8.
Jumping Off
You’re standing on the ledge of a building, fifty storeys high, with the wind howling around you. You look down – down, down, down – at the ant-like people walking the streets below, the toy cars driving down the street – and then you gaze across the five-foot gap to the building opposite: your landing pad. You steady yourself, preparing for your standing long jump to the other building. How on earth did you end up here?
You practised hard at ground level, some 400 feet below, on a small puddle, only a couple of feet across. You got your technique nailed, swinging your arms to create momentum, bending your knees, leaning forward and then propelling yourself into the jump. You reached the point of no return each time, but the stakes were low – just wet feet to worry about.
You then tried a bigger puddle, five feet across, and, while it certainly made things more taxing, you mastered it and began clearing six-foot and even seven-foot puddles. You had wet heels by the end, where you’d just fallen short on occasion, but you’d gone beyond match as you made jumps far in excess of the mere five feet you’d need up in the sky. You discovered that when there is total commitment to the process, the outcome is successful. You were ready to take the ultimate leap of faith.
So now, on top of this skyscraper, you make yourself big and assume command posture in an effort to turn your anxiety into excitement – to mobilize your butterflies. You start to swing your arms, knowing that you must lean forward to the point of no return before you jump: you’ll have to commit fully to the process. It’s a process you’ve executed successfully countless times at ground level, when the outcome was far less crucial, but now the only possible outcomes are either life or certain death, your thoughts are turning to the consequences of failure. Your heart is pounding and you close your eyes and breathe deeply, exhaling slowly, while you imagine a successful result. You concentrate on your sequence, your process key: ‘See the landing spot, tip over and fire the legs’.
You open your eyes: it’s time. You tip forward and launch yourself forward, all the while trying to suppress that inner scream and not look down. You hang in mid-air for what seems like an eternity before you touch down on the other side, a good couple of feet clear of the edge. Your legs, with the adrenaline surge subsiding, suddenly feel weak and you collapse to your knees in relief. Congratulations. You committed to the process and the outcome took care of itself.
Process vs Outcome
Focusing on the process rather than the outcome is the essence of performing well under pressure. The tension between process and outcome seems to heighten in proportion to the amount of pressure someone is under to achieve, or, to look at it another way, the significance of not being successful. The more there is at stake, the more likely that thoughts about the outcome will interfere with thoughts about the process. When you were jumping over puddles, with little pressure, it was much easier to commit fully to the process. But once you were fifty storeys high, that all changed, fears about the consequences of failure flooding into your mind. How could they not?
But this doesn’t just apply to matters of life and death. This is the conflict that every performer goes through when dealing with pressure: how do I commit to the process in such a way that I don’t allow any thoughts about the outcome to pollute my thinking? Throughout this chapter we will expand upon some of the ideas we first touched on in Chapter 4 (Implicit–Explicit Balance) and Chapter 5 (Behaviour), to provide a method for thinking correctly under pressure, or T-CUP.
To be clear, when we talk about concentrating on the process, we’re not talking about every aspect of the process. We’re not talking about every aspect of your jumping sequence at the top of the building or all the components of your golf swing. We’re talking about those conscious process keys that will fill your thoughts. And it is by removing the outcome – putting the net three feet in front of the rugby goal kicker when practising – that we can allow ourselves to give our full attention to the process. This is as true when practising as it is when performing a skill for real: if we trust to our process, the outcome will take care of itself.
This is why we must revisit the power of effective practice. It is through continually practising with consequence – your match practice – that you can build trust in your process, so that you can make this commitment to it when the occasion and the consequences threaten to distract you when under pressure.
The fundamental principle when practising any skill is to create a process based on one or two conscious thoughts that will enable you subconsciously to perform several other actions. The thoughts should be simple to understand, but also fully engaging, so that the concentration involved leaves little or preferably no spare mental capacity to think of anything else, such as the outcome – or the actions that belong in the subconscious.
