Olympians, SEALs, and Singers do this…

For many years, I have prepared a wide range of people for high stakes exams: the GMAT, the GRE, the LSAT, the SAT. And the sad reality is that a good percentage of the students are stone scared of the exams; impressive NYC professionals would have meltdowns and panic attacks in the weeks leading up to test day.

To help, I immersed myself in the fascinating literature of performance psychology: from Olympic sports psychology to Navy SEAL training. Various groups have found this literature and made use of it: public speaking coaches, martial artists, and management consultants.

I found a body of literature coming out of the Soviet Union chock full of techniques used by gymnasts, chess players, and cosmonauts.

And I will share a simple strategy that is common to all of the literature: the warm up.

You need to warm up before you practice AND before the big show.

People naturally warm up before activities they love, but activities they hate? Watch a student walk in to math class or a mediocre employee walking in to a meeting. They sigh and deflate. They slouch and seem to want to go into hibernation.

They should be doing the opposite.

Here are the three components of any warm up:

1. Review: You might have written reminders: the what and they why. If not, start building a list.

2. Premortem: imagine the worst outcome, and then determine why it happened and what you could do to prevent it. The warm-up is not time for cheesy positivity.

3. Get physical. Do push-ups, run up a few flights of stairs: get the heart pumping, and then let it cool off a bit.

Fascinatingly, writer’s block seems to have the same neural signatures as other forms of performance anxiety. Treat your creative time as if it were a big game, a big speech, a big battle, or a big test. Yes, you can do this several times a day.

Warm-ups are the pathway to high performance.