Perform Under Pressure Quotes

The elegance under pressure is the result of fearlessness.

There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

For life today in America is based on the premise of ever-widening circles of contact and communication. It involves not only family demands, but community demands, national demands, international demands on the good citizen, through social and cultural pressures, through newspapers, magazines, radio programs, political drives, charitable appeals, and so on. My mind reels in it, What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives. It puts the trapeze artist to shame. Look at us. We run a tight rope daily, balancing a pile of books on the head. Baby-carriage, parasol, kitchen chair, still under control. Steady now!

The secret is that everything is always on the line. The more present we are at practice, the more present we will be in competition, in the boardroom, at the exam, the operating table, the big stage. If we have any hope of attaining excellence, let alone of showing what we’ve got under pressure, we have to be prepared by a lifestyle of reinforcement. Presence must be like breathing.

When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.

we cannot calculate our important contests, adventures, and great loves to the end. The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined.

Her mouth was on his with such ferocity, it knocked him back a step. He managed to haul her back so he could gasp for air and answers. "Not that I'm complaining." "Then don't. Shut up and put out Savoie." "You are so romantic, detective." She chained rough kisses about his neck. "What if I can't perform under this unexpected pressure?" Her hand dropped below his belt for an assessing fondle. "Just my luck. Appears to be high performance all the way." He chuckled and began to nuzzle and nip at her rather roughly, his attention supercharged by her aggression. "And what kind of handling are you looking for?" "Fast and reckless

I’ve done it before. I can do it again” is the mantra of this pressure solution.

Under pressure people can perform fifteen percent better or fifteen percent worse.

If you want to be able to perform under pressure, you need to learn to play tired.

At this point, I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to get people to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it, and to sleep on it. I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human beings had to come down with, under the pressure of the most fundamental of all the changes which they experienced—that change when they finally found themselves locked within the confines of society and peace. Just like the things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure—suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.” From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leader, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely. These unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and error-prone organ! I believe that on earth there has never been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts had not all at once stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for them.

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web. The names and pictures Cheryl found were at once familiar and yet not part of her conscious memory: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Louis 'Jolly' West, Dr. Ewen Cameron, Dr. Martin Orne and others had information by and about them on the Web. Soon, she began looking up sites related to childhood incest and found that some of the survivor sites mentioned the same names, though in the context of experiments performed on small children. Again, some names were familiar. Then Cheryl began remembering what turned out to be triggers from old programmes. 'The song, "The Green, Green Grass of home" kept running through my mind. I remembered that my father sang it as well. It all made no sense until I remembered that the last line of the song tells of being buried six feet under that green, green grass. Suddenly, it came to me that this was a suicide programme of the government. 'I went crazy. I felt that my body would explode unless I released some of the pressure I felt within, so I grabbed a [pair ofl scissors and cut myself with the blade so I bled. In my distracted state, I was certain that the bleeding would let the pressure out. I didn't know Lynn had felt the same way years earlier. I just knew I had to do it Cheryl says. She had some barbiturates and other medicine in the house. 'One particularly despondent night, I took several pills. It wasn't exactly a suicide try, though the pills could have killed me. Instead, I kept thinking that I would give myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up the next morning. Maybe the pills would kill me. Maybe the dose would not be lethal. It was all up to God. I began taking pills each night. Each-morning I kept awakening.

I remember a conversation which we had once about translating. Hugo knew nothing about translating, but when he learnt that I was a translator he wanted to know what it was like. I remember him going on and on, asking questions such as: What do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French? How do you know you’re thinking it in French? If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it’s a French picture? Or is it that you say the French word to yourself? What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right? Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time? Or is it a kind of feeling? What kind of feeling? Can’t you describe it more closely? And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo’s ‘You mean’, a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.

Introverts are not smarter than extroverts. According to IQ scores, the two types are equally intelligent. And on many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload.

There’s a pulse in my body, vibrating every pressure point. “I like kissing you.” His hand lowers to my waist. “I could kiss you forever.” I lazily glance at him from under my eyelashes. “Just kissing.” Because I think I’ll combust if we do more. The right side of his mouth quirks. “Just kissing. And some touching.” To prove his point Isaiah’s hands caress my back, weave into my hair and slide against the dip of my waist. Yes, definitely some touching. I inhale deeply, reminding myself that breathing is still a requirement. “I agree. Some touching. No new clothes off.” Because I’d probably pass out at the thought of his jeans off. They already hang low on his hips. Too low. Very low. Low enough that I start to imagine what more there is to him. Isaiah wraps his hand around the back of my neck and performs this deep massage that makes my eyes roll into my head in ecstasy. “I’ll put my shirt back on if you want.” “No,” I breathe out. “I’m fine with it off.” More than fine.

Next, think about likely questions or interruptions, and rehearse your responses. Then think of additional questions or interruptions, and how you would handle them.

The philosopher Epictetus said more than two thousand years ago, “Man is not troubled by events but rather how he interprets them.

There’s no pressure. It is going to be fun, a great game, and I look forward to meeting the challenge.

In light of our results, managers who say—or secretly believe—that employees work better under pressure, uncertainty, unhappiness, or fear are just plain wrong. Negative inner work life has a negative effect on the four dimensions of performance: people are less creative, less productive, less deeply committed to their work, and less collegial to each other when their inner work lives darken.

Many kinds of tasks, particularly those performed under time or social pressure or involving multitasking, extroverts do better. Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload.

Our emotions play a vital role in how we face challenges and setbacks. Our ability to function effectively when everything around us is going awry is closely linked to how we process our emotions. If we’re unable to control them, our capability to perform under pressure suffers. If we are able to exert control, handling mistakes and distress becomes much easier. This is referred to as our emotional intelligence.

