Читать книгу Performance Under Pressure - Ceri Evans - Страница 42

Right in the middle of the ESC-APE process, we can have an experience so destructive that without it, I would not be writing this book: overwhelm.

The state of overwhelm feels like a force overpowering us, a load so heavy we think we can’t cope with the weight.

The heaviness comes from the burden of the external ESC pressure – the expectations, the scrutiny and the consequences of judgment. When those three aspects are rolled into one dense load, the situation becomes too much for us to bear. Our thinking, our feelings, in fact our whole perception becomes overloaded. And that mental overload pitches us into a state of overwhelm.

We all have a particular load that we can tolerate. It is not set in stone, and fluctuates with time. But the mental formula is always the same: when our current limit is reached, we become overloaded, then overwhelmed.

As well as overpowering us mentally, it feels like the external world of pressure is having a physical impact on us. Our posture changes, shrinking us down. We start to stoop, tense our jaw, hunch our shoulders, and bend at the knee, bracing ourselves against the invisible weight. Our breathing becomes shallow, our voice weak. We are a picture of tension, as if we’re really