Back at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, England were playing Australia in the quarter-final, with the Southern Hemisphere team leading 22–19 five minutes from the final whistle, when a penalty was awarded to England. One kick for Rob Andrew, England’s fly half, to keep his team, his country, in the match. He waited patiently for the kicking tee to be brought to the field, then lined up his kick. He stepped forward and thumped it with his right foot and the ball went straight between the posts. His conscious thoughts under all that pressure? Simply ‘Hard foot and precise piece of stitching’.
This was Rob’s way of getting a total focus on the process, rather than indulging any thoughts about the outcome. This has echoes of Harvey Penick’s advice to take ‘dead aim’ at the smallest possible target. For a golfer, this conscious thought might be to hit a specific dimple on the ball. If the player is able to ‘see it’ (the target) in their mind’s eye, then they should be able to become completely engaged with their own unique conscious thoughts. This would be useful to Tom back in Chapter 5 when preparing food for his in-laws, and to you as you stand fifty storeys high preparing to jump. Once we become totally engaged in the process, we can then displace thoughts about the sources of our anxiety – our worry about the outcome – and perform closer to our best. We can all do it. In fact, it can be as easy as driving a car once you know how.
Driving the Car
If we look at the three categories of driver – learner, novice, experienced – we can see big differences in their thought process when under pressure (Figure 7).
For the learner, initially every aspect of the process requires deliberate conscious thought: the accelerator, the brake, the clutch, gears – everything. Mastering these individual components to work in unison, not to mention steering in the right direction, requires a good deal of practice time and no shortage of angst in the ugly zone. This is why most beginners start in an empty car park or on a very quiet road.
As the beginner improves and the core driving skills are practised repeatedly, they hack their way through their forest sufficiently often to reach their comfort zone, where they begin to absorb these aspects into their subconscious – what some like to call their procedural memory – so that they can be performed implicitly. The driving test is passed and the learner becomes a qualified, though still novice, driver. The novice is able to coordinate the clutch and gear stick instinctively, though they still use their ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre’ self-talk in their heads and their braking and accelerating remain deliberate, conscious actions until they have gained experience.
The experienced driver has absorbed almost all the skills into their procedural memory through hours of committed practice. The only conscious thought they need is simply ‘drive the car’. Within this, of course, would be navigation (steering), the communication (taking notice of signals and signs) and administration (the fuel gauge, the speedometer). When an experienced driver needs to improve an aspect of their performance, perhaps they have moved from the country to a city and need to park in tighter spaces than they are used to, they would go through a process of repair in which they would consciously work on those aspects of their driving that usually sit in the subconscious, until they are back in their comfort zone and the ability to park precisely becomes a subconscious procedure.
If we return to the fifty-storey building-to-building jump, we can construct a similar diagram using the familiar labels of repair, training and match (Figure 8). In your repair, when you worked regularly on the individual component – arm swing, forward lean, leg extension and the rest – all of it was conscious thought. Then, when you repeated it and eventually went through the process of clearing larger puddles repeatedly, many of the components were dropped into your subconscious, so that when you reached ‘match’ you could test the effectiveness of the conscious thoughts that bring it all together under pressure. On top of the building, your conscious thoughts were: See the landing spot, tip over and fire the legs.
So, if we look at Figures 7 and 8, the columns on the right represent the effective balance of conscious to subconscious thought when you are thinking correctly under pressure. Not everyone’s chart will look exactly the same, of course. They’ll be couched in language and specific actions unique to you. But the principle is the same as you progress from novice to expert. Your conscious thoughts are your own formula for success.
T-CUP
It was a hot afternoon in 1999 in Ballymore Stadium in Brisbane, Australia, and things were not going well. Sometimes it just doesn’t click when we’re trying to execute a skill we can usually do effortlessly: a golfer can ‘lose’ their swing; you could be taking all day to write up a report that would usually take an hour, tops; and on this occasion Jonny Wilkinson was struggling with his sequence and feel. We were experiencing a bit of a block in the blazing Australian sun, a paralysis of analysis, when I decided to change tack.