It was the very essence of the bean, extracted within forty-five seconds under relentless pressure. Unlike human beings, coffee beans don’t cave into unabating stress. When pressed to perform, they give their very best.

Testosterone has another important effect: It increases levels of dopamine, the feel-good chemical in the brain that mediates the reward network. Pay raises, compliments, sex, experiencing any kind of success—all result in increased levels of dopamine in the brain.

some seem to get trapped in the compulsion to succeed, others take a rebellious stance. Pointing to the blatant cruelties and limitations involved in a cultural pattern which tends to value only the winner and ignore even the positive qualities of the mediocre, they vehemently criticize competition. Among the most vocal are youth who have suffered under competitive pressures imposed on them by parents or society. Teaching these young people, I often observe in them a desire to fail. They seem to seek failure by making no effort to win

that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them.

The Bolsheviks argued that only socialism could resolve the contradiction between work and family. Under socialism, household labor would be transferred to the public sphere: The tasks performed by millions of individual unpaid women in their homes would be taken over by paid workers in communal dining rooms, laundries, and childcare centers. Women would be freed to enter the public sphere on an equal basis with men, unhampered by the duties of the home. At last women would be equally educated, waged, and able to pursue their own individual goals and development. Under such circumstances, marriage would become superfluous. Men and women would come together and separate as they wished, apart from the deforming pressures of economic dependency and need. Free union would gradually replace marriage as the state ceased to interfere in the union between the sexes. Parents, regardless of their marital status, would care for their children with the help of the state; the very concept of illegitimacy would become obsolete. The family, stripped of its previous social functions, would gradually wither away, leaving in its place fully autonomous, equal individuals free to choose their partners on the basis of love and mutual respect.

The big mental shift in performance under pressure comes when we can feel fear but accept deep inside that we will mentally survive the moment. Once the mental threat in a situation is contained, it loses its power to overwhelm us emotionally and shut us down, allowing us to re-energise and face the challenge.

But we now know that even small victories, or micro-successes—a productive conversation with your boss, or a positive phone call with a client, a compliment from a colleague or friend—can have the same impact. They stimulate the winner effect, causing the release of testosterone and dopamine, which in turn build confidence.

Feeling challenged is an inherent performance steroid—your body releases more adrenaline than noradrenaline, which means the smooth muscle in your blood vessels dilate, as do your your lungs, and now you have more oxygenated blood going to the tissues that need it. Your body has more energy and your brain can think more clearly.

If I have learned anything over my first twenty-nine years, it is that we cannot calculate our important contests, adventures, and great loves to the end. The only thing we can really count on is getting surprised. No matter how much preparation we do, in the real tests of our lives, we’ll be in unfamiliar terrain. Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined. It

Conditions might not be calm or reasonable. It may feel as though the whole world is stacked against us. This is when we have to perform better than we ever conceived of performing. I believe the key is to have prepared in a manner that allows for inspiration, to have laid the foundation for us to create under the wildest pressures we ever imagined. It

These small wins matter more because they are so much more likely to occur compared to the big break-throughs in the world. If we only waited for the big wins, we would be waiting a long time. And we would probably quit long before we saw anything tangible come to fruition. What you need instead of big wins is simply the forward momentum that small wins bring.

Instead of someone else’s expectations, we’re driven by our own intention. Instead of being affected by someone else’s scrutiny, we have a clear sense of where we are right now, in this moment. And instead of someone else’s consequences, we are focused on our current priority. The mental recipe for internally driven people is intention, moment, priority, or IMP.

My Standard of Performance—the values and beliefs within it—guided everything I did in my work at San Francisco and are defined as follows: Exhibit a ferocious and intelligently applied work ethic directed at continual improvement; demonstrate respect for each person in the organization and the work he or she does; be deeply committed to learning and teaching, which means increasing my own expertise; be fair; demonstrate character; honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter; show self-control, especially where it counts most—under pressure; demonstrate and prize loyalty; use positive language and have a positive attitude; take pride in my effort as an entity separate from the result of that effort; be willing to go the extra distance for the organization; deal appropriately with victory and defeat, adulation and humiliation (don’t get crazy with victory nor dysfunctional with loss); promote internal communication that is both open and substantive (especially under stress); seek poise in myself and those I lead; put the team’s welfare and priorities ahead of my own; maintain an ongoing level of concentration and focus that is abnormally high; and make sacrifice and commitment the organization’s trademark.

Great performers share a way of thinking, a set of attitudes and attributes like optimism, confidence, persistence, and strong will. They all want to push themselves to see how great they can become. These attributes and attitudes cause champions to work harder and smarter than other people as they prepare for competition. They help them stay focused under pressure and to produce their best performances when the stakes are highest.

On the back of her gratitude for the opportunity to talk and connect with her children, a powerful new insight presents itself. Although she can’t provide as much as some parents materially, there’s is no reason why she can’t develop their inner strength in a way that others will struggle to match. Dealing with pressure and having to think clearly in emotional situations have helped her today, both at work and at home, and passing this gift on to her children will help them face adversity too.

I believe in making society more equal for our kids, she ploughing on, ignoring pointed coughs telling her to get on with it or shut up our kids, she emphasizes (the possibility of shared ownership), have been told they’re failures, thick, as you put it, before they’ve proven otherwise Exams are all well and good but not everyone performs well under pressure or manifests their intelligence at a young age, it can be acquired later, you know, nurtured by us, we have to be more than teachers, we have to look after them, believe in them If we don’t help then, who will?

