Performance Under Pressure - The Full Course

It's almost certain that you'll have to deal with high pressure situations during your career. Some professionals, such as airline pilots or firefighters, deal with very high levels of pressure. Regardless of the scale of pressure – whether you're trying to land a plane suffering engine failure or trying to meet a production target – it's important that you manage the pressure effectively.

Often, people say that they perform well under pressure. Or that they can't reach optimum performance without some element of pressure. It's true that pressure can be both energizing and invigorating. However, pressure can have a seriously negative impact when it isn't properly managed.

Everyone reacts differently to pressure. And everyone's pressure trigger is different. There are four work-related factors that can trigger pressure: time pressure, work overload, relationship strain, and a necessity of balancing competing interests.

The Science of Better Learning

Pressure can cause you to react in different ways. Sometimes pressure can be an invigorating force that helps you achieve excellent results. But, on the other hand, pressure can be debilitating and hinder your ability to perform. It can be an opportunity for you to thrive, or a threat because it may lead to excessive stress.

Factors to consider in relation to your response to stress.

To complete your understanding of your response to stress, you should be aware of the different ways stress affects you. Stress can manifest itself in physical, cognitive, emotional, or behavioral ways. These symptoms may have other origins than stress, but they are potential indicators of stress that should be considered nonetheless.

Experiencing excessive stress triggers different emotions in a person that cause an imbalance to occur. Instead of being calm, a person becomes worried or begins to act in an uncharacteristic manner. To restore the balance and neutralize the impact of stress, the human body releases endorphins.

Access the follow-on activity to review your response to pressure.

Work-related pressure can occur in any profession or industry. In some situations, it can lead to stress and this can cause suboptimal performance. Maybe you know a colleague who is very competent and efficient. But in pressurized situations, that person's ability and judgment becomes seriously impaired.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you'll find that you can't control all the external factors that cause you to experience pressure. However, you can control your reaction to pressure. This will help you avoid wasting energy on negative emotions that can impede your performance at work.

The second principle when managing your attitude is to cultivate a "success mentality." This involves using your emotions to your advantage, boosting self-confidence, having a "go to" statement prepared, focusing on what you can achieve, and cultivating an attitude for success.

Access the job aid to review the two main principles you should consider when you want to control your reaction to pressure.

Section Project (Optional)

This course aims to help you to develop the mental and emotional strength for performing in high pressure situations. If you're able to identify what causes you to experience pressure, react appropriately, and develop the right attitude, you should be able to thrive in pressurized situations.

High-pressure environments can be hard on professional relationships. You can so easily get caught up with a major project or looming deadline that your interpersonal skills slip. Under pressure, you may start to make instinctive emotional reactions as your awareness of others' feelings fades.

In order to maintain the highest level of performance, it's important to understand and control your own reactions to pressure and to handle the effects of pressure on colleagues. There are many circumstances where interactions with colleagues can generate pressure.

To perform well under pressure you need to think sufficiently about what needs to be done, but not fall into the trap of overthinking your performance. Similarly, you should have confidence in your abilities and knowledge, but not to the point where your arrogance impairs your judgment.

Overconfidence leads people to underestimate challenges and fail to ask whether their skills, experience, and knowledge are sufficient to accomplish the task at hand. An example of an overconfident response is refusing to consider alternatives to opinions and decisions.

To use this tool, begin identifying a task that you're struggling with, and read the list of statements often related to overthinking. Then, put a check next to those that apply to your current task. Finally, write statements that counter those that apply to you. You can print this table in a word processing or spreadsheet application and use it to complete this activity.

Thought distortions can affect your performance, especially when you're under pressure. Use this table as an aid to recognize if and how your thoughts are being affected by pressure, and determine how you can revise them if necessary.

The stress you feel in a situation can be influenced by how you interpret the situation. When you perceive a situation negatively, you may perform below your ability. To help you perceive a situation more clearly, you can follow a four-step method.

The next step is to determine what exactly needs to be accomplished. This allows you to minimize emotional distractions and focus on dealing with the situation. Finally, this clarifies your priorities and, when others are involved, helps to establish a common understanding of the issue.

To take action in high pressure situations, you need to first make sure you've optimized how you look at the challenge. This means asking whether your perception may be distorted by emotion and revising any thoughts that are obscured. Then you should clarify what the real challenge is.

The second step of the method for taking action is to identify your goal. To help identify it, ask "What do I need to achieve?" You need to be clear about the challenge, and what kind of solution is acceptable, before you can prescribe any actions.

Once you've defined your challenge and identified your goal, the third step is to generate and evaluate possible solutions. This involves thinking about what kind of actions you could take and the effects they may have.

Once you've decided on a solution, the final step is to design a plan of action to implement the solution you've chosen. The first thing you should do is divide what needs to be done into manageable tasks or steps that can be accomplished with relative ease. This can help to keep you from being overwhelmed by the pressure, or becoming paralyzed by over-analysis.

Having a strategy in place for taking action under pressure can help you to perform more effectively. Use the table to review the steps of the process and the actions associated with each step.

Many stress-induced reactions are driven by automatic thoughts linked to emotions. By learning to recognize these kinds of thought distortions, you can optimize your responses to high-pressure situations.

Section Project (Optional)

This course sets out some principles to help you avoid the dangers of overconfidence and overthinking, which can impair your performance when under pressure. It then teaches a technique for clarifying your perceptions in such situations and creating an action plan to optimize your performance under pressure.