I walked to the stand behind the goalposts and put a rugby top across the back of a seat. I explained to Jonny that this was Doris. She didn’t particularly like rugby but her husband regularly dragged her to games. Doris was ignoring the game; she was instead absorbed in a magazine and I challenged Jonny to kick the ball to knock the magazine out of her hands, but not hit her. Jonny set the ball down and focused his whole attention on this smallest of targets.
The first kick landed within a couple of feet of Doris, but once he got into a rhythm, Doris was being bombarded. ‘I just hit the magazine out of her hands,’ he announced.
‘OK, this time go for the can of cola on her armrest,’ I replied. The barrage continued. ‘Now she’s eating an ice cream. Knock the ice cream off but don’t hit the cone!’
On it went. The session lasted for nigh on two hours as Jonny rediscovered his kicking mojo, thanks to Doris. This emphasis on the smallest possible target had put all thoughts about technique back in the subconscious, where they belonged. In essence, it became the perfect practice T-CUP formula. If he aimed for Doris with his kick, the outcome would take care of itself.
Your T-CUP is your shorthand note to yourself, your conscious thought to engage you in your process. If we go back to when you were struggling on the squash court, your T-CUP formula could have been, ‘Bounce, hit’. If we return to Tom and his dinner party with the in-laws, he would have had a series of T-CUP formulas, such as: ‘Check the food in the oven, keep topping up glasses’, ‘Talk to the guests’ and then ‘Keep an eye on the pan while preparing the salad’, each of them different actions and thought processes that had a level of detail he was able to execute subconsciously. In the repair stage of his progress, he would have been flooded with many more conscious thoughts about things he no longer needs to think about now.
That’s the point about the T-CUP formula: it doesn’t constantly stay the same. Rob Andrew’s ‘Hard foot and precise bit of stitching’ wasn’t the first we’d produced together. It was the result of the hours of practice – the repair, training and match – he’d put in that meant his formula was able to be reduced to this short, sharp phrase, which fired a lot of other subconscious movements.
The reason it’s a formula is because we test it in our match preparation to see whether it’s effective. If it’s not, we hone it until it is. Just like the affirmations back in Chapter 2, they’re always being adapted or even changed completely to allow subconscious procedures to be performed at their best under pressure. The power of effective language, individually tailored, again cannot be overstated in developing these formulas.
As you improve at anything, your T-CUP formula will naturally change. Just like you, it’s continually adapting. A specific thought that may have been conscious a month or two ago will now be wrapped up in another word or phrase that addresses a different part of your process. A good example of this is posture. We talked at length at the beginning of this book about the need to reset your posture for pressure events, be it for a drinks reception at work, before you meet the in-laws or on the starting line of the race you’ve entered. But as you get used to doing this and deliberately resetting your posture each time, you’ll find that, in a process of repair, training and match, you’re doing it subconsciously and you’ll no longer need to include it in your formula. Your T-CUP will evolve just as you evolve.
The more engaging your T-CUP is for your conscious mind, the more you’ll be able to avoid the destructive thoughts about outcome that inevitably arise when the pressure’s on. Ultimately, it is this worry about the outcome – this fear of failure – that is the source of most performance anxiety.
Winning the Lottery
In 1998 the England football team, under the management of Glenn Hoddle, arrived in France with high hopes. They made it through to the quarter-finals against old foes Argentina, where, despite David Beckham’s by now infamous sending off, they held on to draw the match 2–2 and faced the so-called ‘lottery’ of the penalty shootout. England had form here, having exited both the World Cup in 1990 and the European Championships in 1996 at the semi-final stage on penalties. It was to be an all too familiar script, as England midfielders Paul Ince and David Batty, who took the decisive penalty to keep England in the shootout, both missed. England were out.
