Do you get so close you can almost feel success and then you stumble at the last hurdle - how could this happen?

Have you got the guts and resilience for pressure situations?

Have you ever been so close to getting something you dearly want? It’s within your grasp, you’re just about there...and then you sabotage it?

It could be during an interview for a job: you suddenly realise that you have it all wrapped up but before you can stop yourself, you’re jabbering away, talking more than you should and in next to no time, the job you thought was yours is lost.

Or it could be selling a proposal at a meeting. Same thing. You’ve just about got them across the line. There’s a silence as people are coming to a decision. Instead of waiting out the silence – our mouths open again, adding unasked for/unwanted information – that triggers more questions that we really didn’t want to answer – end result: proposal turned down!

Or playing sport – you realise you are just about to win. You’re playing tennis - you have 3 match points and only have to win just one more.  Or in football or rugby or hockey or netball, you are ahead and need only to defend your goal line for 60 seconds longer. In cricket, you only have to get two more runs and protect your stumps from the next 6 balls. You get the idea.

But what happens – we blow it, we lose the match, we lose the game, we lose the test. Why?

Surprise surprise - It’s your amygdala calling

Chances are – it was not because of our lack of skill or the superior competence of our opponent – it was because of our own self-sabotage, what is happening in our brain.

In a split second, our amygdala realises how close we are to getting what we want and fills us with fear at the thought we might not achieve it.

Instead of allowing our pre-frontal cortex to continue on the successful path that has led us to this point, to concentrate and hold our course (the logical way to deal with the fear), no – instead our amygdala starts its flight or fight routine, filling us with extra adrenalin, niggling at us, causing us to shake, our heart to race even faster, to lose concentration, worry about the future if we don’t win and suddenly we’ve lost when only moments earlier we were about to be victorious.

No wonder commentators, future employers, our colleagues, team selectors, our bosses, even the stock market in a crisis, ask whether we can ‘hold our nerve’ under pressure.

Nothing to lose

It’s ironic isn’t is that when we start out as a new manager, a budding sports person, a new employee in a role – we come up with great ideas, try out new strategies, new shots, give it our all – simply because we have ’nothing to lose’. Our brain hasn’t yet filed away any potential consequences of not succeeding in its ‘things to be frightened of’ storeroom.

The more we try, the more experience we get - these are the things that should make us more confident, more able, more focused. Yet so often they seem to create more anxiety about losing, more fears that hold us back and more occasions when we lose our composure.

Staying cool under pressure

One of the key distinguishing features of great sports champions, great managers and leaders, great colleagues and great friends is that they can hold it together under pressure. They can be relied on to hold their nerve, hold on and persevere to the end of the race, the challenge, the game.

How do they do it? It seems to me that this involves two key elements:

* Our ability to control our responses to our amygdala

and:

* Resilience

Controlling our responses to those ‘almonds’ – our amygdala 

Here are three tips to help you control your amygdala and prepare for any pressure situation you know is coming up:

1. Learn how to breathe and relax at will.

Don’t wait until you are under pressure to start practising. At any time at all, concentrate on your breathing and lowering your heart rate – you can do this on the bus, on the train, sitting in your car, watching TV, eating a meal, during a conversation.

Breathe deeply. Get oxygen deep into your lungs so it can spread around your body fast. It’s the best antidote to adrenalin.

2. Focus on your heart rate. 

The exercise is simple: tell your heart to slow down. Keep your focus only on doing that.

Test your current ability to do it. Take your pulse before you do the exercise. Time it for 15 seconds then multiply by 4. Do the exercise for one minute. Then take your pulse again.

Repeat this exercise daily or more often if you can until you have mastered the ability to slow your heart rate down at will. Even slowing by a few beats per minute will make a difference.

You do have the time to practice. The exercise doesn’t take much time out of your day – it’s less than 2 minutes in total. i.e. Measure your pulse rate for 15 seconds, then for one minute breathe slowly and focus on your heart rate; then measure again.

3. Imagine the pressure situation you could find yourself in

This builds on the previous exercises. It will take a little more time – allow 10 minutes.

Sit or lie down in a quiet place and really put yourself there, in the pressure situation, in your mind. Visualise the place, the weather, the time of day, the people around you, the smell, the sounds, the voices, the words, how you are feeling physically, the pressure being applied.

