We're seeing it now with this year's NFL playoffs. Upsets aren't surprises, because everyone is putting together their best football. Close competition is the norm.

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As the games get bigger, the pressure gets more intense. So how do the best get ready to compete on the biggest stage?

Here's a look into some of the psychology of getting ready to win when it's win or go home.

Principle 1: Stay the course

Everyone knows the playoffs are different. One of the least effective things you can do is start treating it like a different game.

This doesn't mean denying the reality of the new consequences, or that it's bad to think about it as a "new season" where everyone is 0-0.

What it does mean is that introducing a new approach or changing the routine is more likely to hurt than help.

When people are put under pressure, they start looking for solutions. Often, those solutions seem like good ideas - people are drawn to novelty. The result is that you end up chasing a new strategy or process just because the time of the season has changed. Novelty is very taxing for the brain, and as a result, is less likely to be learned deeply and more likely to be botched in the game. 

By staying the course, you:

• Send a message to yourself and others that you're well-prepared for this phase of the season. This builds confidence and conviction in the team.

• Refine what you're already good at, without introducing additional taxing stress. 

• Keep a good perspective - playoff games have the same rules and challenges as the other games, which you know how to play and win. Though they require different levels of effort and focus, they don't necessarily require a whole new approach. 

Principle 2: Balance recovery with preparation 

Under pressure, the default you'll feel is to do more. As we saw with the last principle, more is not always better and can often be worse. 

More also interferes with recovery. 

Since playoff games happen at the end of the season, recovery is likely already an issue. This is one reason why playing for a first-round bye is so critical. It allows you to get much-needed recovery in, to heal up, and restore energy to an appropriate level.

But if you don't have a bye week, you still need to try to find ways to let recovery be a part of the protocol. 

Principle 3: Engage your stress-is-enhancing mindset

When you're under pressure, you see stress in one of two ways: a challenge or a threat.

Because the playoffs are win or go home, and because you're human, you're more likely to detect the threat. After all, the consequences of losing (you fail to reach your goal) are much greater than winning (you play another game). It's natural to look at the downsides and be tuned into what's at stake. 

The problem is, when we focus on what we could lose, we end up playing in a threat state (and playing not to lose, versus playing to win). That state narrows your focus, shrinks your range of effective behavior, and even impacts the way you show up as a teammate. You're less willing to take constructive risks, less prosocial, and less flexible in your behavior. At any point if the game takes a turn you're not expecting, you'll be less prepared to respond and less resilient in the process.

To flip that process on its head, you need to look for the challenge.

Seeing the game as a challenge - an opportunity to show what you're made of (or what the team is made of), to demonstrate how your hard work prepared you, and a chance to test yourself - will help you tap into the psychological and physiological benefits of the increased arousal associated with performing under pressure. You'll be more resilient in the face of setbacks, more determined when confronted with difficulty, and have a broader range of flexible behavior available to you in the toughest moments.

The toughest part of leveraging a challenge appraisal is to name and categorize your physiology effectively. In Western culture, we've normalized talking about and feeling anxiety to the point that it's (most) people's default to describe anything associated with an elevated heart rate, quicker thoughts, sweaty palms, and the nerves associated with competition. Instead, here are 4 more adaptive categories you could leverage to get into that stress-is-enhancing mindset:

1. This is a sign you care. If you can appraise your physiology as a sign that this is an important event and something you care about, you'll be more likely to use the increased energy effectively. After all, nobody feels increased arousal about something that isn't important to them. It doesn't have to be anxiety - it can just be a sign that this matters.

2. This is just your brain and body getting you ready to perform. Cortisol is released into your bloodstream - and the associated physiological effects come with it - when your brain is predicting a big metabolic expense soon. And that's good! We want our brain and body to be ready to give great effort during the playoffs. This increased physiology isn't a sign something is wrong, it's a sign your brain and body are working right.

3. This is excitement. In Kelly McGonigal's research on The Upside of Stress, she talks about framing your nervousness as excitement. It's physiologically identical, but the psychological categorization of excitement is much more expansive and adaptive. If you can see the nerves as excitement, you'll be ready to deliver great effort with your full arsenal.

4. This is determination. Finally, if you can see your stress as a sign of determination - a sign that you've worked hard and are ready and want to win - you can tap into the psychological and physiological benefits that come with that increased arousal. In studies of students who framed anxiety about a test as determination, they performed significantly better than their counterparts who focused on getting rid of the nerves.

Of course, there's more you could do to get ready, but keeping the formula simple makes it more likely you'll succeed. 

Stay the course, recover, and embrace the opportunity. 

In Jonah Berger's book Magic Words, he explains the type of words we can use to motivate behavior and action and the 6 ways we can do it.

The first way, and what you'll learn today, is how to activate agency and identity.

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The way we do this is by:

• Turning actions into identities.

• Changing cant's to don'ts.

Turning Actions into Identities

Turning actions into identities is about asking people to become something rather than to do something.

For example, if you want an athlete to be a more effective communicator, you want to talk to them about "being a leader" and not "learning to lead." Or, if you have kids, you want to ask them to "be a helper" instead of "help out." Turning actions into identities firms up commitment and solidifies the behavior as part of who we are.

Change cant's to dont's.

Along the same lines, when we don't do something, we take a firm stance about who we are and what we tolerate. When we can't do something, it suggests either a lack of ability or want to, but not a conflict with values or standards.

Don'ts are stronger stances to take and, again, strengthen our commitment to who we are.

By crafting your language to support the development of a desired identity, you can motivate your performers to act how you want.

The best shooters in the NBA still miss 60% of their shots. The best hitters in baseball are failing even more often than that. The best teams still lose a meaningful percentage of their games (at the very highest levels), and the best executives will be wrong in their assessment of talent a few times, too.

Since we can't do away with failure, it's helpful to figure out how to try and learn from failure effectively. We want to develop an arsenal of strategies to cope with the repeated failures you'll encounter as you pursue excellence. Ultimately, the goal will be for you to see failure as information - nothing more or less.

This short series of articles will explore the dimensions of dealing with failure: why it's hard to learn, what might help us do better, and practical steps we can take to make the most of failure today.

Let's start with why failure is tough to learn from in the first place.

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Learning from failure is hard

Despite how much we've all been told that failure is a learning opportunity and that facing failure that way is the right mindset to have, science suggests that learning from failure is very, very hard.

Failure is tough to learn from because:

• The solution is not immediately accessible. When we fail, we simply learn what not to do - not what to do next time do it correctly.

• We all have egos. Failure hurts our egos, and nobody really wants to spend time just hanging out with those negative emotions.

• When we expect some negative news or information, we often try to avoid it altogether.

• We tend to ascribe failures to external factors. As a result, we fail to recognize and understand our role in the failure.

• We overgeneralize. When we fail, we tend to first get stuck on questions like, "Will it always be this way?" These questions make it difficult to extract lessons.

The real problem for performers here is that, in failing to learn from failure, you miss a ton of opportunities to improve. If you only learn from your wins, you'll be lucky to make good use of 50% of the attempts you make.

Inaccessible solutions

Think about the last time that you watched somebody do something incorrectly. What did you take away? Chances are, it was a simple sentiment - "don't do that."

When we fail at something, or see someone else fail, it gives us no information on how to do it correctly. While it's helpful to systematically eliminate what not to do, that's a long, slow slog to success. And, because people tend to avoid negative news and don't enjoy failure, that path to progress is unappealing. It's hard to maintain motivation in the face of screw-up after screw-up.

The information presented when we fail is also a bit more complex than when we succeed. Failure tends to be ambiguous. Was it because we didn't give enough effort, we chose the wrong strategy, both, or neither? In the face of this complexity and ambiguity, we are both more likely to give up trying to figure it out (it's taxing to decipher) and struggle to make any sense of it in the first place. We may come to a conclusion, but there's no way to know if that conclusion is right, either.

Other cognitive processes underpin the difficulty we have learning from failure. The primary mechanism here is attention. When we're failing, we simply stop attending and check out. It's more comfortable cognitively and emotionally.

In some situations, like sunk costs, this ability to move on and redirect attention is useful. But, in situations we're likely to encounter repeatedly - like stepping up to bat or taking a shot - this tendency to move attention from failure quickly limits our ability to learn.

Attention is implicated in many of our most important cognitive processes like learning and memory. If attention isn't applied and directed, the learning (and consolidation of the learning into memory) simply won't take place. Without attention, there's no forward action.

Finally, when we don't pay attention or apply effort, we tend to default to cognitive biases or heuristics to make sense of information. In the case of learning from failure, this most often shows up in the form of confirmation bias. When we fail, we overlook important data that doesn't fit with our initial assumptions. This is why, when people fail, they often default to easy explanations that are readily available - those explanations comport neatly with their view of the world, are easy to arrive at, and create a sense of cognitive closure that allows us to move forward (though without new, valuable information).

Ego defenses

We all have egos - it's part of what makes us human. And, we're all inclined to defend these egos. It's healthier, more adaptive, and generally better for performance if we can see ourselves as good, healthy, and capable.

Failure is often a direct signal that one of those things is missing or not up to par, or at least that's how we interpret it.

When we fail at something, our first inclination is to protect our ego. Think about the last time you got into a conflict with your partner over something you did wrong. Chances are your initial response was more along the lines of an excuse for your behavior or an attempt at picking apart their argument than an open acknowledgment that you could do something better.

To protect our ego, we engage in one of two processes. The first is defensive reasoning - a process where we avoid uncomfortable truths to protect our ego (e.g., deny responsibility, justify our behavior) and, as a result, fail to learn because we fail to analyze.

The second is ego protection - the psychological strategies we use to guard our self-esteem. These strategies are designed to mitigate and minimize the crappy feelings we have when we fail and include things like downplaying how important the outcome is or self-handicapping in the future to avoid the negative feelings associated with failure. Over time, this can also lead to avoiding difficult tasks and further personal development.

It's hard, scary, and uncomfortable to engage in an honest and open self-reflection of our shortcomings. When we fail, the information about what we're not so good at is already hard to extract, so we're essentially adding double work to get anything out of it. We need to put our egos aside AND be willing to wade through crap to learn. Most of the time, that's a combination that leads to wanting to pass over versus lean in.

Though people can often acknowledge mistakes (sometimes they have no choice, as in the case of missing a shot in front of 20,000 fans), learning what to do next is often much tougher.

An unfortunate example of this recently surfaced on social media, where a national champion player at Michigan who made a mistake said that he'd "never forgive himself" - despite winning the game. His mistake didn't even have the negative outcome he feared, but it hurt his self-esteem so much that, at least at this point, he has a hard time figuring out how to learn and let it go. 

The science here would suggest taking a different approach, which we'll explore when we dive into how to learn from failure and practical strategies you can apply.

The ostrich effect

Have you ever been to the doctor, gotten your bloodwork, and then let every call from the doctor go to voicemail because you don't want to deal with the results?

That was me in 2022. In preparation for having my first kiddo, my wife urged me to go to the doctor every other day for about 10 months. I finally caved and got everything done (it was in Canada, so at least it was free).

And then, I just ignored it for a few months. I fell victim to the Ostrich effect.

The Ostrich effect is a bias wherein we tend to avoid negative or unpleasant information, like the (mythical) idea that ostriches bury their heads in the sand when faced with danger.

If your head is in the sand, you can't learn much.

Of central importance is the idea that you're purposely avoiding information. When it comes to learning from failure, that means ignoring data or feedback that could be helpful but might be threatening or upsetting.

This outright avoidance of real, useful information is common and makes it challenging to figure out how to get better. We miss the opportunity to synthesize relevant information that might help us make a better decision because we aren't sure we want to know the truth.

This effect even plays out on larger scales. There's data suggesting that investors avoid looking at their performance during market turbulence and that managers avoid information about problems with their team or projects. Confronting information that might make us feel crappy (and thus activate our ego defenses) is a cognitively and emotionally demanding task - one that we'd prefer to avoid altogether in the first place.

Attribution

We're all motivated to figure out what causes our behavior and outcomes, and for good reason. If we can figure out what's driving things, we can learn what to repeat, avoid, or do differently.

We tend to engage in 2 types of attribution.

The first is internal. In this case, we attribute our failures to things that live within us, like ability, effort, character, or genetics. 

The second is external. These involve factors outside of our control, like luck, challenge, or what the other team does.

When it comes to learning from failure, most people default to ascribing failure to external causes (despite what you hear in post-game press conferences). When we ascribe our failures to external circumstances, we're essentially absolving ourselves of responsibility, which makes it less likely that we learn from what just happened.

Over time, this pattern can also create the illusion that no change is needed to get better. All the outcomes happen outside us.

This is termed the "self-serving bias," which, again, serves to protect our self-esteem. This bias is the tendency to attribute success to internal factors, like how hard we work or how good we are, and failures to external factors, like luck or other people. Ironically enough, when we look to examine other people's performance, we take the opposite tact and tend to view their failures as something "wrong" with them. But of course, in that instance, there's no connection to our ego that we'd need to protect.

Overgeneralization

Finally, there's one more cognitive process that limits our ability to learn.

When people fail once, they believe that they'll be more likely to fail at the same thing again in the future. This may or may not be true, but either way, this belief is likely to drive behavior and learning that's ineffective. Namely, you're more apt to just give up if you don't think you can succeed than you are to try and get better.

This kind of overgeneralization can lead to a negative self-perception, which lowers both our self-esteem (how we feel about ourselves) and our self-efficacy (what we believe we can do).

It can also prevent us from accurately and honestly assessing the cause of our screw-ups. And, if we don't believe we can do better in the future, there's no reason to put in the effort to learn and improve. Failure is inevitable with this mindset.

Next up

In a coming edition, we'll unpack strategies performers can use to more effectively learn from failure. We'll also take a look at the role of expertise in understanding failure, and how focusing on progress, generally, can help us deal with mistakes more effectively.

If you enjoyed today’s post, it would mean a lot to me if you’d consider sharing with just one other person you think might like it, too.

References

Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2019). Not learning from failure—The greatest failure of all. Psychological science, 30(12), 1733-1744.

Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You think failure is hard? So is learning from it. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511-1524.

Fishbach, A. (2022). Get it done: Surprising lessons from the science of motivation. Pan Macmillan.

But, what I am interested in is the psychology of sports - and why in some cases, like this year's Philadelphia Eagles, the psychology seems to be a bit off and limit the ceiling of the team. In coming editions, we'll explore things like the psychology of getting ready for an NFL playoff game, or how to maintain consistency in March Madness.

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The story of avoidance motivation

The storyline of the Eagles playing a bit uptight has persisted since Week 12 when the team started down a rough patch of losing 5 out of 6 games. Last year's Super Bowl runner-up looked destined to make another run before then and quickly deteriorated after a blowout loss to the 49ers.

As Troy Aikman (who may have a lingering bias here) pointed out during the broadcast:

This team looked defeated when the game began.

So what happened?

Playing not to lose

The main psychology at play here is the principle of avoidance motivation, or, in sports talk: playing not to lose.

When we're motivated to avoid a particular outcome, our behavior is guided by fear. Fear, functionally, makes us tight, restricts our focus, and directs our attention toward threats versus opportunities.

You saw this playing out during the game. If you're an Eagles fan, chances are you read about it during the season as the fanfare and excitement around the team turned tumultuous. The team shifted from free and playing to win to playing to lose.

Here's how playing not to lose affects you:

• Reduced performance. Avoidance motivation is linked to reduced performance, resource depletion, and lower well-being (especially if it persists over time, like weeks 13 to the playoffs).

• Reduced learning. Avoidance motivation doesn't direct you toward what to do, it directs you to what not to do. It's much harder to learn what not to do than what to do. The range of things to avoid is generally much larger than the range of things to accomplish.

