A Personal Journey Toward Understanding Performance Under Pressure
The ideas behind Performing Under Pressure did not begin in a psychology laboratory. They began in Japan.
Japan — Discovering the Mind-Body Connection
Where the Journey Began
After graduating from high school, I joined the U.S. Army Security Agency and was stationed in Chitose, Japan. While there, I studied the martial arts and earned a black belt in Aikido. That experience introduced me to something I would spend much of the rest of my life trying to understand: the relationship between mind and body and the degree to which both can be trained to extend the limits of human performance.
Aikido also taught me something that would become increasingly important later. Performing effectively under pressure does not simply require trying harder. Sometimes trying harder creates the very tension and narrowing of attention that interfere with performance. The ability to remain centered, to direct attention appropriately, and to allow mind and body to work together would eventually become central themes in my professional work.
From Aikido to Psychology
When I left the Army, I entered Lewis & Clark College and studied psychology. I was also a competitive diver, which gave me an opportunity to apply what I was learning to my own performance. I became the Northwest Conference diving champion. Psychology was no longer simply an academic subject; I was beginning to see it as a way of understanding why people sometimes perform up to their capabilities and sometimes do not.
In 1967 I entered Vanderbilt University's clinical psychology program, earning my Ph.D. in 1971. While at Vanderbilt, I conducted research involving attention and also coached age-group divers, applying psychological techniques to their training. The interests that had begun in Japan—attention, arousal, mind-body interaction, and performance—were becoming the focus of my professional life.
Rochester — From Questions to a Theory
In 1971, I joined the faculty in the departments of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Rochester. Those six years became a critical period in the development of my thinking.
I developed the university's psycho-educational and biofeedback laboratory. It served simultaneously as a research, training, and service facility. Graduate students and I worked with individuals dealing with performance anxiety, including musicians at the Eastman School of Music preparing for jury performances, as well as people from business and other performance environments.
The environment was important because it forced us to move back and forth between theory and application. What happened to attention as physiological arousal increased? Why could one person remain effective under conditions that caused another person to become overloaded or overly narrow in focus? Why did pressure cause different people to make different kinds of mistakes?
Those questions led to a theory describing the relationship between attention, arousal, interpersonal characteristics, and performance—and to a way of measuring individual differences in those characteristics. In 1976, I published the Test of Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS) in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Understanding Wasn't Enough
Also in 1976, I published The Inner Athlete. The book attempted to translate the theory and research into something useful to both professionals and performers. It provided a rationale for psychological techniques such as mental rehearsal, relaxation, hypnosis, and biofeedback, while emphasizing an idea that remains important to me today: the right technique depends on the individual and the situation.
But assessment and understanding were only part of the problem. Knowing why a performer is likely to lose concentration under pressure doesn't necessarily prevent it from happening. Performers also need ways to recognize what is happening and regain control.
That realization led to Attention Control Training—ACT. Published in book form in 1978, ACT provided a framework for developing individualized performance-enhancement programs designed to give people greater control over concentration and arousal under demanding and stressful conditions.
Understand the individual. Anticipate the situations likely to create problems. Recognize the warning signs. Develop and practice the skills needed to regain control.
Taking the Ideas Beyond the Laboratory
One memorable example was an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where attention control and centering became part of a very public—and very funny—demonstration.
Johnny Carson at his funniest as he learns to use Attention Control Training and centering to break a board with his head. Ed McMahon and Robert Nideffer hold the boards.
From the Laboratory to the Real World
In 1977, I moved to San Diego and became a professor at the California School of Professional Psychology. I taught psychological assessment, supervised doctoral research involving TAIS, maintained a clinical practice, and continued developing and applying the ideas behind TAIS and ACT. During this period, the work began spreading internationally, and Olympic training centers and national sport organizations in several countries began using TAIS and attention-control concepts with athletes.
Sport provided an unusually good laboratory. The demands are clear, pressure can be intense, and mistakes are immediately visible. But increasingly it became apparent that the underlying principles were not unique to sport.
A musician preparing for a jury performance, a diver standing on a ten-meter platform, an executive making a consequential decision, a police officer entering a dangerous situation, and an athlete competing for an Olympic medal face very different environments. Yet pressure can produce remarkably similar changes in attention, thinking, physiology, communication, and behavior.
The Olympics — A Decision That Changed My Career
In 1983, I was asked to provide psychological services to the U.S. Track and Field Team at the first World Championships and subsequently worked with the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Teams at the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games.
The travel and consulting demands associated with that work forced a decision. In 1983, I left academia and devoted myself to Enhanced Performance Systems (EPSystems), an organization built around the practical application of TAIS and ACT.
That decision moved my laboratory into the real world.
One Principle — Many Performance Environments
Over the decades that followed, my colleagues and I worked with high-performing individuals and organizations in sport, business, the military, police work, and the performing arts. The environments changed. The consequences of mistakes changed. The personalities of the performers changed.
What happens to people as pressure increases, and what allows some individuals and teams to remain effective while others begin a downward spiral?
TAIS helped us understand individual differences and anticipate the situations in which problems were likely to occur. ACT provided a framework for developing the skills needed to prevent or interrupt those problems.
The work also reinforced another lesson. Optimal performance isn't simply about the individual. Communication, leadership, mutual support, role clarity, and the ability to recognize changes in one another become increasingly important as pressure rises. That is true for an Olympic team, a corporate leadership group, a military unit—and a family.
Returning to Writing
In 2015, I became semi-retired. The short chronology I prepared for this website says that I began spending much of my time writing “for the sake of my own sanity, that of my family and the world.” I think I would keep that line. It says something about why I continue to write that a conventional retirement paragraph never could.
Writing also gave me an opportunity to step back from decades of research and application and ask a larger question. What had all of those different performance environments taught me? The answer kept returning to pressure.
Performing Under Pressure
Performing Under Pressure brings together what I have learned about the individual downward spiral.
Increasing pressure changes physiological arousal. Those changes affect attention. Changes in attention affect the way we think, feel, communicate, make decisions, and behave. Unless we recognize those changes and know what to do about them, one mistake can create additional pressure, which creates another mistake, and the cycle accelerates.
The purpose of the book is not to eliminate pressure. The objective is to understand our own patterns well enough to anticipate problems, recognize the early warning signs, and interrupt a downward spiral before it takes control.
Healing a Broken World
Technology and globalization have connected us in ways that would have been unimaginable when I began this journey. They have also increased the speed of change, the volume of information confronting us, and our exposure to people whose beliefs, values, cultures, and experiences differ from our own.
The same kinds of processes that create an individual downward spiral can operate between people and groups. Pressure increases. Attention narrows. Communication deteriorates. A downward spiral becomes interpersonal, national, and potentially international.
How We Got Here
Looking backward, the path seems much more orderly than it felt while I was traveling it.
Aikido led to questions about mind and body. Diving made those questions personal. Psychology provided the tools to investigate them. Research led to a theory. The theory led to TAIS. TAIS identified individual differences but also demonstrated the need for training. That led to ACT. Applied work took those ideas from musicians and athletes to Olympic teams, executives, police, military personnel, and organizations.
Decades of working with people under pressure eventually led me to recognize the downward spiral as a unifying problem. And that led here.
What happens to us when pressure rises—and what can we do to keep pressure from determining who we become and how we perform?
That question applies to an athlete standing on the starting line, an executive facing a critical decision, a soldier operating under threat, a family struggling with conflict—and increasingly, to all of us trying to live together in a rapidly changing world.