Pressure is a concept we’re all too familiar with. Whether it’s a big deadline or presentation at work; trying to get your kids up and out on time in the morning with all the necessary lunches and books; or trying to score a winning penalty at a championship final, we all know how the varying degrees of pressure affect us.
Dr Dave Alred is fascinated by it. In fact, a couple of years ago he completed a PhD exploring the idea of performing under pressure, after years of coaching experience at the top level. “I’ve always been fascinated as to why people can do one thing one day and then they can’t do it at all the next day,” he says.
Having worked with sports people from Jonny Wilkinson to Johnny Sexton and Padraig Harrington on the psychology of their games, he found he could distil his teachings into eight key principles, all of which he says are necessary to understand to truly perform your best.
He's written these principles into a book, The Pressure Principle, because he believes there's no need for mystique around how elite athletes perform under pressure and improve their game: we all approach improving in similar ways and with similar hurdles.
“Because I was doing the PhD and coaching at the same time, I started transferring into other sports, so it wasn’t just rugby, it was golf and then I got involved in judo and soccer and all the rest of it, and I started seeing the commonality there, but also the commonality in people’s attitude to how they perform,” he says.
Focus on mistakes
The starting point for Alred was noticing how often people, professional athletes and ordinary people alike, would focus on their mistakes and what they were doing poorly. This was something he felt was one of the big causes of that feeling of being under pressure to perform.
“Someone once asked me what fundamentally do you try to do with the players you work with? And I said I try to get them to go back to when they were four or five years old and they had no fear about something new and no understanding of what a mistake was, not interested in self-esteem and just do it.
“When it doesn’t work, they just do it again and ignore it but when it does work, they celebrate. We’re trying to actually get the brain to realise this is the behaviour we want and the behaviour we’re going to reinforce. Sadly, it tends to be the other way around.
"When people are successful, they tend to be a bit Joe Cool about it, but when they make a mistake, there's a massive song and dance," he says.
The eight principles he came up are anxiety, language, managing learning, implicit-explicit balance, behaviour, environment, sensory shutdown, and thinking correctly under pressure. The book explains each in detail, each littered with stories from Alred’s coaching experiences, but he says one is no good without the other seven.
“Each one has its own life but it massively overlaps with all the others so it’s not really eight linear principles. It’s a bowl of spaghetti with eight strands that are all intertwined and the reality is it’s seven strands with the language being the sauce because if the language isn’t right, the others tend to stagnate,” he says.
Though language applies to all the other principles, Alred says it’s not the most important. However, it’s often the first to be forgotten.
“Language is the most neglected, but that’s the one where people go ‘wow’, because when you start talking about language and how the brain interprets information, it becomes something you’ve never thought of and the light goes on . . .
“Positive language tends to be overused which is why I use the term productive language now – this is good and this is why it’s good so you can repeat it, or how to avoid using deletions and negative avoidance like ‘That’s fine but I don’t want you to lift your head up’ because your brain doesn’t work like that. I have to give you something that will keep your head down, and it just grows from there,” he says.
Self-belief
For adults, he feels one of the biggest hurdles is actually believing in yourself and that you can do something, whatever it is. He cites the time he coached a woman named Georgina Clegg on her golf, and within a short period, she was made ladies' captain at her club.
The fact she was 74 when it happened didn’t stop her believing in herself, or celebrating each small victory.
“Working with her was no different from working with Johnny Sexton in terms of picking out what went well, how they can change things and just being matter of fact about it but massively celebrating when they hit the ball right in the sweet spot,” he says.
“If people continually focus on what they can’t do, their self-esteem takes a dent, their confidence takes a dent, and they become very within themselves and almost scared to take the adventure that a three- or four-year-old doesn’t think twice about doing.
“What I’m trying to do is rekindle that enthusiasm and I want people to be proud and to enjoy things. It doesn’t matter about the standard, that’s not important. The important thing is actually enjoying getting better, understanding that it will be a bit frustrating, but frustrating doesn’t mean you’re a failure, because eventually you will learn because that’s how the brain works.”
Dealing with pressure
Getting a handle on pressure is important, because you can take advantage of it to achieve better results. It’s a matter of “process versus outcome”, he says. Focusing on the processes will get you to the outcome; it’s just about finding ways that work for you to handle those processes.
“When we get nervous and anxious, we tend to think we don’t want to make a mistake rather than we can’t wait to get this right, so it’s trying to shift the mindset.
“We need to get enthusiastic about improving – improving and the thrill of improving is not the domain of the elite athlete, it’s there for anybody if they want to have a go. What I want to do is try to give them the tools to be able to achieve that,” he says.
Alred’s pressure principles:
Anxiety
Language
Managing learning
Implicit-explicit balance
Behaviour
Environment
Sensory shutdown
Thinking correctly under pressure