• Limited performance under pressure. Under pressure, when avoidance goals are activated, performance is significantly undermined (this is a robust effect demonstrated across several performance tasks).

• Taxed cognitive systems. Playing not to lose requires intense attention to detail and a vigilance that's hard to maintain over time. As a result, it takes a ton of mental effort relative to playing to win. And, we're more likely to perseverate when we've made a mistake, doubling the cost of that intensive effort over time. Mistakes are inevitable.

• Undermines creativity. If you're hoping to improvise occasionally on your way to a win - maybe you need to leave the pocket and scramble or draw a play up on the sideline - avoidance motivation is likely to limit that. If you're playing not to lose and you do improvise, it requires extra mental effort.

Unfortunately, playing more and more uptight as each week went by was systematically undermining the players' performance. From the outside looking in, my guess would be that signs of vitality or joy were also looked down upon or not welcomed in the spirit of being serious about losing. As a result, the environment also knocked out some of the very things the team would need to be successful.

Leadership and playing not to lose

There's also a leadership and social dimension to playing not to lose.

When a team is trying hard to avoid bad outcomes, they're oriented toward less effective behaviors and primed to underperform.

Here's how leadership behaviors that promote avoidance motivation can undermine team performance:

• Poor communication. Leadership that's motivating through avoidance tends to have more difficulty conveying clear performance objectives, which leads to unmet expectations and lower team performance.

• Increased conflict. Task conflicts - disagreement about how we do things - can turn into relationship conflicts - how people get along - when they take place in the context of an environment playing not to lose. The end result is worse team decision-making.

• Negative psychology. We've touched on this a bit, but leaders associated with avoidance motivation tend to produce poorer performers, both on the field and in terms of well-being. Of course, worse performance from individuals generally means worse performance from the team.

• Increases distraction. Leaders motivating through avoidance tend to engage in behaviors that distract team members from their tasks and goals, typically by orienting them away from what's important (what success looks like) and toward things that are harder to process (what not to do).

The alternative: Playing to win

On the other side of avoidance motivation is "approach motivation." Though it can be challenging in the face of defeat or when we're worried about a particular outcome, approach motivation is what we'd like to instill in our teams. It's the proverbial playing to win.

Playing to win tends to lead to better mood, decision-making, and social performance (like being a good teammate). And, some data suggests people with approach motivation learn and perform better.

To instill more approach motivation, we want to focus on:

• What we want people to accomplish. By orienting people toward a goal and target, we help them identify what to move toward, versus what to avoid.

• Providing clarity. When people are motivated by avoidance, what's often clear is only what not to do. To generate approach motivation, we need to be clear about the standards and what to do to be successful.

• Keep a positive attitude. Though it's never fun to lose, creating an atmosphere where losing is something to fear and avoid, rather than learn from, process, and move on is likely to generate avoidance motivation. To keep your team focused on playing to win, deal with the pain of the loss, identify what can be improved, and set the focus on winning the next game (versus not losing).

There's a complex relationship between motivation and human behavior, and avoidance vs. approach motivation is only one dimension to consider in why a team might underperform. However, you can see how consistently playing not to lose systematically undermines team performance and ultimately, leads to an otherwise great team taking an early exit.

If you want to reach your goals, your best bet is to play to win.

References

Booth, B., & Cates, K. (2012). Growing Managers: Moving from Team Member to Team Leader. . https://doi.org/10.1108/case.kellogg.2016.000143.

Roskes, M., Elliot, A., & Dreu, C. (2014). Why Is Avoidance Motivation Problematic, and What Can Be Done About It?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 133 - 138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414524224.

Elliot, A. (2006). The Hierarchical Model of Approach-Avoidance Motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 30, 111-116. https://doi.org/10.1007/S11031-006-9028-7.

In a recent edition of the newsletter, I wrote about the benefits of embracing monotony and how setting a self-transcendent goal can help performers stick with it, even when the activity is mind-numbing.

But there's another reason that falling in love with boredom becomes critical in the development of expertise. That's because, for most high performers, there will be long periods of practice marked by little or no progress. These well-known performance plateaus are places where the truly elite decide that there's nothing more important than rising above it, and where some talented but less dedicated athletes fizzle out - either because it's not interesting, it's not worth the time required, or they just don't care or understand how.

A big part of that is the reduced reward people experience from no longer making progress based on the work they put in. We believe that more work leads to better performance, as though work quantity is all that matters. As famous expertise researcher Anders Ericsson put it, "the belief that a sufficient amount of experience or practice leads to maximal performance appears incorrect" (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer, 1993, pg. 366). In other words, just practicing more isn't likely to help you progress at all times - you'll need a bit more innovation and experimentation, which may look and feel crappy before you make progress to the next level.

Long periods of less-than-ideal performance are part of the gig on a quest for high performance.

So how do we get people out of the stale, static periods of no progress and back to the meaningful (albeit potentially incremental) changes that move their talent forward?

Plateaus, Dips, and Leaps

Wayne Gray and John Lindstedt are cognitive scientists who set out to explore the patterns of behavior that underpin the development of real, skilled performance. The framework they introduced - plateaus, dips, and leaps - helps us understand both the trajectory of improvement and what can be done to help people progress from one stage to the next (Gray & Lindstedt, 2017).

Plateaus

Plateaus are part of the process, but they're unpleasant for most performers and can lead to periods of high frustration, burnout, and, at worst, quitting. 

Plateaus are "periods of stable suboptimal performance" where people simply aren't getting any better and are also not functioning at the level that they could be.

Dips

Part of what maintains a behavior in a plateau is the anticipated (and probable) dip in the quality of execution that comes with learning. When we start to execute a new skill, we tend to be bad at it. Unfortunately, being bad is both an experience we're motivated to avoid and something hard to reinforce - which also makes it harder for people to stick with it.

Leaps

Not to be too literal here, but the Fosbury Flop is an example of a leap - a new method is invented, people learn a new skill, and performance reaches a level that we weren't sure was possible before.

When we start to execute the new and better method we're experimenting with during the dip phase, we tend to have leaps of performance that exceed our previous levels of performance. The leaps are incredibly rewarding, so working to reach the leap phase can make the development of skill (patience with the plateau and self-compassion with the dips) more tolerable. When we experience rapid progress and see ourselves get better through experimentation, we are more willing to try it again in the future.

"League-Stepping"

In the research on getting out of plateaus, the methods that move performance to the next level are referred to as "league-stepping methods", which, to be honest, just sounds awesome.

And, the good news is, there is a 3-step process we can take to find our way out of a dip.

The first step is finding a better way. This involves experimenting with new behaviors and discovering new ways to approach the specific skill. What you'd observe during this phase is trying, failing, and iterating repeatedly until the new method is discovered.

The second step refining the way. Once you've discovered the Fosbury Flop, for example, you need to refine the details.

And once that's done, the final step is to practice. Once you've identified the new method and refined it, you have to get it to a point where you can execute it flawlessly. As you get better and better, the dips are erased and you reach a new level.

Going through these steps boils down to discovering new ways to execute, working out the details, and then experiencing the gains that come from using a better method.

You're building your own, improved performance mousetrap.

Finding a better way

When we first need to find our way off the plateau, we begin by searching for new techniques, experimenting, iterating, and trying again. These techniques can come from trying new things during practice, self-reflection, or being told that we should try something new. 

This type of experimenting and searching requires a lot of motivation and hard work.

If you've ever tried to learn or teach a new skill, you know that you tend to be awful in the beginning. When people are no good, they tend to lose motivation quickly. It's rarely rewarding to do a bad job (despite what we tend to say about our colleagues we don't like).

We stay in this period of awful - the dip - until the new technique that's getting us off the plateau becomes more automatic and effortless. 

Reminding yourself that this dip is temporary can help you sustain engagement during the time of toiling. You can also make the dip more enjoyable by reminding yourself that it's a time to explore widely without fear of failure and to let go of preconceived notions of the way things have always been done. 

Once you've built a better mousetrap, it's time to practice.

Practice makes better... To a point

When you're first trying to develop your new skill, you're likely going to perform poorly at the start. When you go to change an NBA player's shot between college and the pros, for example, it's not uncommon for the player to get considerably worse before they get better. Adjusting and developing your methods is hard.

Once we practice enough (here's a formula for mastering skill-building), we should expect to return and then ultimately surpass the previous performance.

It looks like this:

Once the optimal method is selected and developed, the athlete (or any performer, really) has a chance to take their game to the next level.

Practice alone, though, does not advance performance.

People can break skills down into "hierarchies," such that they only adjust one part of the skill at a given time. This allows for a more refined, nuanced approach to development. And, the Power Law of Practice suggests that, at a certain point, more time practicing is not leading to greater development in a skill.

Making the leap

What the research suggests happens when people make a leap - when performance improves - is that they improve multiple methods to reach their goals (Gray & Lindstedt, 2017; Rickard, 1997).

In other words, practice helps us refine and develop the methods after we've explored, but too much practice of one skill has diminishing marginal utility - and real progress is made when we make incremental improvements to multiple skills that move us toward our goal.

Real expertise develops through this cycle of experimentation, performance dip, leap, and begin again.

References

Gray, W. D., & Lindstedt, J. K. (2017). Plateaus, dips, and leaps: Where to look for inventions and discoveries during skilled performance. Cognitive science, 41(7), 1838-1870.

Rickard, T. C. (1997). Bending the power law: A CMPL theory of strategy shifts and the automatization of cognitive skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(3), 288.

The best coaches work hard to understand their athletes. 

To get the most out of anyone, you need to understand both who they are and how they do things. Though personality psychology has a varied and at times inconsistent history, it can provide a useful framework for making sense of some simple dimensions of human existence.

Of course, nobody can be boiled down to just 5 categories (try as we might), but to ignore that there are personalities - consistent patterns of behavior, emotion, motivation, and cognition over time - is to ignore common frameworks we all use to make sense of ourselves and the world.

Personality evolved to help people attain their goals and self-regulate. Sometimes, these goals are explicit, like making the all-star team, and other times implicit, like self-protection. To reach our goals and make it happen, we evolve these consistent patterns, which are each person's unique combination of:

• Dispositional traits

• Characteristic adaptations

• Personal, self-defined life stories

Each of these interacts with and is influenced by our larger social and cultural contexts to form a cohesive picture of "who we are."

I think this way of understanding personality gives us the best and most flexible picture of making sense of our teammates and who we perform with. Rather than seeing them as static and stable ("that's just who they are"), we appreciate how context, narrative, adaptations, and the tendency to be in certain states (more on that below) influence behavior over time.

With a clearer understanding of personality, we can more effectively coach people and help them move forward while staying patient with the parts of the person that make them uniquely them.

Adding some nuance to the personality picture

When coaches typically describe personality, they do so in a way that creates a static image of a person. We talk about people "being" a certain way instead of appreciating that all behavior is probabilistic. We can say that someone is "likely to be", and that gets us much closer to understanding the true nature of another person's personality.

In scientific terms: "Personality traits are probabilistic descriptions of relatively stable patterns of emotion, motivation, cognition, and behavior, in response to classes of stimuli that have been present in human cultures over evolutionary time" (DeYoung et al. , 2015).

Let's unpack personality, one feature at a time.

Traits = Regular States

Instead of thinking of traits as permanent fixtures or features of who someone is, it's more useful to think of them as a tendency to be in certain states.

It's now a function of probability, which more closely matches how we make sense of the world anyway, instead of a function of a person's inner core. This slight adjustment allows us to accommodate basic understandings we all have about ourselves, but seem to overlook in other people.

For example, most people are aware of the fact that they think, feel, or behave differently at home than at work, at practice or during a game. All of our levels of a particular state ebb and flow over the day.

Just appreciating and acknowledging that people are not always one way can make room in our narrative and behavior for how we interact with them. 

Traits are situation-specific

The natural extension of this line of reasoning is that what we typically consider stable is much more situationally determined than we might feel comfortable with.

If the situation is constant, it may be fair to say that a person "does X in Y situation," but it's not quite right to say that a person "is X", implying that in any situation, they're consistent.

This understanding can help explain some of the surprises we feel when a player we're coaching spontaneously elevates (or tanks) their game or why they tend to play up a level or down to the opponent. These situations, and their relevant contextual features, end up dictating a lot of behavior. 

Appreciating the role of context can help us make more accurate inferences and generate more accurate hypotheses when we're trying to understand the behavior of a given player in a given situation.

Too often we look for the "essence" of who someone is, mostly so we can put them in a neat category and streamline our ability to make sense of them. Of course, none of us likes to be categorized, and we often feel that categories misrepresent who we are and what we stand for, but we do that as a part of a natural simplification exercise, or heuristic, for our mind. Categories make it easier to predict how someone will behave but fail to account for other conditions that may alter those predictions.

This nuance also means that it's important to practice "being" the way we want our players to be in certain situations.

For example, if you want players to more readily demonstrate composure, you need to intervene on two levels. First, you need to address state-level anxiety. If anxiety is the regular state, then it's likely under pressured circumstances, that's only going to get more, not less, intense. Second, you need to address managing anxiety in a pressure-packed situation, and teach players what stimuli to look for in those situations to both keep composed and elevate performance. By addressing state-level anxiety, you change the likelihood that anxiety manifests under pressure. By addressing the second, you address the stimuli likely to be associated with increased anxiety and provide a new narrative for how to best perform in those situations.

Traits are evolved

The final dimension to note is that there have been some fairly consistent pressures on humans throughout evolution, which is why we seem to have some universality in traits across cultures in time. For example, about 30 traits have the same genetic structure across Canadian, German, and Japanese samples (Yamaga et al., 2006).

What this means in simple terms is that all traits have social implications, as these traits evolved to help us select more adaptive social behaviors and survive. Personality is a function of goals, not a static picture of who somebody is and will be.

The hierarchy of personality

You might be familiar with the Big 5 of personality: neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and openness to experience.

These dimensions of personality have had a massive amount of empirical support and conceptual alignment, and for a long time were thought to be the broadest classes of personality characteristics we could find. 

Recently, we've discovered that there are meta-traits that guide these Big 5 factors: stability, or the drive to protect our goals and pursuits, and plasticity, or the drive to explore new strategies and new goals to move us forward.

Our personalities change as a function of what we're trying to accomplish relative to our goals. That's why you might see different behaviors from the same person under different conditions, and people can end up behaving in ways we didn't expect. Depending on which goal and meta-trait that's activated, different facets of someone's personality may come to play out. Though we might have a general sense of how someone will behave, the activation of different goals can lead to departures from these expectations.

Take the player who you believe needs to emerge as a leader on the team. Perhaps you've seen them thrive as the second or third man up and they appear to have the social skills necessary to bring the group together (you've rated them high on extraversion). When you go to promote him to captain, however, they become shy and seem to back away from the responsibility.

What happened? Did they change? Did we misread their personality?

In these instances, we tend to assume that someone "doesn't have what it takes" to make it to the next level. We suppose that something is wrong with them internally, rather than recognizing that the shift in role may have activated a different goal. Perhaps their behavior as the second or third man up is motivated by fitting in, and you promoting them to captain decidedly makes them stand out. You've activated a different goal (lead vs. fit-in), and as a result, are seeing different behavior.

Below the Big 5, we have what scientists call "characteristic adaptations." These are the personality factors that coaches typically want to see in their players and that front offices try to draft for, like grit, growth mindset, persistence, and "killer instinct." Characteristic adaptations reflect how individual people have adapted their goals and strategies to current circumstances.

This explains why not all players react to the same situation the same way. When the game is on the line, some players want the ball in their hands, and others would rather stand on the sideline. These choices reflect differences in goals, understanding of how to pursue them, and strategies or tools they believe they have (or don't) to get the job done.