After nearly collapsing under the pressures of poverty, loneliness, and an addiction to Dexedrine, Spark sought help for her drug use and began to work seriously on a first novel, The Comforters (1957), partly with the financial and emotional support of the novelist Graham Greene. Though a late fiction writer, Spark began producing novels and stories at a rapid pace. In 1961 she wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, widely considered her masterpiece. The novel follows a teacher at a girls’ school who carefully and manipulatively cultivates the minds and morals of a select handful of promising pupils. In 1969, it was adapted into an Academy Award–winning film starring Maggie Smith and was a Royal Command Performance.

Which philosophers would Alain suggest for practical living? Alain’s list overlaps nearly 100% with my own: Epicurus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Michel de Montaigne, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertrand Russell. * Most-gifted or recommended books? The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, Essays of Michel de Montaigne. * Favorite documentary The Up series: This ongoing series is filmed in the UK, and revisits the same group of people every 7 years. It started with their 7th birthdays (Seven Up!) and continues up to present day, when they are in their 50s. Subjects were picked from a wide variety of social backgrounds. Alain calls these very undramatic and quietly powerful films “probably the best documentary that exists.” TF: This is also the favorite of Stephen Dubner on page 574. Stephen says, “If you are at all interested in any kind of science or sociology, or human decision-making, or nurture versus nature, it is the best thing ever.” * Advice to your 30-year-old self? “I would have said, ‘Appreciate what’s good about this moment. Don’t always think that you’re on a permanent journey. Stop and enjoy the view.’ . . . I always had this assumption that if you appreciate the moment, you’re weakening your resolve to improve your circumstances. That’s not true, but I think when you’re young, it’s sort of associated with that. . . . I had people around me who’d say things like, ‘Oh, a flower, nice.’ A little part of me was thinking, ‘You absolute loser. You’ve taken time to appreciate a flower? Do you not have bigger plans? I mean, this the limit of your ambition?’ and when life’s knocked you around a bit and when you’ve seen a few things, and time has happened and you’ve got some years under your belt, you start to think more highly of modest things like flowers and a pretty sky, or just a morning where nothing’s wrong and everyone’s been pretty nice to everyone else. . . . Fortune can do anything with us. We are very fragile creatures. You only need to tap us or hit us in slightly the wrong place. . . . You only have to push us a little bit, and we crack very easily, whether that’s the pressure of disgrace or physical illness, financial pressure, etc. It doesn’t take very much. So, we do have to appreciate every day that goes by without a major disaster.

astonishing number of senior leaders are systemically incapable of identifying their organization’s most glaring and dangerous shortcomings. This is not a function of stupidity, but rather stems from two routine pressures that constrain everybody’s thinking and behavior. The first is comprised of cognitive biases, such as mirror imaging, anchoring, and confirmation bias. These unconscious motivations on decision-making under uncertain conditions make it inherently difficult to evaluate one’s own judgments and actions. As David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell University, has shown in countless environments, people who are highly incompetent in terms of their skills or knowledge are also terrible judges of their own performance. For example, people who perform the worst on pop quizzes also have the widest variance between how they thought they performed and the actual score that they earned.22

Look at your “hobophobia.” If there is one group of people our majority population fear and despise it is rootless, nomadic individuals with no stake in society. They offend simply by “opting out”—of property, commitments, beliefs, relationships, expectations. Many such people have turned their backs on a society they don’t understand or can’t cope with. They have absconded from the pressures to compete, to perform, to sell out, to join in the dance of bureaucracy, money worries, cohabitation, housekeeping, procreation, you-name-it. Society is right to fear such people because they embody the sane rejection of many insanely onerous “civilized” values that would collapse under scrutiny. Strangely, though, society also makes an idol of Jesus, apparently a nomad who had no possessions or family ties, who walked away from a promising career in carpentry, a hobo if ever there was one. (We haven’t, however, made a popular hero out of Diogenes, the ultimate dirty Greek hobo.)

Finally, you need to also refine or cultivate those traits that go into a strong character—resilience under pressure, attention to detail, the ability to complete things, to work with a team, to be tolerant of people’s differences. The only way to do so is to work on your habits, which go into the slow formation of your character. For instance, you train yourself to not react in the moment by repeatedly placing yourself in stressful or adverse situations in order to get used to them. In boring everyday tasks, you cultivate greater patience and attention to detail. You deliberately take on tasks slightly above your level. In completing them, you have to work harder, helping you establish more discipline and better work habits. You train yourself to continually think of what is best for the team. You also search out others who display a strong character and associate with them as much as possible. In this way you can assimilate their energy and their habits. And to develop some flexibility in your character, always a sign of strength, you occasionally shake yourself up, trying out some new strategy or way of thinking, doing the opposite of what you would normally do. With such work you will no longer be a slave to the character created by your earliest years and the compulsive behavior it leads to. Even further, you can now actively shape your very character and the fate that goes with it. In anything, it is a mistake to think one can perform an action or behave in a certain way once and no more. (The mistake of those who say: “Let us slave away and save every penny till we are thirty, then we will enjoy ourselves.” At thirty they will have a bent for avarice and hard work, and will never enjoy themselves any more . . . .) What one does, one will do again, indeed has probably already done in the distant past. The agonizing thing in life is that it is our own decisions that throw us into this rut, under the wheels that crush us. (The truth is that, even before making those decisions, we were going in that direction.) A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself. —Cesare Pavese

Besides increasing or decreasing the stimulation level of the environment, you can also achieve an optimal level of arousal by drinking beverages that have a direct impact on neocortical arousal.38 Alcohol, at least initially, has the effect of lowering arousal. After a couple of glasses of wine the extraverts are more likely to dip below the optimal arousal level, whereas their introverted friends, nudged closer to optimal arousal, may appear unexpectedly garrulous. Coffee, being a stimulant, has the opposite effect. After ingesting about two cups of coffee, extraverts carry out tasks more efficiently, whereas introverts perform less well. This deficit is magnified if the task they are engaged in is quantitative and if it is done under time pressure. For an introvert, an innocent couple of cups of coffee before a meeting may prove challenging, particularly if the purpose of the meeting is a rapid-fire discussion of budget projections, data analysis, or similar quantitative concerns. In the same meeting an extraverted colleague is likely to benefit from a caffeine kick that creates, in the eyes of the introverts, the illusion of competency.

