Have you ever choked? Double faulted a key serve in a tennis match? Muffed an easy three-foot putt? Froze during an important presentation to a key client? If you like most people you could say yes to one of these answers. However, we know some people who don’t choke, who stay cool under the heat of pressure. Is there something they do differently than us? Do we do something different when we’re under pressure than we do when there is no pressure? This is what Sian Beilock, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, tries to answer in her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
Beilock starts off by making a key distinction. “Choking is not simply poor performance, however. Choking is suboptimal performance. It’s when you – or an individual athlete, actor, musician, or student – perform worse than expected given what you are capable of doing.”
Like a number of recent books Choke relies on research on how the brain works using the latest imaging technology, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The fMRI can’t read what is happening within individual neurons and synapses. It measures blood flow which is related to brain activity and identifies which parts of the brain light up when we’re stressed as opposed to when we’re not.
Beilock explains that understanding how and why we choke relies on knowing how our procedural memory works which “is implicit or unconscious. … You can think of procedural memory as your cognitive toolbox that contains a recipe that, if followed, will produce a successful bike ride, golf putt, baseball swing, or fully operating cell phone.” When we take on a new skill we start off consciously learning the key motions. As we become more proficient the details of the mechanics of technique our brain hands off executing these techniques from the conscious to the unconscious or our procedural memory. As a result once we become proficient in a skill our performance actually declines if we usurp our procedural memory by consciously trying to control our action.
This is what happens when we choke. We start to think about the technique of our serve and double fault. Or we start thinking about the mechanics of putting only to push the putt wide when we normally would make easily when there is no pressure. Instead of letting our subconscious execute the shot or the putt we try to steer it consciously only to choke.
When we become too conscious of how we doing something we also use up our working-memory which “involves the ability to hold information in mind (and protect that information from disappearing) while doing something else at the same time.”
So what can we do to lower our chances of choking? Are there ways of keeping us engaged with our procedural memory and not sucking up the precious resources of our working-memory? Beilock provides research showing that practicing that adds pressure similar to what you’d experience during competition will help. “Practice can actually change the physical wiring of the brain to support exceptional performance.” This also shows that we’re not stuck with a set amount of working-memory. We can expand it with the right kind of practice.
Another tactic would be to reinterpret your body’s response to a tense situation. Instead of thinking “I don’t handle pressure well. I’m tight and might make a mistake” you would say to yourself “I’m excited about facing this challenge.”
Beilock offers some other tips as well. These include taking time before starting the activity to reaffirm your self-worth by taking a few minutes to write about your many interests and activities. Map out your complexities: draw a diagram of what makes you a multi-faceted person. Meditate. And perhaps the most counter-intuitive tip: write about your worries. You would think we should not focus on what worries us but Beilock’s research shows that writing out your worries actually helps to relieve them!
All of this is fine for athletics but what about preventing choking in business or other non-sport activities? Some of Beilock’s tips are the essentially the same: meditate, write down thoughts you want to avoid, focus on a three strong talking points and think about the journey, not the outcome.
For interviews work up “a few well-rehearsed sentences about why you are the right person for the job, this first impression can help set the tone for your interview and for what is taken away from the meeting. … Providing a schema for interpreting a meeting at the outset, then, can help guide others’ memory of you.” I’d say this approach also works for presentations.
Beilock admits that brain research is fairly young and that future research might reveal more strategies for dealing with choking. Nonetheless Choke offers some good suggestions to ensure we don’t choke.