Some other examples of characteristic adaptations include:

• Each player's unique set and order of virtues and values

• The roles they play on the team

• How a player responds to a coach’s feedback

What's important here is to recognize that the way people behave is much more flexible and varied than we typically feel comfortable accounting for. Though we can create broad categories of behavior to describe people like "extraverted" or "agreeable," these categories and labels come with their own assumptions about what behavior should go with those labels. Deviations from those labels are hard to make sense of and often lead us to treat people like the label, instead of like the individual, idiosyncratic person they are. These labels also obscure our view of personal goals that guide behavior and limit our own flexible responding to the people we lead.

The cybernetic mechanisms behind personality

To best make sense of personality and behavior, it's helpful to link personality constructs to their relevant functions. Personality didn't evolve in these large, covarying structures for no reason. The dominant traits we appreciate in personality - the Big 5 - serve a purpose.

That purpose is namely to help people go after goals and self-regulate in the process. The scientific terminology behind this is "cybernetics," which gives us a 5-step framework to use:

• goal activation (illuminating a goal)

• strategy selection (choosing how to go after it)

• action (pursuing it)

• outcome interpretation (evaluating if we did it or not)

• goal comparison (comparing the new end state to the goal and seeing if there's a mismatch).

If we go through this cycle effectively, we iterate again with a new goal. If not, we start over basically with the same goal but a different plan and action.

With this simple structure in mind, we can look at personality traits and their characteristic adaptations as patterns of behavior that serve to move a person through one part of this cycle.

Extraversion

We typically think of extraversion the way it's been described by the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory, which is, unfortunately, a load of crap. (In case you need more evidence, you can look here, too.)

Rather than reflecting how much energy we get from (or lose by) interacting with people, the data suggests extraversion is a reflection of how sensitive someone is to rewards (Depue & Collins, 1999; Smillie, 2013). 

In other words, high extraversion predicts who is most motivated by the chance to achieve a given reward and who will enjoy it most if it happens.

The main subfactors of extraversion are enthusiasm and assertiveness, which may help further explain how we popularly explain what extraversion is.

When we say someone is extraverted, we are usually referring to their enthusiasm. From the perspective of the science, a person being high on enthusiasm would mean that they are motivated by liking a reward - they enjoy the experience of receiving the reward or imagining it.

We rarely describe someone as extraverted if they are assertive, but the science suggests assertion is about wanting a reward - and reflects a motivation to attain a desired goal.

Taken together, these predict high levels of positive affect, like being energized, and are what we mean when we say someone is extraverted. Of course, this perspective (that extraversion reflects sensitivity to reward) matches neatly with our typical popular understanding - most human rewards are social. 

Extraversion is most closely related to goal activation in the cybernetic cycle but has links to the other parts. How sensitive someone is to the rewards they experience along the path to reaching their goals is a good indicator of how likely they are to keep going as they progress.

Neuroticism

Neuroticism, on the other hand, most closely relates to goal comparison.

When the current state doesn't match with the goal we set, it's natural to get defensive. Though we may want to explore other strategies, we'll likely experience some negative emotions about the fact that we didn't accomplish what we had hoped. How sensitive and reactive someone is to those negative emotions and the resulting defensiveness is what we call neuroticism.

More simply, neuroticism reflects the degree of negative emotion we experience when progress toward our goal is frustrated or thwarted. Those barriers could come in the form of a signal that the goal won't ever be reached, like being cut from the team, or a signal that the goal is going to be unlikely to be met, like being down 15 points in overtime with 30 seconds to go.

How someone responds to these signals is a reflection of how individually threatened (not in terms of physical safety, but their psychological sense of comfort) someone feels. People higher in neuroticism experience a greater degree of threat and consequent negative emotions.

When we feel threatened, we have two types of defenses we activate: active defense or passive avoidance. 

Active defense is what we see when we describe someone as "emotional" - they get angry or upset easily. 

Passive avoidance is what we see when we describe someone as "withdrawn." In this instance, what we mean is that someone is reducing motivation in response to the uncertainty of reaching their goals.

Though everyone uses both strategies to some degree, what's important to note here is that someone high in neuroticism is going to be more motivated to avoid pain than to seek their goals. These are the players who tend to quit early, cop out when it gets tough, or don't do the extra work we think they need to get better. What's happening under the hood is that they're more motivated to resolve the uncertainty by backing off than by reducing the current discrepancy between their present status and desired end goal. 

In that instance, we need to find ways to "punish" (in the most behavioral sense of the word) behavior that, in the short-term brings comfort via withdrawal, makes the end goal more salient and rewarding, and then reinforces behavior that looks like a move toward that end state.

For example, that might mean committing extra playing time to a player who currently doesn't see the floor much and rarely sticks around after practice, if they stay and do extra work after practice to get better. That would enhance the importance of the end goal (playing) while making withdrawal (leaving practice early) less desirable.

Openness/Intellect

Openness is a reflection of our desire to explore, understand, and use information (DeYoung, 2014).

In the case of our cybernetic model, it's about both strategy selection and actions, since actions can be used to uncover new information that helps us better adapt and make sense of the world moving forward.

At the core of openness are 3 factors we'd all love to see more of in our athletes:

• Curiosity

• Creativity

• Innovation

Each is about making new meaning in the world and figuring out what's likely to work or succeed.

Like the previous factors, openness/intellect is comprised primarily of two components: (1) openness to experience, which reflects how people engage with sensory information, and (2) intellect, which reflects how people interact with abstract concepts and language.

These two pair together to help us make sense of the world through the ways we set goals, interpret new information, and move through the cybernetic cycle.

When you see an athlete stubbornly holding on to a pattern of behavior that doesn't work, or having difficulty detecting the nuance in the meaning behind some of the feedback you give, that's a sign that they might be low on openness (in the context of sport). In that case, being more direct and explicit can be useful, as well as creating rules that guide their behavior out of the rigid pattern. If you see an athlete who's getting creative in the course of the game and piecing together bits of data to do something special, it's a sign of both high IQ (which is accounted for in this model's intellect) and openness.

Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness, one of the best predictors of performance from personality science across domains, is about how well people can adhere to rules or guidelines and prioritize or protect goals that aren't immediate. It's what allows people to act by their values and not the demands of the day, and allows us to work hard now in service of some larger mission we won't win for 6-7 months (if we're lucky to win at all).

Conscientiousness is comprised of industriousness, or self-discipline and focused hard work, and orderliness, which involves attending to rules (and at the extreme end, is linked to quality and perfectionism).

Taken together, it makes sense why this factor would play a huge part in long-term success and personal outcomes. It's what we're trying to coach our athletes to do - raise their standards and work hard to meet them - because we know this can lead to better outcomes.

Conscientiousness helps us activate long-term goals, select good strategies, and stay focused while we make progress. It can also help us effectively regulate our motivation and emotions, such that we respond less "neurotically" when we're frustrated in the progress of our goals.

If you were to pick one thing to select athletes for based on personality, conscientiousness would take the cake. Of course, there are more effective metrics to use, but many coaches and talent evaluators want to understand who a person is in the context of their sport. We'd do well to double down on conscientiousness as the trait selected for given both its behavioral manifestations and its connection to long-term outcomes. 

Agreeableness

The final of the big 5 traits is agreeableness - our tendency to cooperate and act altruistically, rather than exploit or not care about others. Contrary to what the name suggests, it's not about going along to get along or always being nice. In the case of achieving our goals, agreeableness reflects the human need to cooperate and coordinate with other people to execute at the highest level.

Agreeableness is tremendously helpful in the context of team performance. Cooperating and acting in others' best interests or the collective interest of the team requires understanding how other people think and feel and making good sense of social information. It allows people to shut down disruptive behavior and engage effectively in social emotion regulation.

With this understanding of agreeableness in mind, we might come to see the behavior of our players or team members who avoid conflict in a more nuanced (and potentially more adaptive way). Often the signals we look for to understand someone's competitiveness (e.g., fighting, yelling, conflict) cut directly against behavior we'd expect to see from someone agreeable, yet the agreeable person may simply be redirecting disruptive behavior to a time when it's more adaptive and socially advantageous (e.g., criticizing privately). These players are also more likely to be the "glue" of the team and to help keep things together as difficulty arises in the team's process of moving toward its goals.

Putting it all together

We are all social scientists. The world we live in is inherently social and high performance in sport requires optimizing the way these social interactions take place in service of larger goals.

With the understanding of personality as a framework for organizing around pursuing goals, rather than a static description of how people are, we can better understand how people are instead of trying to figure out "who they are." Personality is malleable - we have different goals in different contexts, and these contexts are likely to also shape behavior in a way that we often fail to appreciate (fundamental attribution error).

Rather than trying to pigeonhole someone into a neat descriptor that we think captures the range of their behavior, we'd do well to do a few things differently with this framework in mind:

1. When you see a behavior you don't like or don't understand, resist the urge to describe that person in a way that fits your framework. Instead, see if you can uncover the goal that might be guiding their behavior in that context.

2. Look for a team composed of people who are different along these dimensions - but only to a degree. Difference is valuable for getting the most out of a team, but you don't want to introduce too much neuroticism, or you'll create a team that is easily swayed and discouraged by the ups and downs of the season.

3. Recognizing that, for most people most of the time, there are several competing goals activated that they are trying to accomplish - like getting more playing time, feeding their family, buying a new car, not getting traded, and being a better teammate. Often these goals are going to drive behavior that seems contradictory or conflictual, because most people don't have all the characteristic adaptations they'd need to successfully pursue all of these goals simultaneously. The best thing you can do in this situation is help your athlete prioritize.

Personality is complex. People are complex. With a richer understanding of the link between personality and goals, we can better understand why people do what they do, and what we can do to shape it.

References

DeYoung, C. G. (2015). Cybernetic big five theory. Journal of research in personality, 56, 33-58.

I've loved my job in professional sports.

When people ask me about my job, what they often think about is what they see on TV - the fast-paced games, high-intensity performances, and the world's best athletes.

What they don't see is the monotony of the days between. Those days are, usually, pretty boring.

The same holds for the athletes. Many of them find practice unenjoyable not because they don't like their sport or getting better, but because going through the same routine, day after day, is hard.

Getting comfortable with boredom may be the single most important thing a high performer can do to improve their odds of getting to the top.

Boredom kills more careers than almost anything else.

Fortunately, there are psychological tools we can use to better regulate our thinking, feeling, attention, and action in the face of the tedious development of expertise.

For example, we know that personally meaningful goals increase a person's use of self-discipline (Fischbach & Trope, 2005). The question is, how do we get someone to set a personally meaningful goal that creates a sticky motivation over the long term?

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Finding a purpose for the action

There are 3 ways to make a goal more meaningful.

The first is to find a goal that benefits you directly. These are goals that are either enjoyable and you're willing to do them for their own sake, or they lead to a better chance of you achieving a larger objective that's important to you (but not relevant to anyone else).

The second is to find a goal that involves serving others, an ideal, or something bigger than yourself.

The third and most powerful way is to combine the two. We'll call this combination a "purpose."

The benefit of this combination is that it focuses on the deeper motivation for the goal (e.g., helping others) rather than the content of the goal (e.g., becoming an NBA player). Combining these two types of motives into one larger framework for pursuing a goal or task can lead to greater task persistence (Eccles, 2009) and often naturally co-exist (Batson, 1998). As a bonus, these deeper motives can also lead to deeper processing of information (Vansteenkiste, Simon, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004), which is critical for the development of expertise.

Testing it out

In a series of studies with a few thousand high school students, David Yeager and his colleagues (2014) set out to see if they could motivate these students more and keep them engaged in the tedious tasks of school by helping them tap into their purpose. 

Specifically, they were looking to find out if:

• A purpose leads to more self-regulation at school, both at the trait level (e.g., grit and self-control) and the behavioral level (persistence on a boring task)

• Whether or not this self-transcendent purpose actually caused a change

• How quickly a purpose intervention leads to change (in this case, deeper learning)

• Whether or not the purpose leads to choosing boring tasks rather than what they called "tempting alternatives"

Here's what they found.

Study 1: Having a self-transcendent purpose leads to seeing boring tasks as more meaningful and greater self-regulation and persistence.

Study 2: Having a self-transcendant purpose can impact performance several months into the future.

Study 3: Having a self-transcendent purpose increases the tendency to deeply learn from boring tasks. In fact, in this study, students spent twice as long engaging in a boring task if they were tapped into the larger purpose behind the learning.

Study 4: When people reflect on their larger goals and how what they are doing contributes to something bigger than themselves, they're better able to persist and overcome temptation.

Applying this research

Nearly every leader I've worked with, at some point, decries the fact that some members of their team do not align with the larger goals of their team or business. It can be both discouraging and difficult to manage a group of individuals pursuing their own goals and needs with no regard for how it impacts the larger group.

This research gives us a framework for unifying both personally meaningful and self-transcendent (e.g., team/organization, "larger than me" goals). These goals can coexist together, and there are exercises we can do and ways to talk about team goals that make them more salient.

First, we need to be cautious not to undermine the autonomy of the performers we work with. It's a tricky balance to strike, as we want to persuade them to adopt a larger team perspective (our goal) in their own way (their goal). 

A clever way to do this is to establish how "people like you do things like this." In the case of getting your performers to buy into a self-transcendent goal, you might frame the exercise as "the other leaders on the team do this" or "this is something everyone will do" to establish a social norm that fosters self-transcendent learning. These norms can motivate new behaviors (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallegren 1990).

Second, you want to connect the larger, self-transcendent goal to a personally relevant motive. The reality is that nobody is going to forego their individual pursuits and fully give themselves to the team - there has to be a meaningful alignment between the two. But, if you consciously connect the two, it can make for a more powerful force and help people connect to the larger goal without losing themselves.

Third, you can ask your performers to self-reflect to identify a self-transcendent purpose. Rather than giving them the purpose (and undermining autonomy), asking them to reflect on how they could best make the team environment better or how they can contribute to the organization's goals can lead to them identifying both self-transcendent and personally relevant goals that motivate team-oriented behavior.

Finally, you can conclude the exercise by asking your performer to just explain their reasons for pursuing the larger goals. This pulls on self-perception and cognitive dissonance (Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957), and research showing that, when people advocate for a message, they internalize it (Aronson, 1999).

If you can combine these four principles when you're setting a goal - whether it’s in the preseason, before a big sprint, or in the context of a tough streak - you can help people psychologically embrace the monotony ahead without losing momentum. 

By leveraging these four principles, you can turn boring, tedious tasks into something that people do to support a mission larger than themselves. When it's tough to make something fun or interesting, tapping into a larger purpose can sustain motivation. Interestingly, in the research, this type of intervention worked even for disengaged students, which suggests these self-transcendent purposes can motivate new behaviors in nearly anyone, and that those new behaviors will sustain over time.

Falling in love with boredom is simple, but not easy. The intervention uncovered in this research, however, suggests we can help people find the passion for monotony by helping them connect it to both personal goals and larger meaningful goals. The end result is a willingness to persist when the going gets tough and improved performance as a result. 

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References

Aronson E. The power of self-persuasion. American Psychologist. 1999; 54:875–884. doi: 10.1037/ h0088188.

Festinger, L. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press; Stanford, CA: 1957.

Bem, DJ. Self-perception theory. In: Berkowitz, L., editor. Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 6. Academic Press; New York, NY: 1972. p. 1-62.

Eccles JS. Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist. 2009; 44:78–89. doi: 10.1080/00461520902832368.

Eccles JS. Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist. 2009; 44:78–89. doi: 10.1080/00461520902832368.

Vansteenkiste M, Simons J, Lens W, Sheldon KM, Deci EL. Motivating learning, performance, and persistence: The synergistic effects of intrinsic goal contents and autonomy-supportive contexts.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2004; 87:246–260. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.246. [PubMed: 15301630]

Cialdini RB, Reno RR, Kallgren CA. A focus theory of normative conduct: Recycling the concept of norms to reduce littering in public places. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1990; 58:1015–1026. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.58.6.1015.

