Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most - Hardcover

Weisinger, Hendrie; Pawliw-Fry, J. P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804136726 ISBN 13: 9780804136723

Verlag: Crown Currency, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Nobody performs better under pressure. Regardless of the task, pressure ruthlessly diminishes our judgment, decision-making, attention, dexterity, and performance in every professional and personal arena. In Performing Under Pressure, Drs. Hendrie Weisinger and J.P. Pawliw-Fry introduce us to the concept of pressure management, offering empirically tested short term and long term solutions to help us overcome the debilitating effects of pressure.
 
Performing Under Pressure tackles the greatest obstacle to personal success, whether in a sales presentation, at home, on the golf course, interviewing for a job, or performing onstage at Carnegie Hall. Despite sports mythology, no one "rises to the occasion" under pressure and does better than they do in practice. The reality is pressure makes us do worse, and sometimes leads us to fail utterly. But there are things we can do to diminish its effects on our performance. 
 
Performing Under Pressure draws on research from over 12,000 people, and features the latest research from neuroscience and from the frontline experiences of Fortune 500 employees and managers, Navy SEALS, Olympic and other elite athletes, and others. It offers 22 specific strategies each of us can use to reduce pressure in our personal and professional lives and allow us to better excel in whatever we do.
 
Whether you’re a corporate manager, a basketball player, or a student preparing for the SAT, Performing Under Pressure will help you to do your best when it matters most.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HENDRIE WEISINGER, Ph.D.,  is a world-renowned psychologist and pioneer in the field of pressure management, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books. He has consulted with and developed programs for dozens of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, and has taught in Executive Education and Executive MBA programs at Wharton, UCLA, NYU, Cornell, Penn State, and MIT.
 
J.P. PAWLIW-FRY is an international performance coach and advisor to Olympic athletes and senior business executives. Among his clients are Marriott, Unilever, Allstate and the Orlando Magic. Formerly he taught executive education at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.  He is president of the Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP), a research firm that trains and coaches leaders and organizations to perform more effectively under pressure.

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Chapter 1

The Power of Pressure

Have you ever thought about how you handle pressure in your marriage? You would be wise to. Of all the things that make marriages difficult, the inability to manage pressure tops the list.

The “Love Lab” sits near Yesler Terrace in Central Seattle, Washington, between Seattle University and Swedish Cherry Hill Medical Center, on East Jefferson Street. Officially, it is known as the Relationship Research Institute, and the nondescript white brick building is home to two of the leading experts on relationships in the world: Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Gottman. The institute’s nickname suggests a bohemian enterprise, but it is anything but that.

A professor emeritus at the University of Washington, John Gottman has spent a lifetime studying more than three thousand couples in research and four thousand more couples in intervention and treatment. He is the author of 190 published academic articles and author or coauthor of 40 books, including the New York Times bestseller The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. As a team, the Drs. Gottman have worked with approximately eight thousand couples in workshop and therapy settings.

Of their many empirical findings, none is more amazing than this one statistic: They can predict, with 93.6 percent accuracy, which couples will divorce. To put that number in context, the odds of making a chance prediction with 90 percent accuracy are 1 to .0000000000000000001.

How do they do it? Armed with decades of clinical research and data, Dr. John Gottman examines how couples interact when under pressure. That single element—pressure—whether managed or succumbed to in a difficult conversation, is a more accurate predictor than financial and social compatibility, “chemistry,” or any number of other commonly held relationship keystones. It’s all about pressure.

In his research, the psychologist recognized that many variables thought to be important for a successful marital relationship are not in fact predictive of whether couples stay together. What he looked at instead was how couples interact when they feel the heat or experience the pressure that comes with discussing a contentious issue. He found that couples who can’t navigate their way through the pressure experience crack and divorce.

