Today's message is inspired by the book, Pressure: Why We Crumble Under Pressure and How We Can Overcome It by Dane Jensen. The book discusses strategies for performing well under pressure. One key practice emphasized in the book is "reframing pressure as a challenge rather than a threat." This mindset shift allows athletes to see high-stakes situations as opportunities to demonstrate their skills rather than as potential failures. By focusing on the positive aspects of the challenge—like the opportunity to succeed or to showcase one's abilities—athletes can reduce anxiety and improve their performance in critical moments. This practice involves consciously altering one's perception of pressure, thus turning stress into motivation.
Change Agents Community with Dr. James Rouse
This One Practice Will Change Your Life
(upbeat music) - Hey, it's Dr. James Rouse. Welcome to the Change Agents Podcast. This is the place where personal growth meets human performance. Join me and the Change Agents community where inspired individuals unite to ignite their full potential and create extraordinary mastery. - Good morning, it's James. It is so good to see you today. Thank you for your time. Thank you for energy. I'm deeply grateful to have the honor and the blessing of laying eyes on you and I do hope and pray that this message finds you and all the people that you love, peaceful, thriving and very, very well. Let me share a phrase with you and I would love for you to honestly think about what comes up for you when I share this with you. This one practice will change your life. This one practice will change your life. When you hear things like that, you go, really? Or, okay, show me how because I'm really ready to have my life transformed, my personal growth continue to be exponential. And if there really was one thing I could do that could help me to have those experiences, what would it be? And bonus here, it's super, super simple. I've been looking at a book called Pressure by Gears Your Day. I think that's how you pronounce his name. He is a Norwegian psychologist and sports performance coach. This guy's been working with some of the very best athletes and soccer, tennis, all kinds of sports, but his whole jam is helping athletes perform when it matters most. In fact, most of this book, Pressure, is written around the experience of just a few moments. That only happens every now and then is that is the penalty kick phenomenon at the end of the game. When the game is tied and each team gets a chance to shoot penalty kicks, literally standing in front of the goal and kicking and hoping that you get more in than the other team does. You're probably familiar with this. This experience that he's been studying over the last couple of decades is so amazing because basically what he's done is he is distilled down what happens those first few moments. And at the end of those moments and put it into a practice that every single one of us can benefit from because this whole idea of what's happening to somebody who's getting ready to kick a penalty kick, there are just moments. And in those moments, you have to get centered, you have to get focused, you have to really get clear about your purpose and what you wanna be doing, and then you gotta go and do it. And it all happens in just a few moments. So his whole research is about how you can take that experience of penalty kicking and put it throughout your entire day because all of us have things that come up every single day, maybe not nearly as intense as a World Cup penalty kick, but we've got presentations, we've got hard conversations, we've got things that we wanna do. And all of those things can be treated as a high pressure opportunity to employ this science. Because he's studied the people who are most successful with taking those first, those moments and putting them into a practice that becomes replicable, replicatable. And when you do this, you can pretty much count on the highest outcome each and every time. No, they don't always make the kick and always get the goal, but the vast majority of the time they do because they do a certain sequence of events. So I want you to think about, you're gonna get a presentation and you wanna get yourself ready for that. You're having a tough conversation with a loved one and you're gonna get yourself ready for that. You're getting ready for your day or three quarters of the way through your day. It's been going well and all of a sudden you get a hard call or a tough email or a really aggravating text and it sends you off and then you go, "Wait, I can't let this take me anyplace. "I gotta get myself re-centered. "I gotta follow through. "I gotta perform at my best." So what basically he talks about is, there's a sequence of four P's. Number one is you wanna pause. Before you do anything intense or you wanna get yourself back to the center, you wanna get yourself back into a place where you can be focused, pause, hit the pause button just for a moment. In the experience of getting present, number two, you take three long, deep breaths. And your exhale is twice as long as you're in heels. So you got pause, present, per, (laughs) pause, present, purpose. As you are getting present, you think about your purpose. My purpose is to get centered. My purpose is to be loving. My purpose is to, number four, perform. Pause, presence, purpose, perform. I know it's a lot of these. Pause, presence, purpose, perform. This is magic if you can think about how you can do this and look for times in your day when you're in a place in your mind, you're going, oh my gosh, I'm losing my center. I need to get back to my center. I've got an important presentation. I've got a sales call. I've got to do this hard thing and I need to get myself ready so I can perform. I'm gonna pause. I'm gonna get myself present. I'm gonna get myself on purpose. Think about what I want to achieve and then I kick the ball I perform. This is awesome. I hope I did it justice. I know there's a lot of peace there but I think you get the gist. We can stop anytime during our day, anytime and take these four piece to heart and think about the science behind it. The highest achieving athletes, this is what they do. In between tennis points, this is what Federer, Novak, Serena, Coco, this is what they do in between tennis points. They pause, they get present, they get on purpose and they perform over and over and over again. Love this, love the book, it's called Pressure. I will write down the author because I probably didn't do that right either. But I hope you guys appreciate this message and take it to heart. Much love, all blessings, bye for now. Thanks for listening. Together, I believe we can make a difference in our own lives and the lives of those around us. Don't forget to subscribe, share and leave a review to help us spread positive energy across the planet. Until next time, keep shining your life and being the change you wanna see and be in the world. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (gentle music)