No book about pressure would be complete without addressing the penalty shootout in football. It has been labelled a ‘lottery’ and an unfitting way to settle a high-stakes football match – a challenge of pot luck after a two-hour contest. Well, there is a saying that does the rounds in golf: ‘The more I practise, the luckier I get.’
The reason for picking on England’s exit in 1998 is partly because of the fact that David Batty had never taken a penalty in a senior game, which perhaps made him something of an odd choice, though, to be fair, there weren’t many options remaining on the pitch – but it’s largely because the squad apparently didn’t practise penalties. Glenn Hoddle has said since that he thinks the idea that ‘we just need to practise penalties more in order to prevent another exit’ is ridiculous. He cites the long walk up to take the penalty, the particularly unique set of pressured circumstances that can’t be replicated in training and during which doubt enters the players’ heads, as being the biggest factor in England’s failures (they lost shootouts in 1990, 1996, 1998, 2004, 2006 and 2012).
If there’s one thing this book should have made clear by now, it is the power of effective practice to enable us to perform better under pressure. While it is true that the absolute match environment cannot be created in training, surely it’s still worth putting in the time to practise rather than not hitting any at all? And besides, with imagination you can do your best to get closer to the real thing. When I work with rugby teams or golfers, we don’t have thousands of spectators or the exact match-day conditions in which to practise, but there is still huge benefit to be had in repair and training – hitting penalties over and over again to put aspects of them in the subconscious mind – and with a bit of creativity, steps can be taken to make the practice more realistic. If the walk from the halfway line is such a factor, couldn’t penalties be practised in this manner, with all the players in the centre circle and the penalty taker making his lonely march to the spot?
In some respects you can make the practice even more demanding than the match conditions. In rugby I spend a lot of time with international players in which they kick from very narrow angles, which reduces the target to about a tenth of the size it would be in a match. Another method is to give the players a series of kicks from different positions on the field. If one is missed in the sequence, they have to start again. In football, having penalty targets in specific parts of the net will hone in the skill and expose any technical flaws in a player’s technique. This will enable you to create some very relevant repair work (technique) for penalty taking where the criteria are accuracy and pace of the kick to beat the goalkeeper.
As we illustrated in the C to J concept, the physical impact of pressure has a tendency to move the player towards a tighter, C-shape trajectory, with the pillar rotating. When this happens with penalty taking, the player is in danger of wrapping the ball on the inside of his leg swing, which often gives the goalkeeper an easier opportunity to save. Or, even more destructively, a very tight C-shape will lead to the ball escaping to the right (if the kicker is right-footed). The J-shape kicker gets his power and commitment from his body shift towards the target, and under pressure he is using the biggest muscle group possible to make the kick. Couple that with command posture (helping to produce a productive mindset) and they are far more likely to direct the ball accurately. The caveat is that it will only happen as a result of consistent, measured practice.
Then there is also the importance of excitement and vibe within practice sessions to create a can-do attitude and get players to commit regularly to their ugly zone. If we were to look at shooting at a specific spot in the corner of a net, how many players would be encouraged to practise regularly, little and often, and genuinely celebrate progress and achievement?
If David Batty had never taken a penalty in a senior game, then he had no match experience to call upon. Practice would have been his only crutch – the only thing that could even begin to prepare him for the experience he was about to face. It’s difficult to understand how, of the ten England internationals still on the pitch, there weren’t enough to take five penalties effectively. Football is a chaotic, unpredictable environment and to be caught unprepared would suggest that the football team made the same mistake as the England rugby team in the 1995 World Cup, when Jonah Lomu burst on to the scene, in not effectively preparing for the possibility of dislocated expectations.
No less an expert than former England striker and regular penalty taker Gary Lineker has talked about the necessity of practising penalties: ‘It’s like saying a golfer never practises a six-foot putt. Yes, it’s different when it’s for the Open Championship, but it doesn’t half help if you’ve actually hit a few.’