When you’ve done this, if your heart rate hasn’t gone up – you’ve either mastered the art of relaxation and focus (well done!) or you haven’t really put yourself in that place. If necessary get someone who understands what you are trying to do to ‘talk you into’ that situation.

Then either, doing it yourself, or with another person’s help – breathe, talk to yourself, tell yourself to focus, walk though what you have to do, acknowledge that you are feeling ‘hyper’, tell your brain to translate all that hyper energy and adrenalin into even greater focus on keeping on doing what you have been doing to get you to the point you are now at.

Depending on your imagination, you might even imagine the adrenalin as a high powered injection of laser like accuracy, vision, and strength – whatever works for you to take back control over your mind rather than letting your amygdala create the very thing it is fearful of.

In other words, you can’t stop your amygdala from doing what it does – we are hardwired to worry about things that might cause us psychological or physical harm.

What we can do is train ourselves to quickly realise that the only thing to fear is fear itself and convert that extra surge of energy into the winning edge.

Building resilience

When you think about it, how do ambulance officers turn up for work every day knowing that they are going to have to attend accident scenes where people are dead, dying or horribly injured?

What do you think their amygdala does? Before training I am sure they experience fear and an impulse to get away, to not attend, to avoid the situation.

But they don’t. They turn up, remain calm, take control and in so doing save lives. If ambulance officers can do it in real life or death situations, I’m confident we can in other situations.

Resilience comes from feeling the fear and doing it anyway. To fight the urge to give up or to stop trying; to not let that ancient part of your brain dominate the contemporary you.

Resilience also comes from familiarity with the challenge. Every time you face it, whatever the outcome, win or lose, your amygdala realises it was not a life or death situation and slowly will becomes less sensitive and reactive to the perceived threat. So when we talk about “practice makes perfect” – it’s as much about the mind as the body.

Resilience not only in pressure situations

Ever wondered why you couldn’t stick to your diet? Resilience is not simply about dealing with pressure situations. It can also be about staying on your new food program, giving up smoking, going for the walk, to the gym, practising the piano, your language lessons, persevering with the new software or system.

Even in these situations, if you allow it to, your amygdala will make the ‘fear’ of the difficulty of the challenge run you off track and you’ll sink back ‘safely’ into your comfort zone. You’ll beat yourself up anyway if you do that so why not persevere with the challenge?

One step at a time

To build resilience, tell yourself it’s one step at a time whether it’s a pressure situation or not. Your amygdala can cause you to leap mountains in emergencies – but it takes an all or nothing approach. Your amygdala ‘sees’ life in extremes. Your pre-frontal cortex sees the spectrum.

So use your cortex to break down the pressure situation into its component parts. Then let your amygdala face it each part at a time not just as one overwhelming feat. Learn to breathe, focus and become resilient – then winning and coping under pressure will never again be ‘so near but so far away.’

Woman not afraid anything even danger due to rare genetic disorder

This is a fascinating case study about a woman with a genetic condition that causes calcification of parts of the brain including the amygdala. As well as an insight and confirmation of the role of the amygdala, it offers researchers another potential pathway to alleviation of conditions such as anxiety disorder and PTSD.

Woman not afraid anything even danger due to rare genetic disorder

Is it performance review time? Your brain thinks its a mammoth and it probably is

Are performance ratings be a thing of the past - just like a mammoth?

One of the most significant things we know about our brain is that it's going to react the same way to a threat (at least initially) whether it is a physical one or a psychological one. Our brains simply don't register the difference until the cortex is actively engaged and even then, managing fear can still be difficult.

It's why we can get anxious, upset, or flippant or aggressive at performance review time. It's the fight or flight system, your amygdala reacting to 'protect' you - what I call 'The Almond Effect.

This video suggests that performance ratings run contrary to the neuroscience.

It suggests a strategic conversational approach instead.

At the last Neuroleadership Conference (San Francisco 2014), it seemed that some companies were leading the move away from ratings to this approach.

Makes sense to me. What do you think?

Watch the video here:

How your brain responds to performance ratings

You can't share this with anybody

You can't share this with anybody

Has your boss ever said something like the words in the title to you? Have you ever said it to a member of your team?

The secret might be about a restructure, change in product line, new technology, the company's financial results, a mistake, a failure, a possible merger, something about themselves, another employee or even about your role yet you are sworn to silence.

And what about at home? Have you ever withheld something from your partner or kids? An action that's left you feeling uncomfortable at best and dishonest at worst?