Yeager, D. S., Henderson, M. D., Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., D'Mello, S., Spitzer, B. J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). Boring but important: a self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 107(4), 559.

I've now watched hundreds of elite athletes prepare and compete at the highest levels. A big part of my work has been figuring out what separates the best from the rest.

Here are the ingredients I think it takes to become the best at what you do.

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Talent x Effort x Team x Luck

These four factors belong together. Individually, none of these is likely to help you rise to the top. You need all four of them in some combination to have a shot at reaching your full potential. The good news is, there are steps you can take to put yourself in a position to maximize each factor's value (even luck).

Talent

I’ve been fortunate to watch some of the most gifted athletes in the world perform on the biggest stages. At the highest level, everyone is talented.

Pro sports are confirmation of the idea that, if you want to be in the top 450 people in the world at a very specific skill, it requires some level of ability that other people don’t have. There’s a reason that executives across sports are willing to tolerate some pretty outlandish behavior for what they believe is an outlandish return on ability or potential. Talent is hard to find.

It's a prerequisite to being in the top 1% of what it is that you do.

Talent, as it pertains to being successful, is about having enough of the baseline skills or abilities so that you have a legitimate chance of adding the other three factors in to get somewhere meaningful. In the NBA, these are the talents that allow a player to be on the floor, night after night, and deliver at a high level. For achievers in other spaces, it might be skills like strategy, leadership, execution, or communication.

We’ve all got things we’re naturally predisposed to, that we pick up more easily than others, or that we gravitate toward because we’re good at them. These things are often the foundation of talent. The key is to take them, mold them, and double down in your focus on them so that you can turn them into something inimitable.

Without talent, reaching the peak of success is impossible. No matter how hard I work, lucky I get, or the quality of my team - I'll never be an NBA player. I lack the talent. 

Talent is both critically important and not enough at the very, very, very tip of the spear. If you want to be the equivalent of the top 1% of the top 1%, you need a few more ingredients.

Hard work

To reach that level, you have to add hard work.

Even if you’re good at something, the odds of you becoming world-class at it are stacked against you. Injuries, poor teamwork, leadership changes, travel schedules, or some off-court issues that you could never have anticipated are enough individually to derail a career. There are plenty of obstacles to navigate to give yourself a shot.

Having a 1% of the 1% outcome requires real effort to tip the odds in your favor, plus real effort to develop your talent into its highest form.

There’s no substitution for hard work if you want to be really, really good at something. Hard work itself isn’t going to guarantee your rise, but not working hard almost certainly will. There's not a single professional athlete we revere that didn't have a work ethic rivaling their natural gifts. There are no shortcuts and no ways to get around the painstaking process of personal improvement.

That's good news. Effort has compounding benefits. The harder you work, the better you get and the easier it becomes to work hard. The easier it becomes to work hard, the better your odds of becoming great.

We’re all familiar with the talents who didn’t add in the hard work and failed to achieve their full potential. The first-round busts, the one-hit wonders. They left out this second critical ingredient, without which they fizzled and failed out.

If you’ve got the first 2 components going for you - talent and hard work - you're well on your way. If you can get the next two factors in line, you have an ever better chance of reaching the peak.  To reach the highest level, you need a team of people around you.

Team

The best athletes in the world have coaches for a reason.

Top performers need someone who can take a different view and imagine possible alternatives or scenarios that might improve the odds of success. They need someone to provide structure, someone who will share honest feedback, and someone who can help them figure out how to be better.

They also need people around them to support them when things are difficult and to round out or hide their shortcomings. And, top performers need people who encourage them to keep pushing when most of the world will tell them that what they're working toward is extreme or not worth it.

Nobody reaches the very top alone.

The team itself also has to be special. Extreme outcomes require elite teams. Nobody achieves anything meaningful or reaches success - a top 1% outcome - in a vacuum. The right other people make us better.

We're only talking about Steph Curry being one of the best players of all time because he also plays with some talented teammates that allow him to play his game in the best possible way. Tom Brady reached legendary status paired with a hall-of-fame head coach and several hall-of-fame teammates along the way. Even in individual sports, players like Tiger Woods had their family or friends around to hold them accountable and assist in their development.

In the best possible scenario, the members of the team complement your talents and encourage your hard work. They build you up, help you optimize your strengths, mitigate your weaknesses, and help create meaning that allows you to persist over the long run. Teams that form deep relationships like this have the chance to create individual and personal dynasties.

Luck

The final factor we can’t ignore is luck. Timing matters. Circumstance matters. We need the ball to bounce our way a few times.

If you want a 1% outcome, you need a little luck.

The good news is that hard work and the right team increase your luck surface area. By working as hard as you can with the right people on the team, you put yourself in the best position to tilt luck in your favor.

These four belong together. Miss any of the ingredients, and you're not making it to the top.

Have ridiculous expectations 

 If you want to achieve anything meaningful, you need to be a bit ridiculous.

Ridiculous doesn't mean unrealistic. It just means believing you can achieve something that, in most circumstances, other people simply can't or won't be able to relate to (if you can find people who do, keep them very close).

Because you’re striving for something rare and unique, most people will default to telling you that you're crazy for going for it. You’d be surprised at the number of NBA and NFL athletes I’ve met who’ve been told they’d never amount to anything and wouldn’t ever make it from people who had next to no idea what it takes. When something is difficult to understand and appreciate, people default to no.

Defaulting to no stifles progress to the top.

The best athletes expect themselves to get there. Despite what other people have said, many of them have anticipated playing in the league since a young age. If they started late, they figured out quickly that they had a gift and that they wanted to maximize it. They've internalized outsized expectations of an outlier outcome.

When you spend enough time around high-level athletes - those who are truly at the top of their game - you can hear their expectations in the way that they talk. I remember early in my NFL career, when I was with the St. Louis Rams, riding the elevator with one of the league's best running backs and a future Hall-of-Famer. In making small talk about his goals and his approach for the year, he looked at me and said "I'm here to be great every day."

At the time, I couldn't imagine what it would look like to try and be great every day at what I did. I was just trying to survive. He was doing a job that was 1000 times harder than mine and his default expectation was that he'd be great, day in and day out. It was another level of excellence.

Success requires not settling for less. It comes from an expectation that we can and will do whatever it takes to be great. It comes from a belief that, if we just keep going, we're going to make it to the top. And for most top performers, this expectation allows them to almost will greatness into existence.

You have to pay the price of admission.

Pursuing excellence has a cost. Working toward being the best at something is hard, on you and the people around you.

Most of these are costs that the average person isn't willing to accept. It’s time away from things that seem more fun, family, and friends. Missing big moments. Leaving the party early. Not going at all.

The road to the top is paved with performers who thought they could do it all.

It can be hard to accept these costs as a natural consequence of having such a lofty goal. The consequences are a product of the choices you've made to do something challenging. Success requires that of us.

Love Yourself as a Person, Doubt Yourself as a Performer

Pursuing the path to the top is a mind game.

Self-doubt and self-criticism are part of the territory. Consistent failure is par for the course. You’re going to miss a lot more than you hit. If you recently listened to Novak Djokovic talk about his mental preparation for the game, you heard his admission that he questions himself regularly.

He trusts and loves himself as a person, but doubts himself as a performer.

Chances are you’ll question yourself more than you’d like to admit, and maybe even more that feels comfortable. Self-doubt makes it hard to leave those unreasonable expectations unchecked.

It’s normal to wonder if you’ve made the right choice or if you've got what it takes.

The challenge is reading the self-doubt right. Self-doubt can be a signal if we listen closely enough. It's a sign that there's more to master and more growth to go after in a specific domain. It's a sign that you haven't reached the depth you need to feel fully grounded. It’s a sign you’re on to something special.

What it’s not is a sign that something is wrong with you.

That’s why the best love themselves as people and doubt themselves as performers.

If you can learn to love yourself as a person - failures, doubts, trials, challenges and all - the self-doubt stops being debilitating. It becomes a source of information. We can learn to delight in being wrong because it's a sign we're getting better and learning something new. The self-doubt becomes a source of self-mastery.

Self-mastery leads to the top.

Fall in love with boredom 

The path to the top is boring. Boring often feels crappy. Uninspiring. Demotivating. Tedious. Tired.

This level of performance requires massive dedication and complete focus to honing your craft. That means you may spend hours trying to get just one part of one skill good enough to do it on the court, and even then, it may not be good enough to use consistently.

Over time, that can wear on people.

It feels like a plateau, and plateaus are usually where people bow out. They give up and change directions because they're not seeing the progress they expect.

It's normal to feel resistance to working at that level of detail and effort. It's monotonous and mundane. At times, it even feels pointless.

The best find a way to embrace that. The feeling that it’s boring or unpleasant becomes a signal that you're on the right track (if it was fun, everyone would do it). If you can fall in love with doing the same thing every day - with boredom - you have a chance to reach the very top.

If you can’t bring yourself to love that level of commitment, sooner or later, the boredom will win. You’ll clock out early. Stop short. Convince yourself that working to that level of excellence isn’t necessary for you - as though you have some superpower that the other successful people don’t (minds tell stories like that).

You don’t have to enjoy that level of commitment (though it’s better if you can find joy in it). But, you do need to fall in love with what it takes to get to the top.

Consistent improvement 

Our society is obsessed with stories of overnight success. In sports (and life), the reality is, there are no shortcuts. There are no hacks. The only way to the top is compounding, consistent improvement. To be truly successful, you're going to have to work hard for a long time.

"Little by little, a little becomes a lot."

One of the oldest sport psychology tropes is to focus on getting 1% better every day. Over time, that focus compounds to 37x better per year. Small changes add up quickly.

The best stay focused on consistently getting better. When you’re pursuing being at the top of what you do, there’s no real way to know when you arrive. It’s measured by the accumulation of your good work over time. It’s marked by repeated successes, failures, growth, development, and change.

Because you're in the slog of boredom, it'll be hard to see it daily. But, when you pick your head up and look around, you might notice you're several steps ahead of where you thought you'd be, simply by focusing on getting the most out of yourself each day.

This type of consistency requires several adjacent psychological skills, without which this kind of improvement becomes nearly impossible:

• Focus - the ability to concentrate on just one thing, day after day, until you've reached a level you can be happy with.

• Intrinsic motivation and identified motivation - both a personal drive to improve and an internalized identity that you're the type of person who does what it takes.

• Clear goals - you know what you're working toward, how you want to get there, and how you'll know if you do (or don't).

Each of these is a prerequisite for consistent improvement. Focus keeps your attention where it needs to be - the task at hand. Intrinsic motivation allows you to find meaning in your development. Identified motivation allows you to do the stuff that feels crappy because it’s who you believe you can become. Clear goals set the stage for you to make improvement a reality.

You then pair these mental factors with taking action and executing the habits, routines, and skills that will lead to meaningful change. 

Improvement is a product of behavior repeated over time.

Don’t Compromise

You’re going to be presented with a lot of off-ramps that look like really good options.

The top 1% is made up of people who keep going.

Know yourself

A big part of achieving excellence is understanding who you are and what you need.

When can you push harder? When do you need to rest? Who do you need on your team? What does a good coach do for you?

What is all this for?

Being able to answer these questions accurately requires knowing who you are.

That means understanding your values, motives, goals, and desires. It requires recognizing what sets you off, trips you up, or distracts you. What your greatest strengths are and what your greatest risks are. Knowing yourself allows you to take full advantage of what you can do and what you have to offer. It also allows you to recognize where you’re at risk of getting in your own way. 

For many good (but not great) performers, this is why they hit their ceiling. They fail to do the work to understand how they cut themselves off at the knees. They can’t see how their habits, beliefs, or other behaviors get in the way of achieving their full potential. They miss out on their long-term growth because they've failed to appreciate and understand who they are.

We need to catch ourselves and our tendencies that undermine what we’re after. That means we have to know what we’re feeling and thinking, and the information those thoughts and feelings are conveying. We need to make full use of our entire experience to get to the very top.

The best performers take the time to understand themselves. They reflect often on their experiences, go out of their way to process what they are learning with a trusted person (either a coach, teammate, sport psychologist, athletic trainer, or someone else), and stay connected to the deeper motivations they have. They use those deeper goals and values to push them forward when things are challenging and understand when they might need to use their elite team to get through a plateau or over a hump.

Elite outcomes require elite self-awareness. If you want to be successful, you have to know who you are, what you stand for, what you're after, and what you need to get there.

Constant Learning 

The best in the world constantly engage in what psychologists call self-regulated learning.

It looks like this:

Learning is exhausting, though, so it’s easy to fall off the wagon. Neuroscientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett suggest it’s the most taxing thing our brains can do to learn something new.

Because it’s so tough, many good performers tap out here, too.

They get to a point of good enough. They satisfice, instead of maximizing, because maximizing wears us out. It’s hard to constantly learn something new, test, iterate, and repeat. 

And yet, this single skill - self-regulated learning - is enough to separate professional athletes at the highest skill levels.

To climb to ever-higher levels of performance, we have to keep mastering new things. New tools and tricks, strategies, and tactics. We need to learn about ourselves, our minds, our teammates, our opponents, and our games.

The best way to do that is in a structured, systematic way.

Self-regulated learning offers a repeatable framework for self-mastery.

Success requires an elite skill

Every all-time great has an elite skill.

Of course, they're great at many of the other facets of the game. But, to truly reach the top, you need something that makes you special. For Steph Curry, that elite skill is shooting. For Peyton Manning, it was game intelligence. For Federer, it's the ability to keep adapting his game to his current physical status. 

This factor may be the most important to get right because it's about what makes you special. Every elite performer has something that they recognize allows them to belong at the top, and they spend a good deal of time and energy maximizing that factor. It's much easier to raise your ceiling by optimizing your strengths than fixing your weaknesses.

The good news is, everyone has an elite skill. The bad news is, finding it is often obscured by our tendency to focus on what we're not so good at and to "fix what's broken" instead of finding what's right. You've got to work hard to find it, and oftentimes, it's not easy to find.

For many of the all-time greats, their elite skill started as the part of their game that they were just slightly better at than anything else. Originally, your elite skill might look a lot like just another one of your strengths or even something average. 

Your task is to experiment widely and search hard to find what you can be elite in, and then relentlessly double down on developing that skill until it's unstoppable.

You're only as good as your system

Have you ever noticed the number of prolific college quarterbacks who never play a down on Sundays? As the spread offense became more prominent in college, the stats started to climb through the roof. Average players in the right system started to look like superstars. 

To give them some credit, it takes skill to execute the right system well and turn in a prolific college career. At the same time, it's important to recognize that, in the end, you're only as good as your system.

The best players at the highest levels both work to master and shape the system they're in.

If you've watched LeBron James over the last 15+ years, for example, you've seen him actively provide feedback to each of his coaches to help them put him in a position to be maximally successful. He knows what's required and asked of him, but doesn't resign himself to a prescribed set of actions by someone who doesn't know what he's thinking or feeling in the moment of performance. He's both mastered what's asked of him and mastered himself so that he can maximize the system.

Your system is your unifying, guiding behaviors of values, goals, habits, cues, triggers, and people that allow you to do what you do. Optimizing each part of your system gives you the best odds of success beyond doing the work (and the system makes doing the work more engaging and impactful). To be successful, you have to get your system and your execution right. 

Play to win

If you want to be successful, you have to play to win. When we talk about all-time greats, we're invariably talking about winners. 

Yes, you need to focus on the process more than the outcome. Yes, you need to work on consistent growth and improvement. Yes, winning shouldn't become the way that you define yourself.

But if you're doing all this work and not trying to win, you're selling yourself short.

