Tips from a sports psychiatrist on how to perform under pressure

Tom Brady retired this week as the NFL’s all-time leader in just about everything, including Super Bowl wins (7) and game-winning drives (58). He’s widely considered the greatest of all time as well as one of the most clutch quarterbacks in history because under the highest pressure and in the biggest moments, he was so poised that it seemed like just another day at the office.

Then there’s the terrible, horrible, very bad day at the office that Dallas Cowboys kicker Brett Maher had in the Wild Card round against Brady’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Maher missed an NFL-record four extra points as part of a three-game stretch in which he missed six out of seven kicks.

Maher is more than a competent NFL kicker. He made 50 of a league-high 53 extra-point attempts during the regular season and more than 95% in his four-year career.

The question is . . . what happened? Why, in high-pressure situations, do some athletes excel while others fold?

According to Dr. Michael Lardon—a clinical psychiatrist and performance coach who has worked with NFL kickers, PGA golfers, Olympians, and Fortune 500 CEOs—it’s complicated, but also quite simple. Or at least it can be.

Fast Company: Every kicker misses kicks. But what happens to someone psychologically that leads to missing four extra points in one game?

Dr. Lardon: There are certain patterns in the brain where there’s a synchronicity and everything hooks up. Some people call this “flow state,” or being “in the zone.” Generally, in this state, the use of the cerebral cortex, where thinking is done, is minimal, and the athlete relies on instinct and rhythm. When the nervous system is functioning at this high a level, the circuitry is much faster. So the brain is picking up stimuli more quickly, which is why you hear some athletes talk about how the game “slows down” for them. It’s a state of mind where athletes perform at their highest level because they’re not thinking.

Now, when you start thinking about your own performance, that goes away. So once a kicker starts thinking about the kick that he just missed, or whether or not he’s going to make the next kick, or what happens if he doesn’t make it, the cerebral cortex is activated at the expense of instinct and rhythm.

FC: How would you describe the feeling someone gets when they’re under pressure to perform and they’re unable to?

DL: Anxiety. I say that anxiety is the gap between the here and now, and the future—or the past. If I’m a kicker and I’m thinking about what happened on the last kick (the past) or what happens if I miss (the future), the anxiety changes my rhythm and takes me out of the here and now, and I probably miss the kick.

In most high-level sports, it’s all about rhythm. It’s a dance, right? It’s coordination. When I was young, I used to watch the 49ers and I’d see Joe Montana hit Jerry Rice on a fly pattern. And every time, Jerry Rice would hit a full sprint and Montana would put it right on his fingertips. Incredible timing. If you change that rhythm, the play doesn’t work. Anxiety changes that rhythm.

FC: How do you avoid that anxiety—or better yet, how do you train yourself not to think in those moments?

DL: Whether it’s a golfer, a kicker, or a high jumper in the Olympics, we try to create an impervious psychological bubble. You see many athletes who have a very particular routine. It’s almost like an OCD thing. I refer to it as “left brain, right brain, no brain.” The left brain is analytic. So let’s say you’re a kicker. You need to kick the field goal to win the game, and the wind is blowing. So, analytically, maybe you aim at the right goal post because the wind is going to cause the ball to drift into the middle. That’s a left-brain, analytical decision. But as soon as you do that—and it’s sequential—then you have to go to the right brain: creative. And a creative function can be kinesthetic, audio, rhythmic, visual—whatever works for the individual athlete. Then, once they have that rhythm, it’s no brain, where you don’t think. You just kick it.

FC: Can you give an example of a right brain, creative technique that worked for a specific athlete?

DL: Nate Kaeding. He was a kicker for the Chargers. When I worked with him, we worked on rhythm, and we did it with a metronome. We created tape loops with a specific rhythm so from his first step to striking the ball, it’s boom, boom, boom, boom, all in rhythm. So when he’s ready to kick, it’s “no brain,” and he can rely on that rhythm and sequence to execute something he’s done 800,000 times, regardless of the situation.

Some athletes are more visual, so we’d think of a different creative function. It really has a lot to do with the athlete’s gifts. But no matter what creative function they use, there’s a basic sequence and routine that we use that they can go back to. It’s like a script for an actor. When an actor gets nervous, they go to the script, and that settles them down.

FC: What other strategies do you use when working with athletes?

DL: Another technique is thought substitution. Let’s say you’re a pro golfer and you’re coming down the stretch to win a tournament, and on the 18th hole, there’s water on the left, and all you can think about is hitting it into the water. In this case, we would use thought substitution, where we give you something to think about as a placeholder, so you don’t think about that negative thought. It’s always something nontechnical, too. So in golf, we’ll focus on follow-through. We did something similar with Nate Kaeding where we focused on extending through the ball—because if you’re focused on extending through the ball, you’re not thinking about missing the kick. You’re locked in on extending through the ball. It’s the same with the follow-through in a golfer’s swing.

FC: Is there a strategy people can use, either in sports or in business or in life, to better handle high-pressure situations and perform when it matters most?

DL: It’s process versus results, right? Perfect example: I use a system in golf called “the mental scorecard.” So instead of a player coming in after a round and telling me they shot a 68, they’ll say, “I got a 98 on the mental scorecard.” That means that on 98% of all their shots, they went through the process—left brain, right brain, no brain. And we know there’s a very high correlation between being absorbed in the process and achieving a good result.

So in business, we define the objective and ask, “What’s the process that brings us to that objective?” And that becomes the focus. As soon as your focus deviates from that—you start thinking about the money you’re going to make, or the raise you’re going to get—your performance is compromised.

FC: So it really comes down to controlling what you can control, trusting your process, and letting the results take care of themselves.

DL: Exactly. That’s the simple way to put it. What we can control is the process prior to execution, right up to execution. And that’s what we get people to focus on. We try to get an athlete to compete against themselves in terms of evaluating the process and not the result. If you can get that fundamental paradigm shift—whether you’re an athlete or an executive—then you’re off and running.

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A founding editor of The Players’ Tribune, Paul Mueller is a freelance writer and content strategist based in Florida.

Dr. Michael Lardon is the author of Finding Your Zone and Mastering Golf’s Mental Game.