The way we mentally prepare can be the difference between being good and being the best.
Picture this. You have to give a big presentation. It’s one of the larger ones you’ve done, with an audience with several hundred people.
If you’re like many people, just the thought of this is enough to spike a little anxiety. Most of us share a fear of public speaking.
On the day of your presentation, you feel great. You’ve rehearsed the presentation dozens of times. You have your key points spot on. You’re not only going to nail the presentation, but you’re going to have fun doing it!
As you take the stage to deliver your opening you notice your slides aren’t working. The screen is black.
You see the panicked technician at the back of the room. You figure your slides aren’t going to work. And you don’t know whether that will be for 10 seconds or 10 minutes.
Your audience is waiting. You remain calm. You take a moment to assess the situation.
This would ruffle most people, but not you.
Why? Because you prepared for this.
You know you can speak for at least 10 minutes before you need a single slide. That should give the technician enough time to figure things out. And if not, well, in ten minutes you’ll deal with that too.
So you start your presentation with confidence. Despite the bright lights you see enough people in the front rows of the audience to see they’re impressed that you’re not ruffled.
Why The All-Greats Mentally Prepare
It might seem like over-preparation, to plan for the possibility the slides might fail.
But I can tell you some of the greatest leaders, athletes and business people in history take mental preparation very seriously.
Before we look at examples, let’s look at why preparing for even unlikely situations is important.
When we practice a potential response to a situation, something important happens. At first, we have to apply all of our attention to creating a response. This fires up two important areas of our brain, our neocortex and prefrontal cortex, which are responsible for the type of thinking involved in exploring complex tasks.
As we practice a response, the response starts to become routinized, requiring less and less of our conscious attention. This process of routinization is important. When known routines are in place, after an initial assessment of the situation, our attention is able to “outsource” parts of the response to other faculties in our brain and body, which take care of the action.
This process only occurs through practice and experience. It’s an important contributor to patterns for high performance and is more difficult to generate in the heat of the moment, when no prior practice has been performed.
Remember the first time you drove a car? It took a lot of work and concentration. It required every bit of your attention to think of what you needed to do. Over time it became much easier. Now when you drive, you focus your attention on the road, because the act of turning the wheel, flicking the indicator, pushing the breaks, are all routinized processes done with little thought through sensory motor routines.
The same can be applied to other situations.
If faced with a particularly tough and new problem that we’re expected to solve on the spot, like the slides not working in a presentation, we perform far better if we have a suitable response accessible in our memory, than if we have to make one up on the fly.
A Cycle To Mentally Prepare
Researchers believe this is because a kind of dynamic dance occurs when we’re placed in high pressure situations.
The more experience we have with a situation, the easier we are able to deal with it. This occurs as we read cues in our environment, and then use inferred reasoning to match those cues with our previous experience of a situation. This gives us a greater depth of strategic thinking to execute a suitable response.
This is one of the reasons why paramedics who have more experience, are to provide faster, more effective emergency care than less experienced colleagues. 1)
What is so interesting is that we can train for these situations, before they occur. This is particularly useful for important events. Consider these examples…
3 Examples Of How To Mentally Prepare
Broken Goggles
Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian history has known, with a total of 28 gold medals to his name. But in the 2008 Olympic Games, in the last 100m of the butterfly event, he faced a tough moment. His goggles filled with water, greatly reducing his visibility. This would have created panic in most competitors…but not Phelps. That’s because Phelps had prepared for this very possibility. Knowing that something as simple as goggles breaking in an Olympic event could mean the difference between winning and losing, he learnt to train without needing his goggles. So when his goggles broke in the Olympic event, he didn’t panic and went on to win the race.
SEAL Team Training
David Cooper led Seal Team 6. He had taken his team into many precarious situations. For one mission, his commanding officer asked him to use a new helicopter still at a prototype stage of testing. Having had prior experiences with experimental technologies going wrong, Cooper had his team prepare for the possibility the helicopter would be forced to make a crash landing. To mentally prepare his team, they ran drill after drill to emulate a real life situation. He did this despite assurances the helicopter would be fit-for-purpose. When the real situation came, and the helicopter was indeed forced into an emergency landing, Cooper’s team had trained for this very event. Instead of being thrown into chaos, they had prior experience of how to deal with it and completed their mission. 2)
Flight Simulation
The final example is flight simulation. We naturally assume when pilots undergo simulation training they are learning to become better pilots. One of the reasons for this, is that through practice they are building a type of personal databank of situations they may encounter. This helps if they hit a real situation and need to recall this knowledge in a time of crisis. What we don’t naturally assume is that simulation training may be as important as time in a real plane. In a study that reviewed 26 experiments for flight training in the military, researchers discovered that flight simulator training, when combined with time in real jets, was often more effective for pilots than jet-time alone. 3)
In sport, this model has been used for decades to build different types of resilience in althetes and leaders. The football team rehearses hundreds of plays, so when they need to call on a specific offense, the perfect play is already available in their muscle memory. Tennis players study their toughest opponents and develop specific counter-measures to combat their strengths, which are often rehearsed thousands of times between tournaments.
Mentally Prepare For Anything With These 4 Steps
You and I can apply these same principles to increase our success in high pressure moments.
By understanding the process that others have used, all we need to do is take four actions.
1. Imagine Different Scenarios
In the very first example with the presentation, the scenario was ‘something to prevent our presentation from going as planned’. The scenario Michael Phelps used to mentally prepare was ‘something that might distract him during a competitive performance’.
In this step, we need to know the important moment or event that we’re training for, and imagine what might challenge it. This doesn’t have to be a negative scenario, it could also be a positive one. For example, say you’re bringing a new product to market, and it sells out in half the time you expect. That would be a positive scenario.
2. Define The Cue
It’s helpful to identify a specific cue to respond to. In the presentation, the cue was the slides not working. In the Phelps example, it was his goggles not working. By being specific about the cue, it helps us visualize a very real situation, and also gives us a target to respond to.
3. Consider Similar Experiences
While we may not have dealt with the same situation before, the chances are we’ve dealt with something similar.
No chess game is alike. But when experienced chess players meet, they search through all of their experiences with other games to find a pattern that might resemble the game they’re playing.
So in this step, we query our memories to think about similar situations we’ve dealt with, that might give us access to possible responses.
4. Practice The Response
In the final step we practice our response. You can use a number of techniques to doing this.
You can visualize yourself in the situation, picturing how you would respond. You could act out the response, as though you were really in the situation, like Phelps did when he trained without goggles. You may also find the sketchnoting and visual thinking can help you elaborate the scenario you have in mind.
For every time you practice a response, think about what you would improve and then put those improvements into action.
This model is immensely useful for us as individuals and can be applied easily to other circumstances.
A team could use this model to mentally prepare for situations where an initiative failed or did exceedingly well.
A company could use this model to prepare its resources for a dip in revenue, a new competitor entering the market or customer demand spiking to high levels.
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