Don’t Choke
Jonah Lehrer follows up on his recent Wall Street Journal article with some helpful information about how to not screw-up when the quality of your performance is important. For many people, this would be in a competitive sports-type situation. For me, it’s in the area of cutting teeth for a grade. Here’s an excerpt from Lehrer’s article Don’t Choke : The Frontal Cortex:
The second interesting result was that there was a way to ward off choking. When the expert golfers contemplated a holistic cue word, their performance was no longer affected by anxiety. Because the positive adjectives were vague and generic, they didn’t cause the athletes to lose the flow of expert performance or overrule their automatic brain.
So, you can think “smooth” or “precise” or “accurate” — and your body will act in a way that mimics the word being contemplated. It seems like a great strategy for trying to produce your best performance on cue… but of course it only works if you have many practice hours invested, allowing you to call on that “automatic brain”.