When the Bible speaks of following Jesus, it is proclaiming a discipleship which will liberate mankind from all man-made dogmas, from every burden and oppression, from every anxiety and torture which afflicts the conscience. If they follow Jesus, men escape from the hard yoke of their own laws, and submit to the kindly yoke of Jesus Christ. But does this mean that we ignore the seriousness of his commands? Far from it. We can only achieve perfect liberty and enjoy fellowship with Jesus when his command, his call to absolute discipleship, is appreciated in its entirety. Only the man who follows the command of Jesus single-mindedly, and unresistingly lets his yoke rest upon him, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard, for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light. “His commandments are not grievous” (I John 5.3). The commandment of Jesus is not a sort of spiritual shock treatment. Jesus asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to perform it. His commandment never seeks to destroy life, but to foster, strengthen and heal it.

The third serious problem the culture of customer service as we know it creates is turning every profession into a customer service tool to generate profits. In doing so, we risk the loss of creativity, quality, and critical thinking in many walks of life. Nowhere is this risk clearer and more damaging than viewing students at different educational institutions as customers, and nowhere this trend has been happening more rapidly than at schools, colleges, and universities, especially at private institutions. There is severe damage done to creativity and critical thinking when all students want is an A, and in fact feel entitled to get it since they (or their parents) are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend elite schools. Many educators are under enormous pressure to give students grades they do not deserve in order to avoid receiving bad student evaluations (or to ensure getting good ones). This pressure is intensifying as academic jobs become increasingly contingent and precarious, where teaching staff are hired under short contracts only renewed based on so-called ‘performance,’ which is often measured by student evaluations and enrollment. When this happens, academic and intellectual compromises and corruption increase. Colleagues at elite American universities have been pressured to give students grades no lower than a B, with the explanation that this is what is ‘expected.’ Rampant grade inflation is unethical and unacceptable. Unfortunately, when graduate instructors resist professors’ instructions to fix grades by grading according to independent criteria of intellectual merit, they may be verbally chastised or worse, fired. This humiliation not only reinforces the norm of inflating grades, it also bolsters the power of the tenured professors who instruct their teaching assistants to do it.

Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who teaches creative-writing workshops for kids and teens as director of Writopia Lab in New York City, says that the students who sign up for her classes “are often not the kids who are willing to talk for hours about fashion and celebrity. Those kids are less likely to come, perhaps because they’re less inclined to analyze and dig deep—that’s not their comfort zone. The so-called shy kids are often hungry to brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them, and act on them, and, paradoxically, when they’re allowed to interact this way, they’re not shy at all. They’re connecting with each other, but in a deeper zone, in a place that’s considered boring or tiresome by some of their peers.” And these kids do “come out” when they’re ready; most of the Writopia kids read their works at local bookstores, and a staggering number win prestigious national writing competitions. If your child is prone to overstimulation, then it’s also a good idea for her to pick activities like art or long-distance running, that depend less on performing under pressure. If she’s drawn to activities that require performance, though, you can help her thrive. When I was a kid, I loved figure skating. I could spend hours on the rink, tracing figure eights, spinning happily, or flying through the air. But on the day of my competitions, I was a wreck. I hadn’t slept the night before and would often fall during moves that I had sailed through in practice. At first I believed what people told me—that I had the jitters, just like everybody else. But then I saw a TV interview with the Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt. She said that pre-competition nerves gave her the adrenaline she needed to win the gold. I knew then that Katarina and I were utterly different creatures, but it took me decades to figure out why. Her nerves were so mild that they simply energized her, while mine were constricting enough to make me choke. At the time, my very supportive mother quizzed the other skating moms about how their own daughters handled pre-competition anxiety, and came back with insights that she hoped would make me feel better. Kristen’s nervous too, she reported. Renée’s mom says she’s scared the night before a competition. But I knew Kristen and Renée well, and I was certain that they weren’t as frightened as I was

The key to preventing this is balance. I see the give and take between different constituencies in a business as central to its success. So when I talk about taming the Beast, what I really mean is that keeping its needs balanced with the needs of other, more creative facets of your company will make you stronger. Let me give you an example of what I mean, drawn from the business I know best. In animation, we have many constituencies: story, art, budget, technology, finance, production, marketing, and consumer products. The people within each constituency have priorities that are important—and often opposing. The writer and director want to tell the most affecting story possible; the production designer wants the film to look beautiful; the technical directors want flawless effects; finance wants to keep the budgets within limits; marketing wants a hook that is easily sold to potential viewers; the consumer products people want appealing characters to turn into plush toys and to plaster on lunchboxes and T-shirts; the production managers try to keep everyone happy—and to keep the whole enterprise from spiraling out of control. And so on. Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decisions impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well, which means achieving stated goals. Particularly in the early months of a project, these goals—which are subgoals, really, in the making of a film—are often easier to articulate and explain than the film itself. But if the director is able to get everything he or she wants, we will likely end up with a film that’s too long. If the marketing people get their way, we will only make a film that mimics those that have already been “proven” to succeed—in other words, familiar to viewers but in all likelihood a creative failure. Each group, then, is trying to do the right thing, but they’re pulling in different directions. If any one of those groups “wins,” we lose. In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.