Apart from the discomfort you almost certainly experience, I am sure you've witnessed the effect of secrecy on people around you especially if they suspect something and already feel they are operating in an information vacuum.

People generally hate being kept in the dark. You are right if you suspect that our amygdalae are implicated in reactions to silence in ‘suspicious' circumstances.

We are so predictable!

Let's explore this. Most of what we do everyday we don't need to think about - we run on ‘automatic.' We consciously don't need to think about what to do next - we just ‘know'. Our brain guides us to take action based on pre-existing patterns of behaviour (habits) and predictability of outcomes.

So from the moment you get out of bed to the time you go back to bed, you probably follow a similar routine every day.

We don't like to think we are predictable but we are. We have to be otherwise our working memory would be exhausted and we would be whacked from the sheer effort of using our brains so much.

Routines are the basis of how we live

For me, my early morning outline is to get out of bed, go to the bathroom, then to the kitchen, turn on the electric jug, get my vitamins out, turn on my computer, open the sliding doors to the deck, open the front door and go down the steps to collect the newspaper, get my breakfast and so on. I don't actively think about it - it just happens like that most mornings.

My sub-conscious brain is guiding my actions and making decisions (like, is there enough water in the jug, stop pouring milk into the bowl) based on neural patterns laid down in its hardwiring that predicts outcomes.

Of course, if the paper hasn't been delivered or I've run out of vitamins then the routine is interrupted. I have to stop and think about what to do - well actually first, my amygdala automatically does some checking and assesses the risk to my survival with this break in pattern.

Usually it's no big deal because my amygdala knows based on history, that the lack of vitamins or a newspaper is not life threatening!

Pattern interrupter

However if my computer tells me when I turn it on that its hard drive has failed then that's another reaction entirely - my ‘almonds' (the english translation of amygdalae) kick in!

I immediately have to manage my survival response (manifesting as words that it's preferable not to use!) and stop panicking long enough to get my thinking brain (pre-frontal cortex PFC) to work out where I put the number and service code for Apple, what I backed up, what I lost and what my priorities are.

My predictable morning didn't go as planned so The Almond Effect® kicked in - and I haven't even been up longer than 10 minutes!

Is it the same at work?

What do you do when you get to work, do you follow the same routine? For example, it could be that you turn on the computer, get coffee, say hi to people at the workstation across from you, open your email, look at your calendar etc.

No drama, all normal just as your brain predicted, unless an unexpected message starts flashing on your screen to call your manager urgently. Your brain's hard-wired pattern-based operation is stopped in its tracks as it rapidly tries to assess the ‘threat' and predict what the urgency is all about.

Your amygdala is immediately on red alert asking whether the interruption is a threat to your survival. If your personal history indicates that an a message to call the boss immediately is likely to cause a problem, then The Almond Effect® kicks in.

That's when you'll be glad you've been to one of my workshops, because you'll immediately put STAR into operation and get your PFC engaged to think before you act!

Not knowing is worst for the brain than knowing

Uncertainty really throws our brains into a spin because in the absence of any pattern to the contrary, our brain defaults to predict the worst outcome The Almond Effect®) - even in non-life threatening situations at home or at work.

This is why you should never be surprised that withholding information, keeping secrets etc will lead to gossip (flocking) pessimism and worst case scenario interpretations.

Lack of certainty creates anxiety, frustration, gossip and innuendo - all expressions of The Almond Effect®.

And anxious people don't concentrate or perform well - their brains are distracted - focussing on the cause of the anxiety. They are searching for any kind of predictable outcome so that the brain can operate with certainty again.

The situation is exacerbated if we are already operating in an information vacuum because our brains will predict the worst case scenario so we can prepare ourselves to survive.

Applied at home, it means for example that if your teenager isn't at the place they said they were going to, your 'almonds' go off. If you unexpectedly find a hotel receipt in your spouse's pocket, if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere etc - you get the picture!

Implications

Whether you are implementing changes at work or trying to hide something from someone at home, be aware that if the other party's amygdala can't see a ‘safe' pattern, it will get suspicious. And the natural default reaction will be to focus on the worst case interpretation of the events with all the ramifications that will flow.

That's why most people say, just tell us what's going on - and then we can work out how to deal with it.

If you think you are doing people a favour by only giving information on a ‘need to know' basis, think again - brain biology wants just the opposite.