In football, pocket presence refers to a quarterback’s ability to maintain composure while standing in the pocket created by the offensive front line. For the rest of us, the analogy is to our ability to remain unruffled when under duress, to stay cool, calm, composed, centered, and collected when the winds blow hard and the storm rages. In other words, how is our mental toughness?
Few if any of us are born immune to the tension of stressful, pressure cooker situations. That ability is much more a learned mental capacity developed through experience, training, reflection, and maturity. Successful people think about pressure differently than others; they expect pressure, work with it, and recover from it deliberately. Since pressure consistently appears at the edge of competence, they normalize it as just the cost of progress, of growth. They don’t try to eliminate it so much as develop a comfortable relationship with it.
Winners keep their identity, their self-concept, separate from performance. Outcomes under pressure are just that: outcomes, simply data. Outcomes are not internalized as defining a person’s identity: “I didn’t achieve my desired result v. I’m a failure.” Pressure is toxic when mistakes are experienced as indictments of one’s self-worth.
Healthy performers focus on what they can control, the next executable action and don’t obsess about the final outcome. When I’m behind in racquetball, I do not focus on winning. No, my effort is simply on just winning the next point, heck, on just hitting the next shot hard as I can i.e. the next controllable step. I do that and eventually I end up winning the game.
The ability to tolerate stress and strain, to sidestep anxiety, can be developed by repeated rehearsing under artificial constraints or stimulated stress. I frequently impose an earlier, artificial deadline and when studying for the LSAT I took practice exam after practice exam until the real one was like a reunion with an old friend. Familiarity reduces stress, practice builds confidence.
Closing Quotes:
“Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.” – Horace, 65 BC to 8 BC
“On the other side of a storm is the strength that comes from having navigated through it. Raise your sail and begin.” – Gregory S. Williams
“No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can’t take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.” – Ryder Carroll
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller, 1880-1968
“The more obstacles you face and overcome, the more times you falter and get back on track, the more difficulties you struggle with and conquer, the more resiliency you will naturally develop.” – Jim Rohn, 1930-2009
As always, I share what I most want and need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier
Note: Every effort has been made to properly source any 3rd person material. I am, however, a voracious reader. If anyone finds any unattributed material, pls let me know asap and I will be delighted to give credit where credit is due.
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749-1832