T-CUP is represented in Figure 9. This figure does assume a degree of expertise. The two centre columns show a penalty-taker’s thought processes. In the left-hand column, there are only the two conscious thoughts, the T-CUP formula: See the precise target and Zone in on the piece of stitching, for the player who is filled with productive, can-do thoughts before he sets himself to shoot; however, the right-hand column describes a player filled with destructive, negative thoughts. In short, the player is in no fit state of mind to perform well under pressure.
Kickers should be aspiring to be in the left-hand column and this can only be achieved by the kind of practice that gives confidence in the process, so that the outcome can be trusted to take care of itself. The kind of confidence that Jonny Wilkinson, Rob Andrew and Johnny Sexton were able to call upon. Furthermore, when watching the England football team’s missed penalties in shootouts, it’s clear that, unlike Rob, Johnny and Jonny, they have a haphazard pre-shot routine. It appears to be, ‘Get the ball down and get it over with as soon as possible’, rather than deliberately placing the ball, seeing the precise target and smashing the ball past the goalkeeper. Compare that with a rugby player, where they take a deep breath, slow things down and set themselves properly for the shot before executing aggressively.
By using a similar process, a footballer would have a better chance of managing the impact of their anxiety and delaying any sensory shutdown. It would also displace those interfering conscious thoughts, moving them back down into the subconscious where they belong. Do all this and, the next time they find themselves in a penalty shootout, who knows?
Displacement Training
The long walk from the centre circle to take a penalty in a shootout offers players an opportunity to do something they could manage well without: overthinking. On that walk they have time to think about where to put their kick, but also plenty of time to think about the outcome, about the consequences of failure. Golf is no different, especially when the pressure is on. Players have a long gap between shots while they walk to their ball, plenty of time for similarly negative thoughts. Perhaps it was this overthinking that inspired Mark Twain to say, ‘Golf is a good walk spoiled.’ Perhaps Twain was simply struggling to manage his anxiety between shots!
If we look at pressure situations in our own lives, we often have plenty of time to overthink them beforehand too. When we’re lying in bed at night, with work or meeting the in-laws or running the 5k the next day, it’s easy to fill our heads with worry as we walk towards the ‘penalty spot’. Overthinking can be as detrimental to our own performance as it can to a sports performer, who would start second-guessing and unpicking their technique, forcing things that belong in their subconscious above the line into conscious thought. We can deprive ourselves of sleep worrying about it beforehand and when the occasion arrives, things that we would usually do implicitly – make small talk with the in-laws, make eye contact in an interview or presentation at the right moments – we’re suddenly extremely conscious of. We could become awkward, stumbling over our words, looking down at the floor.
I don’t believe it’s possible to train people not to think about something. Remember that purple elephant I asked you not to think about? Instead, we need to find something to displace the potentially destructive thoughts. For Jonny Wilkinson practising on the rugby field, it was Doris. Focusing on her magazine, her ice-cream cone, all helped displace the thoughts about technique he was struggling with so he was able to function at the effective level of conscious thought.
We are able to do this in our own lives. When you hear of people throwing themselves into their work during periods of personal stress, this is the same: they are displacing stressful thoughts with immediate thoughts of work. And we can do this to a less dramatic degree with some of the pressure situations we all have to face. Time pressures often make this difficult, but if we’re able to prepare for our interview or presentation in advance, so that we’re not working on it right up until we go to bed the night before, we can instead do something like watch a film, read a book or see friends or family, and this can act as a gentle displacement exercise, to focus our thoughts elsewhere in the build-up to the event.
In Ben Lyttleton’s book Twelve Yards, German footballer Stefan Kuntz describes a more aggressive method of thought displacement when he was preparing to take his penalty, the fifth, in the Euro ’96 semi-final against England:
‘During that walk, you are so alone, so afraid. I had to find a way to conquer my nerves. So I made myself angry. That way, I forgot about the nerves.’ Kuntz thought about his children, who were then five and seven, and how their school-mates would tease them if he missed the penalty. ‘I got so angry at the thought of these clowns upsetting my kids. I thought, “Don’t do this to your family!”’
