Thriving Under Pressure
How you respond to pressure depends on your skill level. Under stress, habitual responding takes over. If your skills are underdeveloped, your automatic response defaults to threat-activated patterns. If your skills are strong, your automatic response is competent and effective.
Adam Grant cites this research in a recent episode of ReThinking featuring David Beckham. It’s a clean case for regulatory capacity.
Beckham recalls the 1998 World Cup. England vs. Argentina. Beckham receives a foul, retaliates with a kick, gets red-carded, and England loses. The reaction was brutal – he was burned in effigy, blamed nationally, called a disgrace. One of the most public collapses under pressure in sports history.
Grant names this as a basic emotion regulation challenge. Flat out. And theorizes that what happened after – the career Beckham built from that moment forward – reflects what regulatory capacity development looks like in practice. Beckham doesn’t describe it this way himself. He isn’t certain he intentionally practiced regulating emotions effectively under pressure. But the change in his performance tells the story.
Grant describes his approach when teaching people to lead under pressure: identify emotional triggers and build a script for responding differently when they are activated. Recognize threat-activated protection patterns. Plan alternative responses. Learn from mistakes rather than being defined by them.
Beckham agrees that acknowledging mistakes and acting differently afterward matters more than the mistake itself. That’s what regulated leadership requires.
The common challenge: admitting the mistake in the first place. And every human, every leader, makes mistakes.
Ruminating on what we’ve done isn’t helpful. We can’t change what’s already happened. Rumination only increases shame. Which, contrary to common belief, isn’t an effective motivator for behavior change.
Acknowledging and taking ownership – that’s where real change happens. We can assess what went wrong, what contributed to our behavior, and how to act differently next time. Shame clouds that thinking. Accountability clears it.
We need to accept that mistakes happen. They’re part of being human. We’ve made them before and we’ll make them again. Mistake avoidance is reality avoidance, and it makes problems worse over time.
DBT outlines agreements clinicians use to guide interpersonal interactions. My favorite: the fallibility agreement.
The agreement that all therapists are jerks (at times). It removes the need for defensiveness, because clinicians have probably done whatever problematic thing they’re accused of. The task is to rely on teammates to help identify more effective behavior for next time.
I love this agreement because it grants permission to make mistakes. To take responsibility. To repair and move forward without shame shutting down the process. The mistake isn’t the point of the conversation – it’s how to do better next time.
This is the difference between knowing what to do and actually doing it when it matters.