In this case, winning is about being better than the you that you were yesterday. It's about chasing excellence, pursuing something bigger than yourself, and seeing what you're capable of. If you don't play to win, you're leaving motivation and untapped potential out there for someone else to pick up and run with. To be successful, you have to play to win because it's often not going to be fun. Winning gives you something to aim for, believe in, and propel yourself toward when you (inevitably) feel like giving up. 

The original meaning of the word compete comes from the Latin competere, which meant to "strive with". If you're playing to win, you're striving with the other people in the arena to become the best that you can be. You're working on something harder and more personal than people realize. You're pushing yourself to the limit, knowing that what you're after may never arrive.

You need something like that for the pursuit of excellence to be worth it.

Individual performers still have a team around them. The world's best executives have a team of people working alongside them to deliver outsized results. World championships in sports go to the collection of players that best function as a unit, not to the best individual contributor in a given sport.

Teams play a big part in how we rise to the top.

To get the most out of ourselves, we need to understand how to build and get the most out of the team around us. 

Because of what we see in the most public teams in professional sports, I think we mistakenly believe that good teams are built by simply selecting the best talent and hoping that they gel together. Of course, the talent level of individual team members does matter, but it doesn't matter nearly as much as the ability of team members to work together toward a common goal.

In the coming weeks, I'll present a series of articles on the science of high-performing teams paired with my own experience about what I've seen make teams successful, from the NBA to the military unit that defuses live bombs.

To begin, let's create a shared foundation for the basic structures and systems involved in teams.

Teams Form in Stages

The simplest model of team formation goes back to 1965.

Bruce Tuckman developed a catchy 5-step process that groups go through to rise to a place where they can perform effectively together. 

It looks like this:

Each of these stages contributes to a team's ultimate ability to perform well under pressure and to deliver results.

Forming

Forming kind of looks like what you see in movies where they bring a group of people together for a random meeting and don't tell them why until the boss walks in. The forming stage is marked by confusion - about purpose, structure, and even who's in charge. In this context, members of the group start to clarify both the team's objectives (sometimes obvious, like winning a championship, and sometimes less obvious, like being the best defensive team in the league), people's roles, and who does what.

Storming

At this point, the team starts to settle in. There are disagreements about tasks, goals, roles, and occasionally leadership. Around this time, people start to do things like take sides to influence the direction of the team.

 Handling this stage effectively is critical. Conflict can facilitate a much deeper connection and enhanced teamwork or it can destroy a team's ability to perform. Often during this stage, conflicts emerge that you wouldn't anticipate or expect, and there may be conflicts that seem unnecessary as people grapple with their role and how they best contribute.

Norming

As the team works through the conflict, enhanced collaboration and cooperation emerge. People are clearer on their roles and responsibilities and the team may start to become more cohesive. Members align around expectations and goals, and the sense that "we're a team" starts to become more palpable.

Performing

With the previous 3 stages successfully navigated, the team can emerge into a well-oiled machine. With roles and goals clarified, people are encouraged to take risks, members more actively back each other up, and people are focused more on accomplishing the tasks than establishing themselves as important on the team.

Adjourning

In cases where groups disband - whether it’s from graduation or reassignment - this phase simply involves debriefing and preparing to move on to the next team.

Of course, not all teams go through all 5 stages, and they don't always occur in a specific order. Some teams may be in more than one stage simultaneously. It happens all the time in sports, as players jockey for status in the locker room and are also required to play 82 games. 

When teams navigate these stages successfully, they perform better and sustain that performance in comparison to teams that don't (Bushe & Coetzer, 2007).

What Makes Teams Work

There's a whole field exploring the science of teamwork, much of which tends to revolve around the same core features: roles, cohesion, and norms of behavior.

Roles

You might be surprised at the number of professional athletes who don't feel they have clarity on their role. And, to make a team work, a set of roles is often necessary, which may or may not align with the role the members want to play. Football has 11 different positions - if you slot neatly into one of those, your role is clear. If not, it can be more difficult to navigate.

Roles are more multidimensional than just the position you play. We tend to categorize roles into 3 themes: task-oriented roles, relationship-oriented roles, and self-oriented roles (Humphrey, Manor, & Morgeson, 2009).

Task-oriented roles are all about getting the work done. People with a task-oriented role tend to make things happen, by starting the progress toward the goal, seeking new information, and coordinating between members of the team. Often, people in task-oriented roles are seen as focused, intense, and occasionally aloof, because their role is really about driving performance via getting stuff done, rather than moving the team along together.

Relationship-oriented roles are the "glue" of the team. They offer encouragement, try to bridge the gap between team members, and often help clarify the objectives of those task-oriented team members. People in relationship-oriented roles tend to be more followers than leaders and tend to be well-liked but not necessarily high-performing (though you can have people that play both task- and -relationship-oriented roles).

And, try as we might, all teams have some self-oriented roles. These are the attitudes or behaviors that we call "selfish" when we see them, like blocking the team's progress by being negative, dominating, or avoiding conflict. These roles emerge because everyone has individual goals they're also trying to pursue in the context of the larger team performance. Our goal is to mitigate the risk of these roles by aligning incentives and helping people feel a sense of belonging.

Norms

Norms are the informal rules and expectations that regulate the behavior of a group (Ehrhart & Naumann, 2004).

One of the first things I do when working with a new team to improve teamwork and culture is to explicitly address the norms the group wants to develop. The environment is a particularly influential factor in our behavior, and norms are a sort of latent environmental factor that regularly dictates how people think, feel, and act. By consciously shaping and articulating the norms the group wants, we can create an atmosphere that leads athletes to behave in a way we'd want and expect. The norms become "the way we do it around here."

Good teams need norms in a few key areas:

• Productivity and performance

• Commitment to the team

• Communication and conflict

Though not an exhaustive list, by naming what's expected around productivity and performance (and setting high standards in so doing), we can elevate the performance of the team by raising the expectations. By shaping the loyalty and degree of ownership team members feel about the outcome of their work, we can enhance their commitment to the team. By being clear about how the team should communicate and handle conflict, we can improve the way team members interact with each other and squash problems before they tear the team apart.

Status

Everyone on the team won't have the same social standing. In the NBA, some players are more valuable than others, and it's reflected in their paychecks and in the locker room. The same is true in business.

That doesn't mean they're more valuable as human beings, but in the context of a high-performing team, their presence has a different impact than others.

Status tends to form as a judgment of capability, knowledge, experience, and interpersonal skills, but can also be influenced by less important things, like physical appearance. All of this gets summarized into a judgment we tend to make about a team member's "credibility" or "value."

Research suggests status tends to come from 3 places (as cited in Robbins & Judge, 2014):

1. Power over others. These people have sway over team resources and as a result, are perceived as having higher status.

2. Ability to contribute to the team's goals. The more important someone's function is to the team's success, the more status they have. CEOs tend to be of higher status than CFOs because they drive the goals and how they'll be achieved in a business.

3. Personal characteristics. Positively valued personal characteristics, like knowledge and intelligence, raise status.

Of course, any individual can be higher or lower on any of these dimensions, influencing the overall perception of their status.

Cohesion

Cohesion refers to the degree of connection and commitment team members have to being part of the team. It's composed of two factors - task cohesion and relational cohesion (Tziner, 1982).

Relational cohesion is the sense of belonging and togetherness people feel from being a part of the team. Task cohesion is the emergence of mutually dependent relationships that come about as a function of the team members needing each other to reach their shared goals.

Anyone who has been a part of a team can attest to the differences in cohesion they experience as a function of several factors that make teams more or less sticky. How team members interact, how successful they are, how exclusive it is, and even who teams compete against can influence the degree of cohesiveness a team experiences. For example, when teams are as small as they can be to accomplish the task, or when there's a higher degree of exclusivity to join the team, the team tends to be more cohesive.

Teams also tend to be more cohesive the more time they spend together. This is one reason why it's important to try and keep teams together for a considerable amount of time - the team is unlikely to reach anything close to its full potential in the first 3-6 months, maybe more, of working together. This is one reason that the rotating door of coaches in college and professional sports more often than not leads to underperformance. The coach and team simply don't have enough time together to form a cohesive connection that can facilitate high performance.

As a bonus, more cohesive teams generally tend to perform better and are better for the organization (though not always. Cohesion predicts high levels of motivation and commitment to the team, and members of cohesive teams tend to participate more fully, show up more, have their basic needs met, and are more productive than members of less cohesive teams (Lunenberg & Lunenberg, 2015).

Conclusion

With this foundation in place, we're prepared to explore the deeper science behind what brings out the best in teams (and the individuals within them). In the coming weeks, we'll unpack the "Too-much-talent effect," some science behind high-performing military units, and the role that personality plays (or doesn't play) in helping teams reach their full potential. 

The Basics Of Teams

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References

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. (1977). Stages of small group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(3), 419-427.

Bushe, G., & Coetzer, G. (2007). Group development and team effectiveness. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 43(1), 184-212.

Humphrey, S. E., Manor, M. J., & Morgeson, F. P. (2009). Developing a theory of the strategic core of teams: A role composition model of team performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(1), 48-61.

Tziner, A. (1982). Differential effects of group cohesiveness types: A clarifying overview. Social Behavior and Personality, 10(2), 227-239.

Ehrhart, M. G., & Nauman, S. E. (2004). Organizational citizenship behavior in work groups: A group norms approach. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(6), 960-974.

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2014). Organizational behavior (15th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lunenburg, F. C., & Lunenburg, M. R. (2015). Developing high performance teams: Long-standing principles that work. International Journal of Organizational Behavior in Education, 3(1), 1-17.

Brad Stulberg researches, writes, and coaches on health, well-being, and sustainable excellence.

He is the bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and co-author of Peak Performance. Stulberg regularly contributes to the New York Times, and his work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Outside Magazine, Forbes, and other outlets.

He also serves as the co-host of The Growth Equation podcast and is on faculty at the University of Michigan’s Graduate School of Public Health. In his coaching practice, he works with executives, entrepreneurs, physicians, and athletes on their mental skills and overall well-being. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

You can find each of Brad’s book on his website. And, if you want a copy of Master of Change, you can order that here:

Finally, Brad’s awesome newsletter with my former guest, Steve Magness, can be found here.

Here's a science-backed look at the factors that I consider in my performance coaching across these high-stakes, high-pressure situations and some of the frameworks that I think allow the skills to cut across context. 

Regardless of the performance environment you're in - whether you're saving lives, singing, or playing basketball - there's one common theme that sits at the heart of all performance coaching: elevating performance under pressure. That means I believe there's really one skill underlying every dimension of optimal performance: self-regulation.

The skills taught to the best performers in the world can help all of us learn to be our best when it matters most. Though these tools are most typically taught in the context of getting better at sports, they have a broad application for any of us looking to raise our typical performance and get the most out of ourselves.

First, let's unpack the types of performance.

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Understanding the Performance: Typical vs. Maximal

Typical performance is how we function on a day-to-day basis. Maximal performance is how we handle the highest-impact, pressure-packed performances - it's the best we can do in a specific instance (Kaiser, 2019). 

This framework is particularly helpful for figuring out what people mean when they're talking about the performance improvements they want. More often than not, what people are actually looking for is an elevated level of typical performance - to raise their baseline such that they're consistently getting better and doing more. With this understanding, good coaching matches the expertise of high performance with the expertise of the client, which allows for making meaningful progress quickly.

For CEOs, head coaches, physicians, lawyers, and other high-performance knowledge workers, typical performance tends to be the focus of performance coaching. While the moments of maximal performance matter, the reality is sustainable excellence and consistently performing well are much more important than one-off high-level deliveries.

What the research suggests is that, for typical performance, personality factors like conscientiousness, grit, and self-regulation, as well as motivational factors, like intrinsic and identified motivation, matter a lot. When I say personality factors, what I really mean is learned, repeatable patterns of behavior.

When it comes to maximal performance, skill and ability become a more significant factor (though at the very highest levels, skills and ability always matter).

This type of performance tends to matter more for the public performers we think of - people like Olympians and pro athletes who, in some cases, have one shot every four years to deliver the performance of a lifetime.

Of course, in an ideal world, you'd elevate both types of performance for all types of performers. Executives will sometimes need the skill to execute a one-time, clutch performance and elite athletes need high-level typical performance to get the most out of practice days. 

Understanding typical vs. maximal performance allows you to filter down and figure out what skill might best apply to helping a high-performer reach their goal.

If you want to consistently be great, you have to want it and have a set of psychological skills that allows you to sustain it, and to develop those patterns over time. Those behaviors often include persisting in the face of adversity, experimenting and taking new risks, and staying grounded in your values.

In the case of typical performance, it's helpful to look to tools like values, goals, identity development, and techniques to change more enduring behavior patterns, like challenging core beliefs or teaching people how to manage difficult emotions.

In the case of maximal performance, some of those same tools might underlie how you prepare, but the reality is the performance demands themselves are different enough that they require skills like consciously increasing effort, narrowing the focus on a specific goal, challenge appraisals, and managing physiology at the moment. 

The Core of Elevating Performance

I've written about what I see as the 5 main areas that all high performers must address to reach the top of their game.

At its core, I believe much of performance coaching involves moving each of these 5 skills up and to the right. And, the more I think about and refine my model, the more I think it's really about one factor moving most quickly in that direction, which allows the others to do the same.

Of the 5, data consistently suggests that self-regulation (Kaiser & Kaplan, 2006; Kaiser, 2019) is the key to high performance. The ability to control and direct your thinking, feeling, and behavior allows you to be a better teammate by shaping the way you interact. It facilitates leadership and discipline. It allows you to be thoughtful in your decision-making. It underlies effective executive function.

Self-regulation skills can allow you to thrive under pressure.

That means, to me, that most of the performance coaching - and the core of what it means for us to elevate both our typical and maximal performance - is about improving our ability to self-regulate. It looks like the graph below, where you see someone's improved ability to manage arousal (the most common performance limiter) allows for higher levels of peak performance over time.

The good news is that the skills we need to master ourselves and reach a higher peak are accessible to everyone.

"Excellence is an Inside Job"

I love this quote from Robert Kaiser in his 2019 article, Stargazing: Everyday lessons from coaching elite performers". It perfectly sums up what I believe, and what I think science is starting to confirm, separates the best from the rest. 

Technical and tactical skills are prerequisites to greatness. The reality is that the things we espouse as most important - things like "scaffolding" and "growth mindset" - only really matter if you have mastered enough of the fundamental elements of the game you're playing, whether it's in the boardroom or on the court (no matter how hard I work at it, I'll never be an NBA player).

But, assuming you have the requisite skills, the rest of your performance is a function of the ways in which you train your mind and apply the mental skills you need to perform under pressure and rise to the occasion. It's about building your self-regulation.

Regardless of skill level, from amateur to elite, managing your mental is what allows you to raise your level of maximal performance and, as a result, change what's expected of a typical performance. The fundamental question of managing mindset boils down to: do I have the resources I need to succeed?

If the answer is yes, we get a cascade of physiological and psychological changes that tilt toward peak performance. We issue a challenge appraisal, and our brains and bodies are ready to spring into action.

If the answer is no, the opposite happens - our body starts to freeze up and it becomes harder to execute.

Much of the answer to this question depends on having enough mental skills training, and the requisite self-regulatory ability, to recognize what tool is required in that context and to know how to deploy it. 

Building your toolkit

There's a suite of psychological skills that have been referred to as the "canon" (Anderson, 2009, p.11). These 5 skills are deployed by most performance coaches in some form to elevate performance under pressure and include relaxation (the ability to downregulate), self-talk, imagery, goal-setting, and concentration.

Arousal Regulation/Relaxation

When we think of peak performance and managing typical performance, the most common challenge people face is managing their level of arousal. We have to find a way to keep our energy in the optimal range and prevent it from debilitating us and breaking down our performance. 

