Читать книгу Performance Under Pressure - Ceri Evans - Страница 38

Under pressure we all fail in predictable ways.

We’ve looked at how the same emergency reactions seen in animals – fight, flight or freeze – are triggered in modern-day performance situations, although usually more by social threats than physical danger. To help us translate them from the animal kingdom to our world of performance, let’s modernise the behaviours by renaming them.

Rather than fight, think aggressive. Under pressure, people raise their voices, threaten, bully, confront, insult, reject and exclude.

Rather than flight, think escape. Under pressure, people remove themselves from the fray by being late or not turning up, taking sick leave, resigning, or getting sent off the sports field.

And rather than freeze, think passive. People who can’t get out of a situation may not go completely immobile, but they go quiet and look down when volunteers are requested, always letting others go first and staying a step behind, just generally going through the motions.

For my money, the passive reaction is the invisible killer of performance. People can hide in plain sight by being present and operating at a minimum standard, doing just enough to avoid drawing attention to themselves as not contributing. It’s a silent epidemic that can completely undermine a team dynamic.

Many team-sport athletes know this type of player: the one who is on the field but never really gets their hands dirty, and always seems to be one step off the pace. Large organisations are often full of people who say the right things but whose actions lack impact.

Sometimes the passive state can be misread as being relaxed: a basic but common error in the sports world. Unless we are an animal playing dead and hoping to escape, it is a poor performance state.

These three styles of behaviour, aggressive, passive and escape – APE – are the three most unhelpful reactions we have under pressure. They all arise from RED, high-arousal reactions; even the passive reaction, involving low arousal, follows an initial high-arousal spike. The APE acronym reminds us that we share these responses with most members of the animal kingdom – and they are most definitely within us all.

In our early years, we all develop a personal pattern that means one of these three becomes our default reaction to extreme pressure. Or it might be a combination of two, or all three. Passive–aggressive behaviour is a classic example.

Recognising our personal defensive behaviour style and how it hurts our performance will show us what traps to avoid in the future. If we take this step, we are already in a stronger position to perform under pressure.

What APE pattern do you default to when you fall apart under pressure – A, P, E, or a deadly combination?