime’) we can prevent the narrowing of our focus that lets our own planes fly us.
Once the pressure situation we’re dealing with starts affecting our personal lives, exercise is often the first casualty. But exercise is vital if we are to deal with stress and perform better under pressure. Abandoning it is effectively weakening ourselves when we most need to be fit.
Try to treat exercise as you would an important meeting. Even when you have a mountain of work to tackle or you’re involved in a big project, time spent keeping fit should be viewed as an appointment you can’t postpone. Similarly, plan to leave work at a certain hour and stick to it. Always working to a deadline lets you plan your day more efficiently and you won’t find yourself staying late at work.
This approach has the added benefit that you will have time to spend with your family, go out and see friends or even just have some ‘you’ time in front of the television, listening to music, reading a book or whatever it is you do to relax. Making time for your family and for yourself outside work will, just like exercising, benefit you during a stressful period. It’s your navigation; it will allow you to reset, switch off from your work and recharge, so that you can bring your full focus and awareness to the job the next day.
It’s very common for people facing a huge workplace challenge to undergo sensory shutdown and rearrange their lives to cope with the pressure situation. But they usually just end up putting more time into it – working ten- or twelve-hour days – rather than more effective time. An efficient eight-hour working day will produce more and better results than an unfocused eleven hours of toil, and sticking to our personal deadlines allows us to maintain the framework of our routine – our day-to-day sequencing – so that we’re not completely overthrowing our lives because of work pressure. Instead, much like the pilot, we will be better equipped to deal with our own kind of sensory shutdown.
Of course, not everyone has the luxury of being able to set personal deadlines. Junior doctors have little choice but to work long days at hours not of their choosing, as do people who work shifts or are on call. Nevertheless, it is vital to adhere to at least some of our personal sequencing, to find time for family and personal priorities.
Even those with more freedom in their jobs will sometimes have to compromise – maybe only getting out for that cycle ride a couple of times a week instead of the usual five while under pressure. But that’s better than nothing – the plane still isn’t flying you – and so long as the situation remains both temporary and under your control it’s fine in the circumstances. Just as the pilot can’t navigate or communicate at 100 per cent efficiency in a trying situation, neither should you expect to.
Beyond Match
In his book The Gift of Fear, security specialist Gavin de Becker discusses the importance of training under stress over and over again – to match conditions and even beyond. When training security guards for public figures, he puts them through a process he calls ‘stress inoculation’. One exercise involves confronting the security guard with a ferocious dog. Their heart rate is so high when this first happens – above 175 – that, according to de Becker, they can’t even see straight. But after repeatedly facing the dogs, and often deliberately commentating, their heart rate starts to become more controllable, so that once it gets down to the 110–20 mark, they’re in a much better state to manage their fine motor skills. In this case, they are likely to be applied to using a weapon.
This stress inoculation is, of course, similar to that which trainee pilots undergo. Their training takes them beyond where they are likely to need to go in a real operation, much like we talked in Chapter 1 about going beyond what feels right when we practise so that we’re better prepared for the real thing.
For the pilot, this means not only an increase in the dislocation of their expectations – new and unpredictable aspects of the operation being thrown in – but also a decrease in the amount of time they’re given. If they’re coping with a lead time of ten seconds, cut it down to eight. Then when they adjust to that, cut it down again. This will put them in their ugly zone at first, but they will adapt to conditions more changeable and under greater time pressure than those they would reasonably expect to encounter on a real operation.
Take our earlier example of a cricketer learning to face a 90-mph ball using a bowling machine. I’ve sometimes increased the machine’s speed gradually, without disclosing exactly what the speed was. Usually, when it gets up around the 90 mph mark, the batsman struggles initially but then starts making the adjustments implicitly and copes better. By the end of the session the ball is being delivered at over 90 mph – beyond what they’d reasonably expect to face in the match environment – and they’re coping really quite well. But the best reaction comes when I tell them just how fast the bowling was that they’ve been facing – they can scarcely believe it.
The principle is the same as de Becker’s: to provide some stress inoculation against facing fast bowling for real, so that in the match environment the player won’t experience sensory shutdown.
