Keep Your Cool Under Pressure
There are many situations many of us face when going about our daily lives that put us under pressure to perform, or to keep our cool. Some of us seem to be able to cope, and others do not so much. So what’s the difference between these two seemingly different kinds of people?
The difference is simple: They are decisive.
One of the most effective skills you can learn is the ability to make decisions and make them quickly. Making good decisions is of course an advantage here too! But I’ll get to that later.
Making decisions is a part of daily life, and you do it all the time anyway. Like: “What should I have for lunch?” or “Should I get up and go to the bathroom now, or hold off for later?”. Fairly basic decisions but they’re ones that we’ve all had to ask ourselves at some point.
So how does this differ from making decisions under pressure? Well, it’s essentially practice. The more decisions we make, the better we tend to become at making decisions as long as we take the feedback from past decisions into account.
So keeping your cool under pressure is a skill that you learn by keeping your cool during all the other times in your life. So that’s where you practice. Make decisions quickly, and decisively when it doesn’t matter so much. “What should I have for lunch?” can be decided in about 2 seconds if you put your mind to it. Listen to your body, and judge quickly using your mind what would be a good choice and go for it!
If you choose well you’ll be rewarded with a satisfying lunch and a positive feeling of a decision well made. If you’ve chosen poorly you’ll most likely have a stomach ache and use the feedback to make a better decision next time. Either way, you’ve just improved your quick decision making skills and you’re one step closer to doing this in a tough situation.
Once you’ve got some confidence in your ability to make on the spot judgements and get a good result, it’s time to test yourself. Try playing some kind of sport that makes you keep on your toes and decide quickly. I enjoy playing squash because it’s a fast paced game where I get less than a second to make a decision. I train hard, so I make good decisions in a fraction of a second.
