The Pressure Principle: Handle Stress, Harness Energy, and Perform When It Counts

"The Pressure Principle" explains how to turn stress, anxiety and adrenaline into positive influences, so they work in our favor in high-pressure situations, rather than jeopardize our performance. This book helps build our confidence, change our mindset, and practice our skills so we peak at the right time. Drawing on anecdotes from the rugby pitch to the Royal Marines to a car showroom, it teaches us to stay calm in tense times.

So who's this book for? "The Pressure Principle" has a broad appeal. It's for anyone who wants to improve his or her performance in a stressful environment. If your work takes you outside your comfort zone and your nerves sometimes get in the way, this book's for you.

It's also a great read for sports or business coaches, teachers and parents who want to get the best out of their protégés, pupils or children, as well as anyone who's interested in performance psychology. Sports fans will especially love this book – most of Alred's coaching techniques and anecdotes come from the British playing field. By the same token, though, if you have no interest in sport at all, you may struggle to stay engaged.

Dave Alred is a performance coach who's worked with elite athletes from sports including golf, rugby, cricket, soccer, judo, polo, and Australian-rules football. He's coached the England Rugby Union and cricket teams, South Africa's national rugby side the Springboks, Australia's West Coast Eagles football team, and several British premiership soccer sides. He has a PhD in Performing Under Pressure from Loughborough University in the U.K.

So keep listening to hear how to make the symptoms of stress work for you, not against you; how thinking like a skateboarder can help; and how to buy yourself time before anxiety shuts your system down.

The problem with pressure isn't the pressure itself – it's how it impacts us. Pressure can get in the way of our ability to concentrate on a process, either consciously or subconsciously. It can affect our decision making, mess up our technique, and impact our performance.

Elite sportspeople feel the heat too. They miss penalties and drop balls, often with millions of people watching on television and sometimes when it's their once-in-a-lifetime chance to win. But most of the time, they play at the top of their game. So how do they do it?

Alred explores eight areas we need to understand and master if we're to perform well under pressure. He explains how to use the symptoms of anxiety to our advantage; how to use language to improve performance; how to manage learning so we can apply our skills under pressure; how to balance theory and practice; how to practice a skill purposefully and effectively; how to manage our expectations and surroundings; and how to delay sensory shutdown when extreme pressure hits.

He devotes a chapter to each of these eight strands, offering techniques, mixing in sporting anecdotes to back up his points, and showing how readers can apply his tips to business and other walks of life.

So let's take a look at a few of his suggestions, starting with the first area he explores: how to harness the positive effects of a racing pulse, a fast-beating heart, and sweaty palms.

Fear, anxiety, adrenaline, and other physical symptoms of stress are natural consequences of operating in a high-pressured environment. They're part of our body's normal response. The key is to use anxiety as fuel – so you can get the butterflies in your stomach to fly in formation, Alred says.

Body language is one of the keys to this. Notice what happens to your body when you feel scared. Do your shoulders hunch up? Do you retreat, stoop or get smaller? To get our anxiety working for us rather than against us, we need to adopt what the author calls the command posture. This means standing or sitting up straight, adopting an angular rather than a curled shape, and making ourselves feel as big as we can. When we take on a confident posture, the body influences the mind, helping to turn those anxious feelings into excitement.

Now, imagine victory is inevitable. Success is guaranteed. Would you feel like you're walking on air? Would you feel ten feet tall? Once you can picture the feeling, adopt that posture. This will help you walk onto a stage or into a presentation with a confident air and feel anticipation rather than stress.

You can also exaggerate the effect you're aiming for while practicing a skill. So if you're a golfer trying to extend your swing, try swinging the club in an exaggerated way. And if you're a presenter who tends to mumble or look down, try projecting your voice much more than you need to in front of the mirror, while standing up straight with your shoulders back. When it's time to do it for real, you'll remember what it feels like to swing far or speak confidently.

We like Alred's tips on body language and how posture can affect the mind. There's nothing hugely original here, but his sporting anecdotes from top-level rugby, golf and cricket show the impact of physical stance on mindset and add weight to his argument. This is practical, easily-applicable advice that's worth remembering.

Let's now look at why skateboarders are model learners – and why we need to find the right balance between facts and feelings when developing any skill.

Alred tells the story of a friend of his who took up golf. After three lessons, he'd learned to hold the club, stand and swing. But he hadn't hit a ball. Eventually, he got bored with all the theory and quit. This is a classic example of too much thinking and not enough feeling – too much instruction and not enough practice. When we overload our brains with information and analysis about how things should be, we don't give ourselves the opportunity to feel our way forward.