The main techniques for regulating our arousal are things we've explored together here, including mindfulness and breathwork, and things we haven't yet discussed, like progressive muscle relaxation.

Self-Talk

When it comes to our inner dialogue, I often liken self-talk to the "inner coach" (shout out to my colleague Amy Athey for the concept here) that we carry around with us. Unlike more traditional sport psychology approaches, I'm less interested in all your self-talk being "positive," and more focused on whether or not your self-talk helps you. I've also written about self-talk here.

When it comes to helpful self-talk, the goal is really to redirect attention to the performance task at hand. Eichinger (2018) uncovered the 3 forms of self-talk that tend to send us off the rails: thinking about something outside of performance, automatic negative thoughts tied to a core belief, and unresolved worries. These thoughts interrupt our working memory, one of the core executive functions we need to be our best when it matters most.

Our self-talk tools of choice include reframing, replacing, and defusing. Each of these allows us to either experience the self-talk differently or to lessen the impact of the self-talk overall. These techniques also enhance psychological distance, which Ethan Kross explores in his great book on the science behind self-talk, Chatter.

Imagery

The research on imagery is fascinating. We have some evidence that imagery alone can lead to some benefits in strength training, almost to the same extent as doing the work (this isn't a reason to skip the gym, but if you can't make it, perhaps 15 minutes of imagery is better than nothing).

The mind is a powerful vehicle.

Imagery has applications well beyond growing our muscles. People have built imagery protocols to heal physical injuries, develop new skills, and prepare effectively for peak performance.

The most popular model of imagery training is called PETTLEP. It involves incorporating 7 factors in your imagery practice to make it maximally effective:

In practice, my main use cases for imagery include preparation for a performance, refining the execution of a specific skill, and practicing anticipating and overcoming obstacles. Not only does imagery in these instances help an athlete plan effectively or improve their mind-body connection, it also builds confidence and helps implementation intentions feel more actionable. It's both pragmatic for performance and valuable for long-term development.

Goal-Setting

Goals create the context for any performance. Simply setting a goal is enough to guide our attention, and the result is often improved performance well above those who never take the time to set a goal for themselves. And, goals framed properly (typically, positively) can help us execute in the right way and tap into the benefits of a challenge appraisal (Renkema & Van Yperen, 2008).

Goals also allow us to focus our attention. If we can focus our goals and attention on what we can control (process goals), we can be more present. The more present we are, the better we tend to perform.

Concentration

Learning to concentrate allows us to stay tuned in to what's most conducive to high performance. 

In addition to the previous four skills, mindfulness can be used to develop better concentration

skills. Mindfulness involves the repeated redirection of attention after a distraction back to the present moment. The more we can learn to stay concentrated on what we need to perform well, the better we can minimize distraction from the surrounding environment and anything internal that isn't helping us perform well.

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Enjoy the ride

Getting better is supposed to be fun. Ultimately, all the practice and hard work, the fine-tuning of our skills and mindset, only matters if we apply ourselves to something we care about. 

The more we learn about human motivation and well-being, the more we understand just how important it is to both make progress and notice the growth we experience as it happens. If you want to keep raising your game, you have to find ways to make the journey intrinsically rewarding. 

References

Kaiser, R. B. (2019). Stargazing: Everyday lessons from coaching elite performers.

The central job of any coach is to help their athletes and team perform at their best when it matters most.

At the highest levels, the presence of pressure is palpable in nearly every competition. This pressure - "the presence of situational incentives for optimal, maximal, or superior performance" (Baumeister & Showers, 1986) - leads to two options.

Choke or clutch.

I've written before about the psychology of the choke and what coaches can do to prevent it.

But what about promoting clutch performances? How do we help athletes rise to the occasion?

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The Phases of Clutch

Athletes tend to view clutch performances through the lens of phases of competition (Schweickle et al., 2023).

Clutch can happen over the course of a whole game or competition, like when Tiger Woods dominates a Sunday in the red shirt to close the competition, or when Naomi Osaka defeats the odds and runs through an entire tournament.

Or, clutch can happen during a specific moment, like when the game is on the line. 

Intuitively, this makes sense. Athletes may perceive the pressure to ebb and flow throughout the course of the game, and as a result, the experience of being clutch can change from moment to moment. It can unfold at the end of the game, like when a golfer sinks the long put on 18 to close the tournament, or come once and disappear for good, like when a shooter hits a 3 that puts the game away for good.

Understanding the dynamics of pressure and how athletes experience these clutch moments can clue us into what we can do to elevate their performance. And, like most lessons in sports, the tools translate to the wider world.

The Coaches' Perspective

A key part of the role of the coach is to understand these fluctuating dynamics. In doing so, they can better match their asks of athletes with the demands of the game. Like any good leader, good coaching requires matching what you're asking your performers to do with the context they are in. Absent an understanding of an athlete's experience of choking or clutching, coaches are lost.

So, how do coaches understand what it means to be clutch?

Hufton, Vella, and Schweikle (2023) set out to explore just that.

They interviewed 12 coaches working with athletes ranging from just under the highest level to those who've won at the top. They asked them how they understood pressure, sources of pressure, how it impacts performance, and what it means to be clutch. 

Here's a look at some of the raw answers taken from the study.

Let's dive deeper into what coaches perceive as clutch.

Maintenance is Good Enough

Interestingly, coaches seemed to have a lower standard for what it means to be clutch than many athletes do, and in many cases, front offices. For coaches, several seemed to agree that simply maintaining good performance under pressure was enough to constitute clutch. As one coach put it, "An elite performer is someone who, regardless of pressure, they play at the same level" (Hufton et al., 2023).

Despite what we see on the sidelines in these high-stakes situations, coaches seem to understand that the increased pressure leads to increased demands, and just sustaining skill requires tremendous performance and effort.

What's most interesting about this perspective is that it stands in stark contrast to what most front-office executives and scouts, as well as fans, would see as a clutch performance. We don't hear about the players who simply do their job under pressure. We like to talk about the athletes that rise and meet the moment, or crumble. 

This difference in perception can lead to big differences in evaluation, and as a result, different expectations moving forward. I can see how this perception alone might cause a bit of an internal skirmish about who's actually good enough to compete under the brightest lights. Coaches are likely to stick with who they trust. Other evaluators might feel that's not good enough.

Improved Performance is Better

Though some coaches were satisfied with the maintenance of performance, some acknowledged that it would be ideal if the athletes could raise their game under pressure. 

It's as if the maintenance of performance - staving off performance decrements under pressure - was akin to "playing not to lose." Rising up under pressure was how coaches viewed clutch performers "playing to win."

Clutch Depends On Who You Are

Not surprisingly, coaches' expectations of players were different based on who they are and what their role is. For the highest-level performers, coaches expect performance to improve. For other members of the team, simply playing your role is good enough. 

This expectation is important for coaches to communicate. Though it may seem obvious to some (the best player should take the last shot, for example), athletes may not see themselves that way or may have a different expectation of themselves that competes with the coach's view. And, often who we wish could be clutch doesn't have the mental makeup or hasn't done the mental training to rise up during those circumstances.

Coaches should balance their expectations of who will elevate their game with an understanding of who actually has the skills they need to do so. 

It's the Process

As fans, we remember clutch moments by the outcome of the game. Michael Jordan hitting a game-winning 3 is different than other 3-pointers, and we remember his legacy differently as a result.

Coaches, on the other hand, consider clutch a function of process.

Rather than evaluating a clutch performance based on win or lose, coaches are concerned with athletes sticking to the script during crunch time. That means taking good shots, executing the game plan, and doing what you've trained to do.

This view extends to the expectations coaches have of their athletes in crunch time. In this study, most coaches weren't looking for athletes to play out of their minds. They looked for athletes to do exactly what they were capable of.

Much like maintaining performance, athletes doing what coaches know they are capable of doing was enough for coaches to call them clutch. As one coach put it, "A positive performance [under pressure] is when they reproduce what they’re capable of.” 

This is yet another point where coaches deviate from decision-makers. While coaches are satisfied with athletes doing what they do in practice, executives are often looking for "another gear" that seems impossible to replicate outside of games. 

Coaching Clutch

This research suggests there are a few key takeaways for coaches who want to get the best out of their athletes in pressure situations.

The first is that coaches should clearly communicate their expectations to their athletes for a given performance. This communication lessons the pressure athletes feel, because the standard is no longer left up to the athletes' interpretation and has been made explicit (Gibert et al., 2007). This may be a bit counterintuitive. Often, coaches are worried about adding pressure by clearly dictating their expectations. For athletes, this clarity is kindness - it points in the direction of what to focus on.

The second is that coaches would do best by coaching the process under pressure. In these moments, we're all drawn to the outcome of the game. We let it define whether or not clutch happened. Yet the criteria most coaches consider is whether or not the athlete executed their process - the game plan, set of skills, and action steps - with the same fidelity in the pressure situation as they do in practice. If we can shift our athletes' attention to the process, we can simultaneously match the coach's expectations to the athlete’s focus, and align around a shared vision of what performance under pressure should look like.

Finally, it's worth considering if the athlete you want to be clutch or believe should be clutch actually can be clutch. While it may be uncomfortable early on for the team's dynamics (especially when one player expects to be a superstar), this research suggests that a big part of clutch performance is having the right players in the right positions at the right time. Taking the time to figure out who has the mentality to rise to the occasion under pressure can lead to more wins and better performances. No need to force it on the superstar if, under pressure, they don't have what they need to be successful.

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References

Schweickle, M. J., Swann, C., & Vella, S. A. (2023). Objective and subjective performance indicators of clutch performance in basketball: A mixed-methods multiple case study. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 35(2), 155-177.

Hufton, J. R., Vella, S. A., & Schweickle, M. J. (2023). A qualitative exploration of coaches’ perceptions of performance under pressure in sport. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology.

Gilbert, J. N., Gilbert, W., & Morawski, C. (2007). Coaching strategies for helping adolescent athletes cope with stress. Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 78(2), 13–24. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/07303084.2007.10597967

The secret? 5 positives for every 1 negative.

Despite the best intentions and high quality of the coaches I've seen... I've never seen any coach get close to this ratio.

Our culture spends a disproportionate amount of time focused on correcting weaknesses and fixing them rather than optimizing strengths.

I think the main reason for this focus actually cuts quite deep. Most of the time, coaches aren't rewarded, at least not immediately, for winning and big success. They're "rewarded," in that they keep their job if they minimize losing.

That approach means that they're more likely to address things they perceive will lead to losing - weaknesses - than things that might improve the odds of winning. Even if their ultimate goal is to win, the system isn't set up to naturally promote that.

The problem with this approach is that eventually, you need to build skills to sustain success. You have to help your athletes and team think, feel, and perform better if you want to build a championship team.

You need to focus on strengths if you want your athletes to be great.

(The ideal might be to both address strengths and deficits. But, with limited resources and time, and increasing pressure to achieve, most leaders pick one.)

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The Benefits of a Strengths-Based Approach

The data is fairly robust on this one.

If we use our strengths, we tend to get better performance and better well-being (Dubreuil et al., 2016; Harzer & Ruch, 2016).

And:

• Individuals who focus on developing their strengths are 3 times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life.

• Teams that focus on strengths are 12.5% more productive.

• Employees who use their strengths every day are 6 times more likely to be engaged at work.

• Strengths-based development can lead to a 41% reduction in employee turnover.

• Strengths-based leadership can increase employee engagement by up to 73%.

• Organizations that focus on strengths have a 29% increase in profitability.

It's hard to ignore.

But, we also know that taking a deficit-erasing approach also has some effectiveness (otherwise, nobody would do it). When workplaces focus on addressing limitations, performance on some tasks does improve and engagement can improve as well.

Where the deficit-based approach tends to fall short is in sustaining motivation to engage over time.

What the research suggests is that, in the short term, correcting deficits does improve self-efficacy (Els et al., 2018) and enhance performance (Mohammed et al., 2019). But when we start to look a bit deeper, we find that this approach does not lead to people rating their own performance as better, or have others rate their performance as better (based on both behaviors and results) (Hiemstra & Van Yperen, 2015).

When people focus on weaknesses, they feel more confident, but that confidence doesn't translate to seeing or believing performance is getting better - and as a result, the desire to continue drops.

In contrast, when performers focus on developing strengths, they tend to experience some of these things the deficit approach is missing. Their performance is rated as better, their problem-solving improves, and their creativity goes through the roof. It also promotes the behaviors we want to see in making an organization function better on the whole (van Woerkem et al., 2016; Macaskill & Denovan, 2013; Cable et al., 2015; Littman-Ovadia & Lavy, 2016).

When we focus on strengths, we get performers who are more effective, solve problems better and faster, are more creative, and are more fun to work with.

The Role of Self-Determination

When it comes to performance, it would be ideal if we could find ways to support our talents' innate drive to develop, rather than having to constantly correct what we think is going wrong.

We want our performers to want to get better.

We know that organizations offering support to their front-line performers leads to a sense of their needs being satisfied and reduced frustration (Forest et al., 2022). The question is, does satisfying those needs lead to sustained autonomous motivation - the will to do the work, on their own, because they care about it? And, does it matter how we satisfy those needs - through a strengths-based approach or a focus on reducing deficits?

SDT and Building on Strengths vs. Fixing Weaknesses

In 2 studies totaling over 750 participants, Dubord & Forest (2023) set out to determine the impact of a strengths-based approach and deficits-based approach on psychological needs satisfaction (or frustration) and subsequent performance and well-being. 

Their model looked like this:

The idea is that focusing on strengths leads to increased needs satisfaction, reduced needs frustration, and as a result increased autonomous motivation that leads to greater well-being and performance.

In contrast, focusing on correcting deficits is inversely related to need satisfaction and mildly related to need frustration, which leads to increased controlled motivation, lower performance, and lower well-being.

In other words:

A strengths-based approach is the only path that leads to an autonomous, coming-from-within drive to get better.

But the strengths-based approach does more than just lead to autonomous motivation.

It actually proactively prevents need frustration (the sense that we aren't fully supported or don't have what we need to be successful) and reduces controlled motivation (the feeling of needing to do somebody outside ourselves told us so.)

Though the authors didn't arrive at this conclusion, the other critical point this data seems to direct us to is that a strengths-based approach leads to greater self-regulation. With our needs met, we're freer to focus on getting better for the sake of improving and figuring out exactly how we do that. If our needs aren't met, we're too busy figuring out how to get what we need with no energy leftover to optimize how we get better.

The data on controlled motivation seems to support this - controlled motivation is essentially external regulation.

What this means for you

The clear takehome here is that focusing on strengths does in fact enhance performance in ways that correcting weaknesses does not. And, not only does it lead to enhanced performance, it leads to better motivation to sustain that performance over the long term.

Pragmatically, it can be as simple as just starting with catching your players or team doing something right. We're so drawn to what we think isn't working that we tend to overlook what works well. Catching people doing something right is a pillar of good coaching, and giving feedback about that is likely to get them to enact the same correct behavior in the future.

In fact, in my interviews with players, they constantly tell me that being told they're doing a good job isn't a sign that they should rest on their laurels. It's a signal that they should repeat that behavior again.

You might also try to get a bit closer to that 5:1 ratio I mentioned at the opening. Giving people 5 bits of praise is very challenging, but a way to make it easier is to talk constantly about the strengths that people have and how it leads to enhanced performance. This can be as straightforward as saying, "You did a great job leveraging [insert strength] there. Keep it up."

The more you bank the positive feedback, the more room you have to give some critical feedback when the time is right.

Finally, you can encourage your team to do some work on identifying their own strengths and sharing them with you. Once you create a mental model of the strengths of your team members, it'll be easier to figure out how they fit together, complement one another, and where to direct your attention for strengths-based feedback.