John Gottman’s scientific methodology is rigorous. Couples are hooked up to state-of-the-art apparatuses so physiological responses—heart rate, galvanic skin conductance—can be measured and connected to how the couple is acting and how they’re responding to each other. Are they relaxed? Psychologically aroused? On edge? At the same time, trained observers record and code their behavior or body language, facial expressions, voice inflection—all of which is later connected to their dialogue and physical reactions. “Do the partners look at each other when speaking to each other, smile, or frown? . . . Do they lean into each other or lean away? Are they open and expansive or closed and contracted? How long does it take for their voices to sound angry?” It is a lot of data and it is analyzed meticulously.

Dr. Gottman’s data-heavy approach has been incorporated into the work of thousands of therapists, and has changed the course of countless relationships. He has challenged traditional marriage counseling techniques. He has suggested that some of the techniques that therapists routinely use simply do not make much of a difference in a marriage, and may even be counterproductive. For instance, the idea of “active listening,” where partners are encouraged to use “I statements” and play back what their partner is feeling in a conversation. For many years this has been the bedrock of marriage counseling. Yet according to Gottman’s data, it makes virtually no difference in the success of a relationship or in therapy.

According to Gottman, “If your partner is saying, ‘You’re terrible,’ according to active listening, you are supposed to be able to empathize and be understanding. We found in our research that hardly anybody does that, even in great marriages. When somebody attacks them, they attack right back.”

Gottman says, “Well, it kind of makes sense. Let’s say my wife is really angry with me because I repeatedly haven’t balanced the checkbook and the checks bounce. I keep saying: ‘I’m sorry, and I’ll try not to do it again.’ So finally she gets angry and confronts me in a therapy session. What would it accomplish if I say: ‘I hear what you’re saying, you’re really angry with me, and I can understand why you’re angry with me because I’m not balancing the checkbook.’ That’s not going to make her feel any better; I still haven’t balanced the damned checkbook!”

His lab identified negative behavior patterns that can take couples down the path to divorce. One is negative criticism, stating your complaints as a defect in your partner’s personality: “You always talk about yourself. You are so selfish.” Another negative behavior is contempt: statements that come from a relative position of superiority. Contempt is the greatest single predictor of divorce. For example, telling your partner, “You’re an idiot.” A third is defensiveness: making excuses for one’s behavior or accusing your partner—“You always blame me, I am always the bad guy.” Defensiveness is used to ward off a perceived attack. The last is stonewalling and emotional withdrawal, such as when the listener intentionally ignores the speaker, fails to provide the usual nonverbal signals that the listener is “tracking” the speaker, or simply doesn’t respond to what the speaker is communicating.

What Dr. Gottman was able to determine is that success is less about the “chemistry” that exists between a couple and has more to do with how they manage their own internal chemistry as they interact under the pressure of threatening conversations.

The more a couple/individual cannot handle pressure, the more “physiologically aroused, mentally rigid, and impulsive they become during a conflict. This state of affairs increases the likelihood they will engage in destructive communication patterns that inevitably decrease marital satisfaction and increase marital dissatisfaction.” Dr. Gottman found that happily married couples handle the pressure of conflict more effectively and are able to make conversational repair attempts even in the middle of an argument.

At heart, what the Love Lab has found is that if you want your marriage to be long and enjoyable, you need to learn to handle pressure—and hope your partner can handle it too.

Truths About Pressure

There are three basic and powerful truths about pressure. They are powerful because they influence our life every day, often in ways that we are not aware of, and almost always to our detriment.

The first is that pressure disrupts what we value most: our relationships, our careers, our parenting effectiveness, and our core ethical and moral decision-making. The consequences of pressure can break a marriage, derail a career, and cause children to pull away from their parents or feel the need to cheat to meet their parents’ expectations. And it can compromise our very integrity.

The second truth is that people who handle pressure better than others do not “rise to the occasion” or perform statistically better than they do in non-pressure situations. If you are a sports fan, you’ve been fed a myth by the media that some athletes are “clutch” performers who do better under...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown Currency
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804136726
• ISBN 13: 9780804136723
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland