The stories are legendary.
Abraham Lincoln loses his Senate candidacy … twice. And he becomes our best president.
A young Robert De Niro is ignored for the role of his life as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather. And he goes on to become one of the greatest actors of his time.
Steve Jobs, in 1985, is expelled from the company he founded … Apple. He returns in 1997. And continues to rebuild what will become America’s first trillion-dollar public company.
What is the common denominator?
Each of these stories begins with failure and missed opportunities. You can easily imagine Lincoln, De Niro, and Jobs each saying, “Well, that’s it. I’ll never get an opportunity like that again.”
But if these stories, and hundreds more like them, teach us one thing, it is that life offers us multiple opportunities.
Do you remember feeling devastated in high school as if your life was over? Of course yes. Everyone is devastated in high school, as if their life is over. Now here is the follow-up question. Is your life over? If you are reading this, the answer is clearly no.
So let’s fast forward from high school to today. Situations may have changed, but emotions haven’t, right?
When you’re in a high-pressure situation, you go straight back to high school emotions: “This is it. I’ll never get a chance like this again. If I screw this up, I’ll be devastated and my life will.” run out! “
Aside from some extraordinary situations, none of that is true, not in the long term (or even, sometimes, in the short term).
But we think it’s true at this point. And believing that only increases the pressure, which only increases our chances of ruining it.
In other words, we increase our own pressure by believing something that, in all probability, is not true.
There are two factors that determine how much pressure we feel in a high pressure situation: the situation and our interpretation of the situation. And, of the two, the latter is the more important.
When the New England Patriots go to the Super Bowl (they have done it ten times), their coach, Bill Belichick, tells the team to “treat it like a normal Sunday.” That may seem like an impossible accusation. But the more players are able to “treat it like a normal Sunday,” the better they can focus on the fundamentals, the task at hand, and ignore the hype.
And that’s what a lot of our interpretation of a high-pressure situation is: the hype. When we interpret the situation as “life or death”, or “our only chance”, we are caught up in the hype. We are distorting reality.
The answer is to remind ourselves that life offers us multiple opportunities. When we do that, we can minimize the importance of any single event. Even if the event is important (and I’m not saying the events in your life are not), by minimizing that importance in our minds, we can filter the hype and get our work done.
And when we do that, we have a much better chance of succeeding, rather than suffocating, under pressure.