A top performer: • Must perform under conditions of intense pressure • Must understand that numbers drive everything • Is constantly under pressure from ambitious new competitors from all over the world • Realises that last year's record becomes next year's baseline • Constantly grows and re-invents themselves in order to stay at the top • Is subject to brutal accountability perform or you don't play • Must have sustainable drive, or achieving performance goals becomes difficult.

Whether you know or not, you are always under construction as a person and a business builder. You may feel like you are under extreme pressure to perform but you need to always remember that you “are becoming” and you have not arrived. Life and sales are a continual journey, not a destination. The room for improvement and growth is the largest room in the world.

In my view, the key to becoming a successful NBA player is not learning the coolest highlight-reel moves. It’s learning how to control your emotions and keep your mind focused on the game, how to play through pain, how to carve out your role on the team and perform it consistently, how to stay cool under pressure and maintain your equanimity after crushing losses or ecstatic wins.

Imagine two independent worlds, in one of which the wealthy are taxed more heavily than in the other. In the high-tax world, the wealthiest drivers buy Porsche 911 Turbos for $150,000 rather than $333,000 Ferrari F12 Berlinettas, the vehicle of choice of wealthy drivers in the low-tax world. But because the lowly Porsche includes every design feature that materially affects handling and performance, the absolute differences between these cars are minuscule. In both cases, drivers would take the same pride in owning the best car on the road. Available evidence suggests that even if all other features of the two worlds were exactly the same, it would be difficult to detect any measurable happiness differences between wealthy drivers in these environments. But of course other features would not be the same. Even if governments in both worlds were highly wasteful, at least some of the extra revenue in the high-tax world would go for public investment, including better road maintenance. So the real question is this: “Who is happier, someone who drives a $333,000 Ferrari on roads riddled with foot-deep potholes, or someone driving a $150,000 Porsche on well-maintained roads?

But language has a finite number of components and contingencies; there are plenty of examples. And that letter was written by a machine. It’s content derived from data and produced by an algorithm. A machine can’t differentiate the meaningful from the meaningless, and it can’t generate any sort of a literary style or voice. It can only perform toward a goal it has been given, even if it is using examples.

First, being trained to a highly proficient level does not guarantee that the individual will perform well under force pressure. Second, the lack of training does not guarantee that the individual will not perform well under force pressure.

By nature, we humans shrink from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult. We bring this natural tendency to our practice of any skill. Once we grow adept at some aspect of this skill, generally one that comes more easily to us, we prefer to practice this element over and over. Our skill becomes lopsided as we avoid our weaknesses. Knowing that in our practice we can let down our guard, since we are not being watched or under pressure to perform, we bring to this a kind of dispersed attention. We tend to also be quite conventional in our practice routines. We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for these skills.

Matt is one of the people I most try to emulate. He is exceptionally calm and logical under pressure. I’ve seen him face multiple data-center collapses with near-indifference, calmly sipping beer before another billiards shot. What should I tell a hugely influential journalist asking about it? “Tell him we’re on it.” Then he sunk another ball. He’s the epitome of “getting upset won’t help things.” I frequently ask myself “What would Matt do?” or “What would Matt say to me?

The place to start is with ourselves, because if we are vulnerable to judgment from others, the chances are we are even harder on ourselves. It’s easy to underestimate how much disapproval, criticism and scolding we put ourselves through.

We always start with what worked well, then consider where we fell short of our intent. This protects us from looking more at the negative more than the positive.

My call to action goes well beyond asking you to pressure your recruiting team to hire a couple of token employees. That's easy and you've been doing that for years. My call to action is that you dig deeper and place focus on making the work environment sustainable for the minorities you introduce to your team. I'm challenging you to refrain from the habitual practice of listening only to the jaded opinions of people that you are more familiar with. Consider that, although you may be under the impression that your employees have strong ethics, morals and values, there is a possibility that they mat not be telling you the entire truth when speaking about the performance or demeanor of minorities. Furthermore, I challenge you to accept that racism, ageism, ableism, classism, sizeism, homophobia, etc., are real and shaping the semblance of your organization. Accepting that fact does not mean that people you work with and trust are bad people. It simply means that many of them are naïve, fearful, and more comfortable with pointing fingers at the innocent than they are with facing and addressing their own unconscious and damaging biases.

fear could crash our mood; trigger memories of past failures; rob our attention and focus; or undermine our performance (i.e., cause us to choke under pressure) OR it could make us more careful about our decisions; deepen our reflection; create opportunities for changing direction;

A particularly effective means to help Prioritize and Execute under pressure is to stay at least a step or two ahead of real-time problems. Through careful contingency planning, a leader can anticipate likely challenges that could arise during execution and map out an effective response to those challenges before they happen. That leader and his or her team are far more likely to win. Staying ahead of the curve prevents a leader from being overwhelmed when pressure is applied and enables greater decisiveness. If the team has been briefed and understands what actions to take through such likely contingencies, the team can then rapidly execute when those problems arise, even without specific direction from leaders. This is a critical characteristic of any high-performance, winning team in any business or industry. It also enables effective Decentralized Command (chapter 8).