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References

Gradito Dubord, M. A., & Forest, J. (2023). Focusing on Strengths or Weaknesses? Using Self-Determination Theory to Explain Why a Strengths-based Approach has More Impact on Optimal Functioning Than Deficit Correction. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 8(1), 87-113.

Dubreuil, P., Forest, J., Gillet, N., Fernet, C., Thibault-Landry, A., Crevier-Braud, L., & Girouard, S. (2016). Facilitating well-being and performance through the development of strengths at work: Results from an intervention program. International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology, 1(1– 3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41042-016-0001-8

Harzer, C., & Ruch, W. (2016). Your strengths are calling: Preliminary results of a web-based strengths intervention to increase calling. Journal of Happiness Studies, 17(6), 2237–2256. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10902-015-9692-y

Forest, J., Gradito Dubord, M. A., Olafsen, A. H., & Carpentier, J. (2022; in press). Shaping tomorrow’s workplace by integrating self-determination theory: A literature review and recommendations. Chapter to be published in R. Ryan & E. Deci (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Self-Determination Theory. Oxford University Press.

Els, C., Mostert, K., & Van Woerkom, M. (2018). Investigating the impact of a combined approach of perceived organisational support for strengths use and defcit correction on employee outcomes. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 16(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajhrm.v16i0.882

Hiemstra, D., & Van Yperen, N. W. (2015). The efects of strength-based versus defcit-based selfregulatedlearning strategies on students’ efort intentions. Motivation and Emotion, 39(5), 656–668. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-015-9488-8

van Woerkom, M., Bakker, A. B., & Nishii, L. H. (2016). Accumulative job demands and support for strength use: Fine-tuning the job demands-resources model using conservation of resources theory. The Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(1), 141. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000033

van Woerkom, M., Mostert, K., Els, C., Bakker, A. B., De Beer, L., & Rothmann, S., Jr. (2016). Strengths use and defcit correction in organizations: Development and validation of a questionnaire. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 25(6), 960–975. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1359432X.2016.1193010

And inevitably, every year, we see a critical game come down to one of the most high-stakes performance situations in any sport: the penalty kick.

Most fans watching the penalty kick experience an uptick in their own anxiety, in part because they're invested in the game but in part because they empathize with the kick-taker - this situation is bigger than what almost any of us prepare for. And we know that anything less than a goal is likely to result in national scrutiny, criticism, and all too often, much worse.

In a recent World Cup, I still remember Marcus Rashford missing a penalty - at age 22 or something like that - and being derided for not rising to the occasion. The commentators, fans, and media blasted this young man, simply because he didn't quite meet performance expectations.

He choked.

These situations can define and rewrite the careers of athletes and in some cases, entire teams.

We still look back on the 1986 World Series each year and remember Bill Buckner, the unfortunate chap who made an error late in a game that ultimately cost Boston the series.

In fact, the New York Mets hold 2 spots in the top 50 chokes of all time as rated by Bleacher Report - a curse of sorts that seems to linger over the franchise decades later (sorry Mets fans, nothing personal here).

Since these moments loom so large, it behooves us to figure out how we can limit them (if not eliminate them altogether). 

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What's In a Choke

A group of professional sport psychologists defined a choke as a situation where an athlete "perceives that their resources are insufficient to meet the demands of the situation, and concludes with a significant drop in performance - a choke" (Hill, Hanton, Fleming, & Matthews, 2009).

How do we explain why this happens, and perhaps more importantly, how do we prevent it from happening to the athletes we coach?

Theories of Choking

Psychologists know that as pressure in a given situation rises, anxiety rises. That increase in anxiety causes us to shift our attention, often to ineffective or irrelevant cues that ultimately undermine our performance.

These shifts in attention have led to two emerging theories that may explain the reason athletes choke.

The first, which was the focus of Sian Beilock's excellent book Choke, is what's called self-focus: paying too much attention to a skill that has been trained to be executed automatically.

The main premise of the choke here is that the increase in pressure shifts our attention internally, where it's of course very hard to find relevant information for performance at the moment. As a performance psychologist, I don't want you thinking about the way your body feels while you run up and down the court, for example. I want you to focus externally, on the movement of the opponents and the ball. Too much time in your own mind makes you miss things.

Research suggests that this internal shift disrupts our performance.

At first, researchers believed that this internal shift leads us to start overthinking how a skill should be performed, termed the "explicit monitoring hypothesis", or even worse, trying to consciously control how they're executed, the "conscious processing hypothesis." This is akin to asking someone to try and explain how to walk while walking. It's actually very hard because we've taken an automatic skill deeply encoded in our minds and consciously interfered with its execution. The end result is clumsy movement, which, under pressure, would lead to a choke.

But the other thing that an internal shift does is bring attention to our thoughts and physiology. The second set of theories aligns around the experience of anxiety, which tends to be heightened when we turn inward.

There are two predominant theories of attention here that have to do with performance anxiety. The first is processing efficiency theory (PET) and the second is attentional control theory (ACT). Each suggests that the shift inward takes athletes’ attention to their worries and "distractions," and away from task-relevant cues.

If we want to prevent athletes from choking, then, we have to understand which of the two above theories is true. If athletes were to break down because they became fixated on skill, it would suggest coaches need to stay away from pressure moments from focusing on form. If athletes break down because they're experiencing performance anxiety, it suggests coaches need to steer athletes toward external, controllable cues that would allow them to execute.

What the athletes have to say

Oudejans, Kuijpers, Kooijman, and Bakker asked 70 athletes what they think about and feel when they're performing under pressure.

It turns out that what causes athletes to choke, from their perspective, stems from two places:

• Worries

• External factors

The best athletes, it turns out, don't break down because they focus on something they've trained to do repeatedly. It's not a matter of not "trusting your training."

It's a matter of falling victim to the same things we all fall victim to when we're under duress.

Things like focusing on what we can't control, or how other people perceive us, or the noises in the stands.

In fact, take a look at what athletes reported was most impactful on their performance in pressure moments:

How to coach around a choke

Under pressure, it seems high performers start to focus not on the skills they need to execute, but on external factors they can't control - the audience, a TV presence, the opponent - and internal distractions like self-criticism, negative self-talk, and thinking about downstream consequences.

Both paths likely lead to performance disaster.

In these moments, it's crucial that coaches avoid drawing attention to these things, and instead help athletes focus on what matters most.

That includes things like:

• Tactics and strategy

• Managing the game clock

• Affirming their strengths

And avoiding things like:

• Evaluation during the moment (including your own judgments of performance)

• Drawing attention to uncontrollables like the referee (when has your arguing ever led to a different call anyway?)

This doesn't mean you have to sugarcoat or lie about things going well, either. It just means that, in pressure-packed moments, your athletes are already going to be engaging in some thinking that's unhelpful. Rather than doubling down on that, your job is to refocus them on controllables, their own execution, and more helpful thinking.

If you want to prevent a choke in your own performance under pressure, the same rules apply.

Focus on what you can control.

Emphasize the work you've put in and how you're ready.

Consciously increase effort.

Focus on a target.

This simple formula helps the best perform under pressure and can elevate anyone's game when the lights are brightest.

References

Hill, D. M., Hanton, S., Fleming, S., & Matthews, N. (2009). A re-examination of choking in sport. European Journal of Sport Science, 9(4), 203-212.

Beilock, S. (2010). Choke: What the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to. Simon and Schuster.

Oudejans, R. R., Kuijpers, W., Kooijman, C. C., & Bakker, F. C. (2011). Thoughts and attention of athletes under pressure: skill-focus or performance worries?. Anxiety, Stress, & Coping, 24(1), 59-73.

We know that athletes at the highest levels of sport are not there purely as a function of their own physical talent. Though the physical metrics often matter, it's commonly understood by talent development (coaches) and acquisition specialists (scouts and front offices, for example) that skill does in fact differentiate between elite and sub-elite athletes (Farrow & Robertson, 2016).

The question then, is: how do we effectively teach these skills so that athletes can rise to the top?

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Assumptions we make

I think we mostly assume that athletes have the skills they need to participate in whatever level of sport they are in.

We forget that most athletes begin their sports journey organized by age and weight - things that have nothing to do with skill. This categorization often persists until high school, wherein athletes of all skills and sizes are grouped together, and the cream supposedly rises to the top.

After several years of seeing 19-year-old pro athletes up close and personal, it's clear there are definitely some skills we still need to develop.

If you travel to organizations across the country, you largely see the exact same approach to building skills: reps. Volume of reps. Thousands and thousands of shots, with (maybe) some minor corrections along the way. We evaluate whether or not a shot is good not by the skill displayed but by the outcome we care about.

I suspect this is because measuring skills is actually quite difficult.

Even if we know what a good shot looks like, for example, it can be difficult (if not impossible) to make educated inferences about what's happening during the execution of the skill if all we have is our own observation. How can you realistically track where a player is looking, the position of their feet, the position of their shoulder, and their follow-through all at the same time?

The real answer (probably) is that you can't. So we settle for a proxy: is it in or out? Did it look good or not?

We need a more structured, robust way of understanding whether or not an athlete is making progress. We need a way to determine if the component parts of a skill are being executed well - not just if the outcome looks the way we want to.

We need to know how to actually coach people to get better.

The Concept of Periodization

Though it's slightly different from a skill in its purest form, we do actually have a decent framework for how we help people develop physical capabilities in sports.

Periodization.

Periodization is all about "systematic variations" in the way we train "at regular intervals with the aim of improving performance (Farrow & Robertson, 2016; Fleck, 1999). 

Basically, we use short-term and long-term planning to identify what an athlete should do and when, record the outcomes, review, and adjust. Over time and following a few key principles (e.g., progressive overload), we are able to reasonably predict someone will get "better" (stronger, faster, etc.)

What if we took the same concept and applied it to the development of skills?

The SPORT Periodization Framework (For Physical Training and Skill Alike)

Farrow & Robertson (2016) provide us with a framework adapted from physical training that we could use to build skill over the short- and long-term in elite sports.

S: Specificity

P: Progression

O: Overload
R: Reversibility

T: Tedium

SPORT.

Let's take these principles one at a time.

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Specificity

Specificity is just the degree to which training reflects competition.

When we're planning for specificity, we are looking for the training to have a high degree of "representativeness" - the tasks we ask players to do in practice should reflect what's demanded of them in a game.

The way to do this is by messing with the constraints. We have to try and make the practice look and feel like a game so that players can learn to match specific actions to information they might find in a real-life scenario. To adjust, you can play with:

• Individual variables and rules, like doing this training after a heavy lift or toward the end of practice

• Environmental variables, like loud music or who's on the opposing team

• Task variables, like only being able to shoot after 3 passes have been completed

Practicing like this is also more demanding, both physically and mentally for players. If we use representative training, we can shorten our practices and be more effective at the same time.

If you want to see what tracking specificity might look like in practice, here's an example, taken from Farrow & Robertson, 2016.

Here, you can see that they track the type of passes, percentage in training and competition, and time (the example is a pass in soccer). What matters most here is the percentages in columns D, E, and F - the closer the percentage match between training and competition, the more representative the practice.

Progression

In the context of training, progression can really mean 2 things: (1) getting better overall at the skills we need to execute, or (2) increased capacity to do more and take on a higher load.

When it comes to expert performance, the concept of deliberate practice (the real, scientific one - not the BS 10,000-hour rule) - comes into play.

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) noted that an expert "deliberately constructs and seeks out training situations in which a set goal exceeds their current level of performance."

They also argued that a coach is responsible for making sure practice matches this demand and that they keep track of progress,

While not the forum to debate deliberate practice and its merits, there is merit to the idea that practice has to be set up in a way where there's a progressive set of goals set, achieved, and moved forward that reflect different skill difficulties relative to current skill levels.

In short, you need:

• High, hard practice goals

• Tasks that build toward accomplishing those goals are based on the athlete's current skill level.

Of note, though the assumption is that practice is always about building skills, there may be times when it's better to forego skill development and instead focus on psychological development. The tasks that help an athlete get better on the court may be the same tasks that undermine an athlete's confidence if they are challenging enough and there's enough failure (after all, they should be failing on roughly 15% of these reps if the task is appropriately difficult).

Overload

Physical training has two types of load: internal and external.

Internal load includes metrics like rate of perceived exertion (RPE) and heart rate. External load includes things measured outside the body, like GPS data, distance covered, or reps completed.

These same concepts can apply to skill training.

Internal load, when it comes to developing skills, is about the cognitive effort it takes to learn something new. External load is as simple as how much practice is done.

It's worth considering here that most practices today place a premium on external load and often deliberately (and misguidedly) try to reduce internal load.

Though cognitive effort is more difficult to measure, one of the more robust findings on the mental load of practice is that blocked practice - the type where someone just takes rep after rep after rep - leads to better practice performance, but poorer skill retention and transfer to the game. This type of practice creates the illusion of improved performance, and coaches are left scratching their heads when the skill they saw in practice doesn't show up in a game.

Random practice, on the other hand, often leads to crappier practices but better skill retention and transfer. It looks like the athlete is struggling, but they're more likely to execute when the time is right. Though random practice is more taxing mentally, the long-term benefits far outweigh the short-term view that poorer practice performance will lead to poorer game performance.

This doesn't mean there's no time and place for repetition. When you're teaching a new skill, the person is a novice, or you're trying to correct one thing, repetition, and blocked practice can be helpful. But as the skill gets more complex and the player more talented, skill development needs variation.

A simple rule can work wonders here: once the skill seems consistent, this is a sign to change the practice to increase the load.

Reversibility

If you stop going to the gym, you won't lose all your muscle mass in a week. But over a period of 4-6 weeks, you might slowly lose some strength, and the fluidity of the movement, and go through "detraining" a bit. Once you resume, the skill and strength come back, but it takes a little bit of time.

Physical skill isn't much different, though the retention of skill is a bit stickier long-term than the retention of strength.

The question, then, is whether or not the training undertaken will lead to any reversibility, or if the athlete will retain what they've been taught and transfer it to a game over time.

The main mechanisms to attend to here are observation (does the skill look better after practicing?), retention (does the skill look the same after some time away?), and transfer (does the skill show up in games?)

The higher the rate of retention and transfer, the stickier the skill and the less likely it is to reverse.

The main takehome here is not to assume that time away means the skill will be lost, but to make sure you're monitoring the differences in skill execution before and after a break, and ramping up accordingly.

We know that recovery - sleep, naps, rest, time away - is beneficial for consolidating learning and skill development, so it's not a question of whether or not you should continue training. Instead, it's about making sure the training you do is structured well enough to have the skill stay.

Tedium 

Tedium, or doing the same thing again and again to the point of stalling, is what we want to try and avoid. Novelty forces new learning - the brain's predictions are forced to adapt to a new set of circumstances, and our mental model is forced to be updated. Doing the same thing over and over again (unfortunately, like I've seen at far too many practices), doesn't lead to development.

It leads straight to stagnation.

We need variation to keep getting better. Plus, no two moves are ever the exact same - even the best shooters in the NBA, as tracked by biomechanics technology, still have slight variations in their shots. The dynamic environment of sports means that there are always going to be varying circumstances for athletes to respond to, and practice should mimic that variation.

Here's a look at what good variation might be like.

As you can see, there is a lot you can do to stave off tedium. Try varying the tasks, making them harder or easier, or changing the environment. You might play small-sided games, change the spacing around a player, or develop rigid rules to make a task more complex.

Whatever you choose, remember that the increase in novelty is likely to help your players learn.

As a bonus, it also increases engagement - novelty requires a new focus, which makes the quality of practice higher. 

Putting it into practice

Following the basic principle of this model - that varied, engaging training that builds over time leads to better skill - can become a simple north star for how you evaluate your practices and the work you do.

Did we mix it up enough today?

Was it challenging enough?

Did we introduce new constraints?

If you're consistently answering no to 2/3 of these questions, it might be time to change it up.