Buying Time
Ultimately, when it comes to delaying the onset of sensory shutdown, what we’re effectively doing is buying ourselves a little time – or at least the feeling that we have time. Time to make an effective decision, to respond to an imminent threat or challenge, to look up and address our audience or pick out a player on our team.
In the first chapter we talked about sports performers who appear to have all the time in the world to make the right decision. This, of course, is a skill they’ve acquired through practice, but part of that skill is their ability to deal with sensory shutdown. If we look at a footballer with the ball at his feet, we could plot a sensory shutdown diagram much as we did for the fighter pilot (Figure 5).
Central to the footballer’s priorities under pressure is the ball at his feet: this is his plane to fly. But outside of this comes the necessity to move away from the opposing players – his most imminent threat in his environment. If he holds on to the ball too long, the other team will surround him and try to dispossess him. His reaction could be to shield the ball or try a bit of skill to get past them – or hit a pass, which would involve the next part in his awareness, seeing his own players and space. Finally, comes the admin, the game situation: what the score is and how long is left to play.
Top players can address all these concerns comfortably, often knowing exactly where their teammates are and what their opponents are likely to do as the ball comes towards them, and they are able to make the correct decision either to keep the ball or play a first-time pass. Their trained awareness makes them look as though they have all day to decide – their skill has effectively allowed them to buy time – but, as we have seen, even they can crack under extreme pressure.
Only the very best, the Messis and Ronaldos, never seem to succumb: no matter how much pressure they’re under, they remain apparently immune to sensory shutdown and continue to make good decisions almost instantly.
We can construct a similar diagram for the car salesman I mentioned coaching in Chapter 2, examining how sensory shutdown would affect him (Figure 6). The salesman’s starting point is doing his own job, the central act of making sales to people in the car showroom. The next aspect for any salesman is looking for the next sale, doing the groundwork through networking or following up with phone calls. After that is his communicating with colleagues, so they can work in harmony as a united, cohesive team. Finally, comes the admin. Naturally, when the pressure is on this is the first to go, which is why it’s a common complaint in sales teams that, when sales people are under extreme pressure to meet their targets, they just focus on their own job and leave others to pick up the pieces – inevitably the admin.
Once sensory shutdown affects him to the point that he isn’t communicating with his colleagues any more, the customer perception of the company is likely to be one of ‘the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing’. Chaos, rather than coordination, becomes the order of the day. And as the salesman finds himself neglecting the groundwork for future sales – becoming less aware of the essential navigation his role demands – he’s back to just flying his plane. If he was better able to manage the groundwork and communicating with colleagues, coordinating the team efforts more, he would find that this would see him wasting less time repeating efforts that colleagues might already have made and buy him more time to prepare future sales, which would make his sales targets all the more achievable in the long run.
Craig looked like he had all the time in the world in the aircraft and that was because his training had given him the skills to buy time. And so, when we make our efforts to avoid the kind of sensory shutdown brought about by a stressful time at work, our efforts are similarly to attempt to buy more time. Making sure we attend that one session at the gym and then get some family time afterwards provides markers to plan our day around, giving us the feeling that we too have bought more time and that we’re better managing the aspects of our sequencing.
Flying Your Plane
When we’re under pressure, there is a continual tension between the onset of sensory shutdown and effective performance and decision-making. Table 6 brings together the ‘how to’ aspects of delaying its impact.
Some are more relevant to the likes of a fighter pilot than they are to, say, a golfer, while others might be more useful when driving a car than when playing in a football match, but most are universal.
It is our challenge to implement these techniques to help us delay sensory shutdown, which can debilitate us when we need our wits about us most. The greater our awareness, the more we are able to delay its effects, through taking up command posture to manage the physical impact of anxiety; through self-talk if we need it – either in our heads or out loud – to help us focus; through sequencing the less-critical layers of our performance that we often need to keep aware of even under duress; by doing our best to keep a lower heart rate, whether that’s by going beyond match in your preparation, keeping fit through regular exercise or just taking deep, controlled breaths to take on more oxygen and calm us before we take to the match environment.
In this way we can improve our control in the pressured environments we face, rather than having the environment control us. Through managing these facets and practising them we will navigate, communicate and administrate effectively when flying our own plane.