At about this time two fatalities occurred on Nevada due to poisonous gas. On 7 February Lieutenant James S. Clarkson removed a cap from the air test fitting of the steering engine room. He was in a trunk which had limited space and air volume. Several men went to his rescue, but too late as escaping gas killed him. Machinist Mate DeVries who reached him first, later died at the hospital. In all, six men were overcome by the gas. At once a Board of Investigation was called, and the Navy Yard chemist ascertained that the gas was hydrogen sulfide. It is odorless in high concentrations and acts without warning; it originates in stagnant water which has a quantity of paper products in the pressured space. Thereafter frequent samples of air were taken for analysis, and temporary ventilation was greatly increased on all ships under salvage. Confined spaces were not entered without wearing rescue breathing apparatus. Besides the temporary ventilation which was provided as spaces were unwatered, temporary lighting lines were run. Both were essential for the efficient performance of the work.

These are in unprioritized order: • Ability to hire A Players (for managers). Sources, selects, and sells A Players to join a company. • Ability to develop people (for managers). Coaches people in their current roles to improve performance, and prepares them for future roles. • Flexibility/adaptability. Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes effectively with complexity and change. • Calm under pressure. Maintains stable

These are in unprioritized order: • Ability to hire A Players (for managers). Sources, selects, and sells A Players to join a company. • Ability to develop people (for managers). Coaches people in their current roles to improve performance, and prepares them for future roles. • Flexibility/adaptability. Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes effectively with complexity and change. • Calm under pressure. Maintains stable performance when under heavy pressure or stress.

If a woman can be the attorney general or the secretary of state, what’s keeping you from climbing up the career ladder? You want to complain about the glass ceiling, the lack of childcare, or your boss’s assumption that you don’t deserve a promotion because women don’t perform well under pressure? People in our postfeminist world don’t want to hear about it. They want you to find a way around the impediment. Whining about obstacles won’t solve anything, so get over it. Adjust your attitude. You’re not one of those uptight feminists, are you? Don’t you know that gender equality has been accomplished? Haven’t you heard that feminists keep women down by making them insecure about their ability to compete as men’s equals? They are a defeatist bunch, complaining about minor issues. Surely you won’t let trivial hindrances conquer you! Surely you’ll find a way to make something of yourself. Surely you’ll beat the odds.

I should have seen this well-practiced ritual for what it was, understood the level of performance here in Marioland, appreciated the experience, the time served together that allowed these hulking giants to dance wordlessly around each other in the cramped, heavily manned space behind the line without ever colliding or wasting a movement. They turned from cutting board to stove-top with breathtaking economy of movement, they hefted 300-pound stockpots onto ranges, tossed legs of veal around like pullets, blanched hundreds of pounds of pasta, all the while indulgently enduring without comment my endless self-aggrandizing line of witless chatter. I should have understood this femme/convict patois, this business with the women's names, the arcane expressions, seen it for what it was: the end result of years working together in a confined space under extreme pressure. I should have understood. But I didn't.

loss aversion creates the behavior commonly known as “playing not to lose,” instead of playing to win. How

time (and other) pressure might make you feel more creative, but it does not help you do higher-quality work. In

Time pressure may drive people to get more done, but it causes them to think less creatively.” This same effect can be seen in teams.

you believe that the only way to be successful in a pressure situation is to perform better than you ever have performed before—that is, to be perfect—you stop trusting your capabilities, and worse, you start doing things that do not help you succeed. You

Individuals who can perform under pressure appraise the criticism as information that can help them. In

you’ve heard that some people at work do more creative work, are more productive, work better as a team, or add more value to a client under pressure. But it’s not true. Moreover,

When I talk about kindness in business, a few people scoff. They say, “Steve Jobs and the leaders at Apple created a pressure-cooker environment but it produced category-defining products that people love and obsess over.” That is the point — the results are not worth the cost, because there is an alternative. The goal of TRM is to create a kind, sustainable, and fulfilling experience for everyone. Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only obsessive egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense. People are the most important resource for any business, and people — whether they are employees, vendors, or customers — respond best to kindness, respect, humility, and empathy. You never know what other people are going through in their lives. Many of us are under great stress, especially when business cycles shift and economic pressures build. Others are struggling in relationships. When everyone feels valued and heard, they are more likely to show up fully and bring their best each day. Kindness is the alternative to the unnecessary “business is war” analogies that are not only tiresome but borderline offensive. It is the opposite of the “outcome justified the means” mentality that drives many entrepreneurs to consider sacrificing everything (including their morals) to build $100 million businesses in seven years. It’s success without the collateral damage. This aspect of TRM creates a healthy framework for daily interactions and long-term goals and helps people avoid burnout even when they put in heavy hours over long periods of time. We are all naturally optimistic, motivated to be better tomorrow than we are today. A kind organization understands that and leverages it. Your goal is to build a product that lasts, but to do that, you must also build an organization, a work environment, and a fabric of relationships that last too. People will remain engaged and focused on achievements when they are doing something meaningful that they care about in an organization that lets them live the way they want to live. “Caring and a sense of purpose evoke better performance than pressure and fear. The idea that only egomaniacs can produce breakthroughs is nonsense.

Your natural tools are your thoughts, physiological responses, body movements, voice, and senses. They determine how you handle pressure, regardless of your level of expertise, abilities, or good intentions. People

Such defensiveness may just seem to be a refusal to take responsibility for engaging in something essential to healthy relationship, but underlying it is one hell of a double bind: (1) the pressure to cultivate and make central the qualities that make great relationship possible (like vulnerability, emotional openness, and integrity); and (2) the coexisting pressure to cultivate and make central the qualities that supposedly make us real men, especially at work (like aggression, emotional stoicism, and driven performance). Trying to do both, trying to please both sets of standards, simply divides and, therefore, disempowers us.

Individuals with a higher degree of confidence work harder, persist longer, are more optimistic and enthusiastic, show more grit and determination, and choose more difficult and higher goals than those with less confidence.

In effect, higher testosterone and lower cortisol allow them to be the “calm person in the boat.