The SPORT framework gives us a starting point for making practice more effective and for helping athletes effectively learn new skills. But if you try to apply it all at once, just like anything, it might prove to be too much and less sticky.

My recommendation: pick just one area, and start working on it.

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Mastering Skills In Sports

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References:

A special thanks to Joe Baker, who shared this article with me.

Farrow, D., & Robertson, S. (2017). Development of a skill acquisition periodisation framework for high-performance sport. Sports Medicine, 47, 1043-1054.

Fleck, S. J. (1999). Periodized strength training: a critical review. The Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, 13(1), 82-89.

Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review, 100(3), 363.

No matter your field, certain factors often separate the high performers from the rest. What's become clear after several years of working with peak performers across industries is that rising to the top really boils down to how you do a core set of critical skills.

Performance Under Pressure

High performers often face high levels of pressure and stress in their roles. If you are operating in a domain where the outcome matters, chances are you are dealing with needing to perform better under pressure. In today's corporate environment, pressure is part and parcel of your everyday life. If you're a coach or an athlete, though the pressure may ebb and flow based on the opponent you face, the constant evaluation and public scrutiny means that the pressure never fully lets up.

These pressure moments also seem to be the ones by which we define careers, success and failure, and even ourselves as performers. We remember athletes who hit the big shot or sank the big putt. We revere executives who rescue organizations from the deep. Performing under pressure is almost a necessary condition for being considered an all-time great.

The best performers, regardless of their specialty focus, figure out how to use pressure to their advantage. Rather than crumbling under pressure, they come up clutch and rise to the occasion.

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Teamwork

Even in "individual" sports, the performers are surrounded by a team - coaches, trainers, physical therapists, psychologists, and more. There's really no such thing as an elite performer in a vacuum.

Nearly every endeavor we can think of that's highly competitive requires the seamless integration of at least one if not multiple, teams. Sending an astronaut to the moon requires teamwork on the rocket and on the ground, and great teamwork between the two teams. High-level sports require teamwork on two sides of the ball and teamwork between coaches and athletes. Getting a business off the ground requires teamwork within and between the functions of a company. 

The necessity of operating in a team means that you have to figure out how to get the most out of the people around you for you to become the best you can be. And, research consistently demonstrates that teamwork has an ample effect on performance (Schmutz, Meier, & Manser, 2019; Sanyal & Hisam, 2018). If you want to be at the top of your game, you have to be a good teammate.

That's because teamwork, at its core, is about creating an environment in which high performance can emerge. Teamwork behaviors, like backing up your teammate and lending support, create a context in which people can do their best work because they know they have support. Often, the best performers create this context by taking a specific role on the team: leader.

Leadership

The best performers take on the role of leader for several reasons. First, they can demonstrate what elite behavior looks like, which can elevate the performance of the rest of the team. Second, leaders often have greater control and influence over decisions, plans, goals, and the culture, which they can use to tilt the conditions toward their own high performance. Finally, the best performers often rise to the top of whatever hierarchy they're a part of, whether they like it or not. 

Might as well take it head-on.

Incidentally, choosing to take on a leadership role before you've reached your peak can also help you raise your game. If you are recognized as a leader, you're forced to behave like one, which means you're often held to higher standards and have higher expectations. These expectations and standards raise the bar for what's permissible and nudge habits and routines in the right direction. 

If you want to be great at what you do, it requires you to lead.

Decision-Making

In the corporate world, around 70% of leadership's time is spent on making decisions. That means that the average F500 company spends about $250 million a year worth of leadership time on one function (you can learn more here). Before you can determine where you're headed and start building a product, you need to ask the right questions, synthesize data, and arrive at the right conclusion.

In sports, the best players are responsible for making and executing decisions. Quarterback is commonly called the most challenging position in sports, in no small part due to the tremendous amount of decision-making responsibility they have. In golf, before you can even hit the shot, you have to select the right club. 

Much of what we view as performance is downstream from good decisions. For you to consistently be at the top of your game, you need to get good at asking yourself the right questions and develop a process for arriving at the best possible answer, in a timeframe that's conducive to execution - sometimes, just a fraction of a second.

Self-Regulation

The research suggests that what separates the best from the rest really boils down to 1 factor: self-regulation.

Self-regulation is the ability to monitor and manage your thinking, feelings, physiology, and behavior. It's underpinned by executive function, which neuroscience regularly recognizes as key to peak performance. 

To get the most out of yourself under pressure, you have to be able to solve problems in your mind, switch between tasks, control and direct your thinking and feelings, and stay disciplined in the pursuit of your goals.

Self-regulation cuts across the span of the other 4 factors, too. You need good self-regulatory abilities to optimize as a teammate, learn new skills, and control your performance under pressure. Without the ability to self-regulate, mastering the rest becomes a significant uphill battle.

Peak performance is straightforward and simple, but not easy. By setting goals and progressing in these 5 domains, you can more effectively track your path to the top. 

About 50% of American workers report spending the majority of their day on menial tasks - highly repetitive, boring actions that don't require any real decision-making or problem-solving (Clifford, 2016).

It's what leads to the breaks to search the internet, doom-scrolling, quiet quitting, and the many other pithy terms we've used recently to describe the withdrawal from boring work.

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Yet, these same tasks require a good deal of concentration, skill, and mental strength. In fact, boring tasks can often be the most challenging - it requires sustained effort and attention to something simple, which can be very taxing for those of us (read: all of us) who enjoy novelty and use that as a source of stimulation.

To make things even more complicated, we might prefer these boring tasks. People tend to shy away from difficult tasks. We're more likely to engage in something if it's easier (Song & Schwarz, 2008). The way we think about what we're doing - our perception - shapes our motivation, satisfaction, and ultimately, performance. When we think what we're about to do is hard, we get a host of unproductive behaviors that even the highest performers struggle with, like procrastination, avoidance, ostriching (burying our head in the sand), and sometimes, downright escapism (like using a "sick day" to get out of work).

This preference for the easy over the hard limits our our ability to achieve our full potential. In fact, some of the greatest performers in any industry separate themselves simply by being willing to do the things that nobody else will do - even if those things are not all that tough.

This is the CEO who goes the extra mile in all their fundraising pitches and sends follow-up emails, while competitors just send a deck.

It's the athlete who engages in deliberate practice and self-regulated learning, rather than blindly following the training plan on any given day.

What if we could make the hard seem easy?

Is more always more?

It makes sense that we'd believe that adding more tasks to our existing set - like extending our to-do list or bolting new features onto an existing product - would take more effort. When we spend more time to complete something, it's natural to believe that more time means greater effort. Is that view always right?

Research suggests that things like order, timing, and difficulty play a large part in whether or not we see things as easy or hard (Lai, Sevilla, Isaac, Bagchi, 2023).

A bias toward averaging

People have a bias toward averaging, rather than adding, multiple inputs when they form an overall judgment. When we eat pizza, wings, and a salad, we tend to mistakenly estimate a lower caloric intake than just one of those unhealthy foods alone (Chernev & Gal, 2010). In other words, we give ourselves a bit too much credit for adding on the healthy choice and use that information to drag down our estimates, rather than than correctly (and more simply) adding the calories together.

This bias toward the average may allow us to make hard things seem easy.

Rather than simply adding the task difficulties together, we might weight tasks differently based on the overall volume of tasks.

Interestingly, this bias seems to be minimized when people fail to categorize. In other words, if you consider everything on your list as just “stuff that has to get done,” you’ll correctly add, rather than average, task difficulty. But, if you categorize into easy and hard, you can make the harder seem easy by pulling your perception closer to the average - when we categorize, that’s what we do.

Primacy and Recency

We also know that people tend to disproportionately weigh their perceptions of earlier and later items in a sequence. We remember things that we do first (primacy) and last (recency), and those effects ("serial position effects") shape our overall perception of whatever it is we are doing.

These effects are why you want to go either first or last in a talent show, set of presentations, or tryouts for sport. You're more likely to get forgotten in the middle. Evaluators are humans, and humans have pretty bad long-term memory and only a limited capacity of what they can hold in mind in the short term.

These same effects might also influence our perception of the work that we do. If we start or finish with harder things, we might see the task as more challenging than they actually are. If we bury the tough tasks in the middle and bookend with easier tasks, we may find that we see the overall project as easier to complete.

The Peak-End Rule

As if the combination of averaging bias, and primary and recency biases, is not enough to alter our perception, consider the addition of the peak-end rule.

This psychological process says that we end up remembering our experiences based both on what’s most emotionally intense and how things end. As a result, when we evaluate retroactively, we’re more likely to anchor our judgments in these two aspects of the experience, rather than taking a more balanced and nuanced view. The end result may be ascribing too much, or too little, effort to what we achieve, making it more or less likely we’ll take on a similar task in the future.

Combining our biases to make the hard seem easy

Lai and company (2023) found a novel way to combine these biases to make the challenging tasks we take on seem easier. They found that if you add easier tasks to a string of challenging tasks, and categorize them into easy and hard, you can change your overall perception of the work you put in. Amazingly, in their research, this effect - termed the easy addendum effect - was found for physically challenging tasks, mentally challenging tasks, and incentivized tasks. By simply adding easy tasks to the end of the hard work you do, you can make the hard seem easy, and be more productive. What's more, these additions also seem to impact the way we feel about the tasks we've completed. When we add easy tasks to the end of a string of more difficult tasks, we tend to be more persistent in finishing and rate the overall experience as more engaging and enjoyable.

Putting the Easy Addendum Effect into Practice

If you're a coach, leader, or high-performer, you want to leverage this effect to not only get more work done, you want to make the hard seem easy so that you or your team does the work time and again.

Here are the steps you can take to make this effect work for you:

1. Categorize the tasks into easy and hard tasks. Hard may be a function of time, skill, concentration, or something else.

2. Encourage completion of the difficult tasks first, with a string of easy tasks at the end.

3. When coaching or giving feedback, provide reminders of the difficulty of the tasks at the beginning, and the ease of tasks at the end.

By categorizing and sequencing the tasks you or your team does, you can make the hard seem easy.

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Source:

Lai, E. Y., Sevilla, J., Isaac, M. S., & Bagchi, R. (2023). The easy addendum effect: When doing more seems less effortful. Journal of Applied Psychology.

A Framework For Cognitive Biases

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At the end of this document, there is bonus material on common thinking traps and a list of the 50 most common biases we fall victim to.

And, here is a clickable link you can reference and search.

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Beliefs + information-consistent processing.

In other words, we move through the world mostly attempting to confirm what we already believe to be true.

That process leads to a host of cognitive errors downstream.

Notably, it also seems like we have a core set of beliefs about the world that we constantly seek to justify.

Here’s a look into several beliefs that are common for high performers that also limit achieving our full potential.

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"My experience is a reasonable reference."

In the early days of psychology, Freud popularized the idea of "projection" - the notion that we take something that we feel or believe about us, and "project" that onto the experience of other people.

That concept stems from the first core belief that many of us hold that leads to biased reasoning - the idea that our own lived experience is a framework for making sense of the world.

This fallacy leads to things ranging from the curse of knowledge, or the idea that it's hard to take a perspective that's less informed than our own, all the way to more harmful, subtle biases like microaggressions and other identity-laden thinking processes.

This bias also leads to a host of challenges for coaches and leadership.

For example, sports coaches (incorrectly) believe that their perception of performance is more accurate than athletes. In a study wherein both athletes and coaches were asked to estimate the speed of a boat of rowers, the athletes (without a speedometer!) were significantly closer to the correct speed than their coaches, who had a tool at their disposal to anchor their estimates more realistically (a speedometer!) (Millar, S. K., Oldham, A. R., Renshaw, I., & Hopkins, W. G. (2017). Athlete and coach agreement: Identifying successful performance. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching,12(6), 807-813.).

Similarly, this belief combined with belief-consistent processing leads to things like misunderstanding of intentions, alignment, and the importance of specific events.

When you believe that your own experience is a reasonable and relevant reference, you're more likely to overestimate the extent to which other people think about you (spotlight effect), to overestimate the extent to which you believe other people understand your emotions and intentions (illusion of transparency and illusion of transparency of intention), and to overestimate the extent to which you believe other people are like you (false consensus effect).

I've seen each of these come up across the spaces I work.

Leaders who believe that their teams understand their vision, or assume their people know what they mean when they give feedback. Coaches who provide feedback with minimal context because they believe their connection with the athletes is good enough to transfer intention.

The simple way out of this bias is to slow down, ask questions, and seek alternative perspectives. In my coaching, when I’m helping executives or high performers or athletes think through challenging conversations, one of the first recommendations I make is to ask the other person what they’d be thinking, doing, or feeling if the roles were reversed. This simple act of perspective taking allows the leader to better understand another reference point and forces both parties out of their default view. The end result is often a deeper, more collaborative conversation that builds empathy. When we get out of our own head and see the world through someone else’s eyes, we can better bridge the gap between what we believe and the truth that lies somewhere in the middle.

This same fundamental belief is also responsible for some of the interesting findings in mindset research. For example, Navy SEALs who possess an attitude toward stress that suggests the best way to manage is to “will your way through it” tend to be worse teammates, simply because they can’t understand why their teammates can’t also just push through (Smith, E. N., Young, M. D., & Crum, A. J. (2020). Stress, mindsets, and success in Navy SEALs special warfare training.Frontiers in psychology,10, 2962).

When we believe or assume that our starting point is shared, we end up missing critical context that would allow us to operate more effectively.

“I make correct assessments.”

An adjunct to the first belief, the idea that we make correct assessments of ourselves and others leads to biased reasoning in several ways.

First, it leads us to believe we’re good judges of character and that we can easily understand what contributes to another person’s, and our own, success and failure. This leads to biases like the fundamental attribution error (the tendency to ascribe others’ failures to internal characteristics, while ascribing our own to external circumstances) and, ironically, the bias that we don't have any biases (after all, we make correct assessments!)

This bias runs rampant in sports, business, and life. Coaches and front offices alike believe that they've identified the best talent every year. Venture capitalists dole out million-dollar bets at volume to account for the fact that, underneath it all, their assessments aren't all that accurate - but each time they write a check, they build "conviction" that they've made the right assessment.

Conflict also stems from holding this fundamental belief too tightly. After all, if I make correct assessments, then you must be prone to more bias in your reasoning than I am, and therefore you are more likely to be wrong. Whenever you raise a divergent point of view from mine, I'm likely to view your take as coming from a place of inaccuracy, rather than your own experience, and as a result am less likely to adjust my own ideology. We see this at play in the larger discourse in our society that can hardly stand to invite alternative viewpoints.

"I am good."

88% of US drivers believe themselves to be safer than 50% of drivers on the road. 46.3% believe that they are in the top 20% of driving skills. 93% believe themselves to be better drivers than 50% on the road (Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta psychologica, 47(2), 143-148.)

How can this be?

We default to believing we are better than the average.

It's of course adaptive to see ourselves this way. Nobody wants to walk around feeling like they're worse than the majority of their peers, or like they don't have anything special to offer.

Seeing ourselves this way also gives us a very unrealistic view of the world.

We overestimate our view of our own performance and we tend to give ourselves too much credit.

When we are evaluating the performance of other people, this belief underlies many of the more critical views we tend to take. It leads to the trouble many high performers feel managing their frustrations that other people don’t perform to the same standard. This belief also leads us to see most other people as worse than us, which is why someone appearing “more successful” than we are feels so upsetting.

A much more functional way to view ourselves is to recognize that we are simply good at some things.

And we’re average, and below average, at plenty of others.

This isn’t to take away from what makes us special. It’s simply to acknowledge our own humanity and to see ourselves more accurately.

When people ask how I deal with the egos of professional athletes, this foundational belief and bias give me the evidence for my answer: we're all a lot more normal person than we think we are.

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