Compare skateboarding to golf. Skateboarding is a highly complex activity, much more complicated than golf, Alred argues. As a novice skateboarder, you could spend days learning about the physics of weight distribution, center of gravity, friction, and so forth. But how many skateboarders have you seen poring over manuals? They generally just head to the local park and skate. They fall off, get immediate feedback because it hurts, adjust, and try again.

Granted, many of them have youth on their side, so they have a childlike, curious and fearless approach to learning, which is the best way to be. But in the culture of skateboarding, failure doesn't really exist. Falling off is a necessary step in the process of improving. And the more we skate, the more our body gets used to how it feels when we're skating well. In this implicit approach to learning, the skill gets lodged deep in the subconscious and becomes automatic. Skateboarders can tap into their muscle memory as the pressure mounts, letting their bodies lead the way and keeping their minds quiet.

Many golfers, on the other hand, arm themselves with reams of information and analysis about the perfect swing and all the things that could go wrong. This explicit approach can slow our learning and get us into trouble when the heat is on. When we're about to make an important putt, we focus on our golfing manual or analysis videos, while unhelpful thoughts about failure fill our minds. Too many facts and figures and too much thinking can block the connection to our subconscious memory and our intuition. We forget what an accurate putt feels like.

This doesn't mean theory isn't necessary. Alred says the key is to hold a small amount of relevant information in our minds and strike the right balance between the implicit and explicit approach. If you're playing squash, for example, you could repeat the simple phrase, "bounce, hit." This is enough explicit information to keep our conscious, thinking self occupied, allowing the subconscious to take control and repeat what we've done in practice so many times.

So how does this relate to business? It's the difference between handing a new employee a "How To" manual and asking him or her to get to work using natural creativity and intuition. It's the difference between spending hours reading up on how to manage a project, give a presentation, or make the perfect sales call, and simply giving it a go, safe in the knowledge that mistakes are a natural part of improving.

We like Alred's analogy of the skateboarder versus the golfer. It's a powerful picture we can draw on when we're getting too bogged down in detail and not giving ourselves the freedom to have a go. The concept of trial and error isn't new, but the author brings it to life with this analogy and a series of colorful anecdotes.

Let's now take a look at how to stop our senses from shutting down when the pressure ramps up.

As you heard earlier, pressure and stress cause a physical reaction in our bodies, which includes a racing heart. An elevated heart rate isn't a problem if we're fit. Soccer and rugby players, for example, are at their most effective when operating in what's called the combat-performance zone – their heart rate is high but their reactions are still fast. They can pass, dodge, run, and shoot, while being acutely aware of where the goal is and where their opponents are.

But if the heart rate gets above 155 beats per minute, these complex skills start to deteriorate. This is why we sometimes see soccer players run the whole length of the pitch, only to miss the easiest of shots on goal. Extreme exertion has likely compromised the player's awareness, peripheral vision, and hearing – in other words, he's gone into sensory shutdown.

In some lines of work, the ability to delay this response can mean life or death. Fighter pilots, for example, can't afford to let their senses shut down when under attack. That's why they undergo rigorous training that includes simulation of highly stressful and unpredictable situations. Their bodies and minds get familiar with pressure, meaning they can stay aware, alert and effective much longer than the average civilian.

Fortunately, we're unlikely to be in such high-stress situations but, if we're unfamiliar with pressure, we'll need to learn to buy ourselves time before our senses shut down, so we're able to function.

Alred offers some simple tips to do this, from slow, deep breathing, to making sure we exercise and stay physically fit. But we especially like his tip on the power of self-talk to keep ourselves calm when the pressure mounts.

Say we're giving a speech and our nerves are starting to impair our senses. We can no longer see the faces in the crowd and our focus has narrowed to the cue cards in front of us. To compose ourselves, we can repeat a simple phrase in our heads to remind us how to deliver an effective speech. We can say: "Cue cards, audience, speak. Cue cards, audience, speak." This will remind us to look down at our notes, make eye contact with someone, and speak out loud to the room.

The more we're aware of sensory shutdown and how to delay it, the more in control we'll be. We can also take our lead from those fighter pilots and get used to stress, by getting out of our comfort zone more often.

Alred's tips aren't groundbreaking. So much has been written about performance psychology and stress management that it's hard to say anything entirely original. But we think his anecdotes showing how these techniques have helped the stars of elite sport make his advice both memorable and convincing.

Our main criticism of "The Pressure Principle" is that some of the links to business and how the author's tips can transfer to the corporate world feel like a bit of an afterthought. We'd have liked to have heard more on how to apply his suggestions to our work lives, along with more case studies from business.

With that caveat, we're happy to recommend this book. It's an entertaining read, especially for sports fans, and it offers a range of practical tools to help us perform at our best under stress.

"The Pressure Principle," by Dr Dave Alred, is published by Penguin Life, part of the Penguin Random House group.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.