Pressure is Positive

Small amount of pressure or nerves in the early stages (before it builds into something big) can be a distraction. With your senses heightened, your mind can attend to things unimportant to what you’re doing. Noises that you didn’t hear before you now hear. Your clothing doesn’t seem to fit as comfortably. Movement around you, that you didn’t even see before, now catches your eye.

Players skilled in dealing with pressure, use the power of their minds, their mental muscle, to block out these distraction. They’re successful not just because they know not to focus on these things, but more importantly they know what to refocus upon.

When you know where your mind needs to be, rather than just where it shouldn’t be, you have directions for where you mind needs to focus.

If all you have are directions where not to focus, the mind idles like a car waiting for you to step on the gas and go.

The benefit of pressure is that increase in energy – nerves amped up – allows you to dig deeper into the action and see things that you can’t normally. If you’re finding that in the early stages of getting nervous that you get distracted, force yourself to focus 1st on where you mind needs to be (reading your opponents, improving a few of your own weaknesses, sensing game flow, etc) and 2nd use that find new details.

Pressure can be a positive if you use it well.