Even when we hone our skills in practice, it’s easy to fall apart under the pressure of performance.
With eyes on you, something at stake and a little voice whispering in your ear that you shouldn’t be here, even the mundane can become impossibly daunting.
Why?
In a vacuum, there’s no reason why something we can do with our eyes closed in one context causes us so much stress in another.
But life doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It happens in connection & response to other people.
While we’re capable of being our own worst taskmasters, the fear we feel when we worry we won’t measure up on this outing typically arises from the judgments other people place on us.
Sometimes, those judgments are explicit. People tell us what they expect – and if we fail to live up to that standard, we’ve let them down.
Other times, they’re implicit. Societal expectations. Not something that you can easily point to, critique, and ultimately discard. It’s a part of who we are… and self-surgery is a frightening option.
There are a multitude of techniques you can use to master performance under pressure. Plenty of good books have been written on the topic: one worth reading is the “The Pressure Principle” by Dave Alred (a solid piece of work from a sports psychology perspective).
But beyond techiques, there’s a paradigm shift we can rely on:
One that transcends context & helps us to put these fears in their proper place.
It’s this…
Rather than seeing this challenge as the end, see it as just another point on the line.
Success and failure are merely moments in time.
Maybe you don’t measure up to the necessary standard today.
Maybe you gave it your best shot & it just didn’t work out.
Maybe, all that’s left to do at this point is to lick your wounds and forget you ever tried.
Perhaps.
Or maybe that’s the wrong way of looking at things.
What if, instead of being a holistic, unchangeable assessment of your ability to perform, you just saw this as practice with more spectators, more noise, or more mental chatter to quieten?
Being on the Big Stage for the Big Show feels like a Big Deal.
But to the lifelong performer, it’s just another opportunity to hone their craft.
Whether it goes brilliantly or they bomb, it’ll all be over soon…
And before they know it, another chance will have rolled around.
The only thing that’ll stop from capitalising when it does is the voice in their head that says “remember what happened last time”…
Because the decision to try again and creatively engage with the next challenge – without any regard to what came before – grinds to a halt when we talk ourselves out of it.
Maybe the best way we can practice for performance is by letting go of our need for performance to be perfect.
And better still – when we see the performance as practice in another form, the pressure relieves.