Needless to say, Kuntz aggressively buried his penalty and England were soon out of the tournament when Gareth Southgate, who had not practised penalties, missed his. Kuntz’s method of displacing his thoughts might sound unusual, but it was effective He wasn’t thinking about his kicking technique; he was instead focusing on his anger. You might say that, instead of turning his anxiety into excitement, he turned it into anger, which produced a real focused aggression. And that’s the point with the T-CUP formula and in our efforts to displace our own unhelpful thoughts: it needs to be personal to us. For Kuntz, it was his family.
You will need to find your own bespoke method of displacing unhelpful thoughts so that you can think correctly under pressure. It will take some trial and error, just like it did for Jonny and Rob, but this is what your match practice is for. When you find the right formula you might not even realize it at first, because quite often we’re not aware of what we’re not thinking about. But you’ll see the improvement in your performance and you’ll begin to trust yourself.
New Balls, Please!
Elite sportsmen and women spend years working on their skills to be able to perform them on the biggest stage. Once their processes are honed and they are thinking correctly under pressure, then it should be the case that, if they do their processes right and perform to the best of their ability, they will get their intended outcome. Of course, even then they might be beaten on the day by better opposition, but there is no shame in that. What is difficult to accept, however, is when the equipment lets you down.
A top performer needs to be able to trust implicitly in their equipment. Golfers spend hours sourcing clubs and balls that give them consistent results; tennis players do likewise with the setup of their rackets; even footballers need the ball to be of the requisite standard for them to execute their skills effectively in front of the thousands of fans who have paid good money to see them do so. And it’s for this reason that I was so disappointed by the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand in 2011.
Like every other team, we were provided with tournament balls to use in training. I noticed initially that some of the balls didn’t seem right: the strike – the feel reported by the players – and the flight weren’t true, although this seemed to improve with use.
England won our first pool game narrowly, 13–9, against a very spirited Argentinian XV, but the goal kicking from both sides was well below standard. Jonny Wilkinson missed five kicks, while Argentina, who used two kickers, missed six in total. The game was played in an indoor stadium, so there was no wind factor, and although one kicker having a bad game might be understandable, for all three to do so in an environment unaffected by the weather was highly unusual.
Why did this happen? The simple fact is that the match balls were inconsistent. Eight match balls are supplied for every game (when the ball goes into the stands another is used to keep the play flowing), and when we used them the day before during the team run in the stadium, not all of them behaved the same in the air. For the kicker, this plays havoc with the mental side of their game. Instead of thinking, ‘If I do this [process], I will get that [outcome],’ they start to think, ‘If I do this, I might get that.’ The implicit trust in their equipment has been lost and their ability to think correctly under pressure compromised.
The day after the game I took a bag of brand-new balls and spent several hours kicking on my own. It was clear that some of them were behaving differently, despite being straight out of the packet. They needed a good few days’ kicking in before they were fit for a match, which wasn’t going to happen. I reported my findings to the head coach, Martin Johnson, and Rob Andrew, by then the RFU’s director of rugby, and made suggestions as to what we could do to manage the situation – to work with our dislocated expectations.
Mindful that we would always be playing with brand-new balls in the matches, we did likewise in training for our next game, against Georgia. During the team run in the stadium, when we were working with the new match balls, we’d test them using the Top Pocket system. As the match balls were numbered 1 to 8, we were able to note the characteristics of each ball – and so identify those we were keenest to avoid. We’d confirm our findings in the warm-up on match day and where possible during the game we tried to keep the best balls on the pitch.
Against Georgia we fared better, winning relatively comfortably with Toby Flood missing only two kicks from a possible seven. In our next game, against Romania, we did the same. On this occasion the players identified ball number 5 as a ‘real dog’. Frustratingly, this ball seemed to be in play throughout most of the match, and Toby Flood missed a kick with it in the second half. After that, we took the ball out of action, hiding it behind the hoardings, so it couldn’t be used by either side. Unbeknown to me, a match official had reported both myself and Bobby Stridgeon, the England fitness coach, who had actually kicked number 5 away and given Jonny a different ball in the first half, for breaking a law of the game. Bobby was simply doing what I asked him to and, in my opinion, should not have been implicated.
