Why do some choke, while others stay cool and calm? It’s all about how you prepare.
You’re on stage. Three hundred pairs of eyes are fixed on you. You’re killing: Twenty minutes in and the audience is in the palm of your hand.
Then your slide show freezes up. Your skin tingles. Your body tenses. You stammer. Your eyes dart back and forth from the audience to the screen to your laptop to the stage manager in the wings. You fall apart.
As Beilock and Carr describe it, “Pressure raises self-consciousness and anxiety about performing correctly, which increases the attention paid to skill processes and their step-by-step control. Attention to execution at this step-by-step level is thought to disrupt well-learned or proceduralised performances.”
Or, as those of us less learned describe it, you choke. Still, some how, some way, in the very same situation, other people don’t choke. What do they have that we don’t?
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