When we engage in what she terms a “high-power pose” where our bodies are more open and expansive—arms open as opposed to closed across our chest, standing straight with shoulders back as opposed to hunched with shoulders folded forward, occupying more space versus less—our brain and body respond by increasing testosterone and decreasing cortisol. Testosterone levels go up by 20 to 25 percent, and cortisol goes down by 20 to 25 percent.

In essence, Ian is flooding his brain (and his body) with chemicals; as Cuddy’s research at Harvard found, he is increasing his level of testosterone and decreasing his level of cortisol.

One is that they allow the individual to create a mental model of perfect performance that shows what ideal execution looks like. The individual can then use this covert model to guide performance. Another is that visualization reduces performance anxiety, allowing the individual to successfully deal with unexpected or troublesome situations.

But it is our perception of success that has the biggest hit on this part of our brain. When dopamine levels are high, they engage our frontal cortex, where are our “executive function” exists.

The important takeaway is to know that you don’t have to wait until you win something to access the winner effect: You can do it in any moment by engaging and getting proficient at mental rehearsal or visualization.

By achieving these small goals you can use the winner effect to gain momentum on achieving bigger goals. Essentially you feel more confident.

Practice the basics. Run through your presentation again and again. Make sure you know it cold, so you can perform it on autopilot; that way you can turn some of your focus to reading the room instead of having to think about every word you are saying.

Rework the basics. Your initial presentation will result in a sequence or series of steps: To really know your stuff, change the order. Start with step 5 and work backward. Skip a couple of steps. Rehearsing the material in a different order helps to reinforce your knowledge of the material.

Like a beta-blocker, confidence acts as a neurochemical antidote that allows them—allows each of us—to move forward even when we are feeling the physical and psychological manifestations of pressure.

Ricardo’s other necessary condition for comparative advantage is that a country’s capital seeks its comparative advantage in its home country and does not seek more productive use abroad. Ricardo confronts the possibility that English capital might migrate to Portugal to take advantage of the lower costs of production, thus leaving the English workforce unemployed, or employed in less productive ways. He is able to dismiss this undermining of comparative advantage because of “the difficulty with which capital moves from one country to another” and because capital is insecure “when not under the immediate control of its owner.” This insecurity, “fancied or real,” together “with the natural disinclination which every man has to quit the country of his birth and connections, and entrust himself, with all his habits fixed, to a strange government and new laws, check the emigration of capital. These feelings, which I should be sorry to see weakened, induce most men of property to be satisfied with a low rate of profits in their own country, rather than seek a more advantageous employment for their wealth in foreign lands.”   Today, these feelings have been weakened. Men of property have been replaced by corporations. Once the large excess supplies of Asian labor were available to American corporations, once Congress limited the tax deductibility of CEO pay that was not “performance related,” once Wall Street pressured corporations for higher shareholder returns, once Wal-Mart ordered its suppliers to meet “the Chinese price,” once hostile takeovers could be justified as improving shareholder returns by offshoring production, capital and jobs departed the country.   Capital has become as mobile as traded goods.

when teams face significant performance pressure, they tend to defer to high-status members, at the expense of using expert team members.

you can lose a competition and not choke, just like you can give a great presentation and not get the job. Choking has more to do with the effects of pressure on performance than on the outcome.

Whether you come in first or last, you’re still my horse!

teams facing significant performance pressure tend to default to high-status members at the expense of the most knowledgeable of the team members.

It is not the event that causes our reactions but rather how we interpret the event, which makes us either confident or anxious.

October 3 After the earthquake came a fire. . . . And after the fire came a gentle whisper. (1 Kings 19:12) A woman who had made rapid progress in her understanding of the Lord was once asked the secret of her seemingly easy growth. Her brief response was, “Mind the checks.” The reason many of us do not know and understand God better is that we do not heed His gentle “checks”—His delicate restraints and constraints. His voice is “a gentle whisper.” A whisper can hardly be heard, so it must be felt as a faint and steady pressure upon the heart and mind, like the touch of a morning breeze calmly moving across the soul. And when it is heeded, it quietly grows clearer in the inner ear of the heart. God’s voice is directed to the ear of love, and true love is intent upon hearing even the faintest whisper. Yet there comes a time when His love ceases to speak, when we do not respond to or believe His message. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and if you want to know Him and His voice, you must continually listen to His gentle touches. So when you are about to say something in conversation with others, and you sense a gentle restraint from His quiet whisper, heed the restraint and refrain from speaking. And when you are about to pursue some course of action that seems perfectly clear and right, yet you sense in your spirit another path being suggested with the force of quiet conviction, heed that conviction. Follow the alternate course, even if the change of plans appears to be absolute folly from the perspective of human wisdom. Also learn to wait on God until He unfolds His will before you. Allow Him to develop all the plans of your heart and mind, and then let Him accomplish them. Do not possess any wisdom of your own, for often His performance will appear to contradict the plan He gave you. God will seem to work against Himself, so simply listen, obey, and trust Him, even when it appears to be the greatest absurdity to do so. Ultimately, “we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28), but many times, in the initial stages of the performance of His plans: In His own world He is content To play a losing game. Therefore if you desire to know God’s voice, never consider the final outcome or the possible results. Obey Him even when He asks you to move while you still see only darkness, for He Himself will be a glorious light within you. Then there will quickly spring up within your heart a knowledge of God and a fellowship with Him, which will be overpowering enough in themselves to hold you and Him together, even in the most severe tests and under the strongest pressures of life. from Way of Faith

Employees are not productive because they are satisfied; they are satisfied because they are productive. High satisfaction is the result of high performance, not the cause of it.