In the build-up to England’s game against Scotland, we walked right into a disciplinary storm. The Rugby World Cup organization were investigating the incident to see if Bobby and I were guilty of misconduct, as it is not permitted to switch balls when a player kicks a conversion without permission from the referee, and the English RFU had lengthy discussions with them about the matter, which I knew little about. I was left with a choice: either accept a one-match ban or attend a hearing on the Saturday (match day), which would mean both Wilkinson and Flood having to attend it too. Hardly ideal preparation for the match. I felt that this was no choice at all, so I accepted the ban.
The press, naturally, had a field day – Ballgate! I still maintain that I did nothing wrong: tennis players change balls all the time and there are other instances in a rugby match when it is permitted to change the ball, such as when the hooker wants a dry ball to throw into the lineout. Out-of-shape cricket balls are routinely replaced. I have since been told that both Scotland and South Africa also complained about the balls.
Why did this matter so much to me? Well, at this level, consistency in the equipment isn’t just important, it’s crucial. There is enough for a performer to think about when the pressure’s on without having additional interfering thoughts about the equipment to deal with. It is much tougher to commit fully to a process that only might produce the intended outcome. If we go back to that five-foot jump between fifty-storey buildings, how would it affect you if the concrete edging was crumbling and unstable? A little piece breaks off and falls all the way down to the ground: how ready are you to commit to the process now?
Equipment inconsistency causes the player to start unpicking their subconscious thoughts. When results become inconsistent they’ll start to blame themselves when, in fact, it is the equipment that isn’t consistent. Surely both players and fans deserve better?* If you were asked to take your driving test in a car with no brakes, would that be an accurate platform from which to assess your driving capability?
While we can plan for dislocations in our expectations, we should be able to depend on the basics when we perform under pressure, certainly in terms of our equipment. If you work in an office, you would reasonably expect your computer not to crash half a dozen times a day. If you are a doctor or nurse, you would expect your equipment to provide accurate readings. If you are a soldier going into combat, you would certainly expect your weapon to fire when the trigger is pulled.
We need to know that, when we approach a task under pressure, if we do this (the process), then we get that (the outcome). And if we don’t, then we need to know for certain it’s because of us and not our equipment, so that we can take steps to correct it. I hope this book can do a lot to help you, but it won’t be able to fix your brakes or your computer – or repair the cement on the ledge before you make that leap.
Just Hit It
Thinking correctly under pressure is a method for displacing unhelpful thoughts and filling your mind with productive, engaging keys – language here is vital – to help you perform at your best. It is a way for you to commit fully to a process you’ve practised so that you can leave thoughts of the outcome – the major source of all of our performance anxieties – to one side. The outcome will then take care of itself. When we can truly lose ourselves in the process we can appreciate what people mean when they say they’re ‘in the zone’. We become immersed in our process, acting implicitly and not hugely conscious of much else, and this is what we’re all striving for when we perform under pressure.
Your T-CUP is an ever-changing formula that should help you strive to reach this. As you gain experience, so your formula for each task you’re attempting will develop; it grows with you. Anyone can use T-CUP, at any stage of their development, just so long as you are prepared to practise. When we look back to John, the little boy having a go at golf back in Chapter 3, we see that he didn’t harbour any thoughts about failure. We have learned about fearing failure as we’ve grown older. John didn’t need a formula to help organize his mind in the back garden with the ball and club: he just hit it and was excited at the result.
In essence, we’re all trying to ‘just hit it’ – to be completely lost in that wonderful moment, with no unhelpful thoughts about the consequences, no possibility of ‘failure’ clouding our minds. We need to be able to stand on the ledge and, with excitement, commit wholeheartedly to jumping off.