When the matter at hand is eternal salvation or damnation, the “unsettled soul” suspicious of ritual and tradition looks for evidence of her spiritual condition as close to the knowing self as possible, not in the objective mathematical language to which the Royal Society aspired but in objective experiences of spontaneous, passionate speech: in the substance of the inmost, most immediate thoughts and feelings, evinced by spontaneous, fervent prayer, which it takes both scientifically and economically as proofs and tokens of grace. If the Restoration witnessed the rise of what Robert Markley has called the ideology of objectivity, it also saw the coalescence of a related ideology of spontaneity. Concerned with the science of the soul and informed by emerging market and commercial logic, the cardinal points of this ideology were authentic and immediate sincerity (as opposed to performance or artifice), pure desire (as opposed to coldness, hypocrisy or a bifurcation between doctrinal knowledge and feeling), freedom (as opposed to form), and novelty and currency (as opposed to the repetitive, the boring, and the out-of-date). In the consolidation of the discourse and practice of free prayer, we see the culmination of Renaissance crises of representation and the fruition of the dramatic Reformation attacks on ritual, when under increasing pressures toward certainty and ever more entrenched economic logics, spontaneity becomes policy: not an option, but, for growing numbers of Protestants, paradoxically an obligation and the sine qua non of valid prayer and a saved subjectivity.

a study that some colleagues and I (RG)18 conducted a few years ago suggests that way pitchers are given advance information about hitters can influence how they handle pressure. It has become common in baseball to give pitchers a “heat map” representing a particular hitter’s batting average for pitch locations throughout the strike zone. While it has been shown that athletes can use this type of information to improve performance,19,20 it also has the potential to change how athletes respond to pressure. The theory of ironic processes21 proposes that pressure will cause a skilled performer to maintain a movement profile typical of an expert but act as though he or she has a different goal: achieving a result that was intentionally avoided (e.g., throwing a pitch into one of a batter’s high average, hot zones). In other words, showing a pitcher where NOT to throw the ball might produce a “don’t think about pink elephants” kind of effect. To test this, we compared pitching performance for two groups: one group that was shown only their target (i.e., a cold zone) and a group was shown the target and an ironic (avoid, hot) zone. Performance was measured in low pressure (just pitching) and high pressure (crowd, monetary incentive for control) conditions. Consistent with the ironic process theory, the two-zone group missed their target more often, but not because they were wild and erratic in their delivery. This occurred because they threw significantly more pitches into the hot zone as compared to when they were not under pressure. Thus, we have two suggestions here. First, advance information should show the goal targets (cold zones) and not include things we want the pitcher to avoid. Second, this type of advance information should be included and manipulated in some practice activities. For example, in the Sniper Challenge described above, pitchers could be given different zones they are trying to target indicated using different types of advance information displays/graphics. This will allow the athlete to get practice at setting their intentions based on this type of information.

Over past two decades emerging research in skill acquisition science has made several truths abundantly clear: (i) “repeatable mechanics” are unattainable, (ii) efficiency of movement, coordination, and athleticism are the manifestations of an athlete’s adaptability – his capacity to make real-time adjustments to the ever-changing demands of his task, his environment, and his body,(iii) adaptability requires the athlete to couple perception with action rapidly and subconsciously, as a highly performing athlete cannot think his way to quality movement solutions, and (iv) under time pressure, only the sensory information he gathers (visual, auditory, haptic, vestibular, and proprioceptive) can influence his movement.

Ed Catmull says, “Toy Story 2 was the defining moment for our studio.… People and how they work together is more important than ideas. They [other companies] could copy our technology but they couldn’t copy our team.

The pressure to get Toy Story 2 successfully made was not the high pressure of a single moment, like giving a speech or competing in a musical competition or sporting event. It was an intense, long-lasting pressure that wore people down. And it came immediately following the three-year grind of making of A Bug’s Life, which was ten times as complex as the original Toy Story.

Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, had a different notion of how to handle nervousness. In a series of three studies, she subjected groups of people to experiences that most everyone would find nerve-racking: completing “a very difficult IQ test” administered “under time pressure”; delivering, on the spot, “a persuasive public speech about ‘why you are a good work partner’ ”; and most excruciating of all, belting out an 80s pop song (“Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey). Before beginning the activity, participants were to direct themselves to stay calm, or to tell themselves that they were excited. Reappraising nervousness as excitement yielded a noticeable difference in performance. The IQ test takers scored significantly higher. The speech givers came across as more persuasive, competent, and confident. Even the singers performed more passably (as judged by the Nintendo Wii Karaoke Revolution program they used). All reported genuinely feeling the pleasurable emotion of excitement—a remarkable shift away from the unpleasant discomfort such activities might be expected to engender. In a similar fashion, we can choose to reappraise debilitating “stress” as productive “coping.” A 2010 study carried out with Boston-area undergraduates looked at what happens when people facing a stressful experience are informed about the positive effects of stress on our thinking—that is, the way it can make us more alert and more motivated. Before taking the GRE, the admissions exam for graduate school, one group of students was given the following message to read: “People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly on the test. However, recent research suggests that arousal doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s GRE test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.” A second group received no such message before taking the exam. Three months later, when the students’ GRE scores were released, the students who had been encouraged to reappraise their feelings of stress scored an average of 65 points higher.

The irony is, in the midst of the pressure this creates for both companies and employees, employees also want a culture of accountability. Cultures with a poor accountability structure create a toxic work environment that under-values star performers, incorrectly rewards poor performers, and leaves leaders feeling confused and overwhelmed. In the end, the best employees leave for a culture with greater accountability so that they are no longer adopting the slack of employees who are not being held sufficiently accountable.