You Don't Have to Feel Great to Perform Great
(Read this on the Growth EQ website here.)
“I said to myself: what the hell am I doing here... I just didn't want to be there."
“All I want is to get this over with.”
As a big performance approaches—whether it’s in the boardroom, surgical operating theater, or on the track—anxiety and fear can send us spiraling. Our legs feel heavy, our mouth dries up, and our brain isn’t firing like it should. In these circumstances, it’s easy to think today just isn’t my day. Everything feels off, and that means we are not going to rise to the occasion. Maybe it’s best if we pack it in and try again another time. Or, if we’re forced to start anyway, perhaps we should accept that our best performance is out the window.
But the quotes above aren’t from a weekend warrior or from someone who relegated themselves to a subpar day. Murray Halberg said he didn’t want to be there when describing how he felt before becoming the surprise champion of the Olympic 5k race. Herb Elliott said he just wanted to get it over with in the hour before he went on to win Olympic Gold and set a World Record in the 1500.
We often think that how we feel before stepping into the arena will dictate how the main event will unfold. If our legs feel dead before a race, we panic. If our mind feels sharp before a pitch, we know we’re ready to step into the batter’s box. If the notes are popping off the strings, we’re ready to take the stage. If not, it’s going to be ugly.
At one point or another, all of us have probably pre-judged performance, anticipating how we’ll do before we’ve even taken our first step. It’s a common habit of mind. But in doing so, we set ourselves up to fail. We don’t allow for the breakthrough performances and surprises that Elliott or Halberg experienced. That’s why it’s so important to reverse this habit and replace it with a better one.
If there’s one sport where a warm-up ought to predict performance, it’s Olympic shooting. After all, the warm-up is the same exact thing that you’ll do during a match. You fire at the same target, using the same gun, and in the same manner. The only difference is that an announcement has been made letting you know it’s no longer warm-ups, but now everything you do counts. In a recent conversation with 2016 Olympic shooting champion Ginny Thrasher, she told us that it’s vital to disconnect how she feels right before the competition and the competition itself.
It’s easy to pre-judge. If you couldn’t find the target in warm-ups, your brain naturally jumps to this is how it’s going to go during the match. But that kind of thinking backfires—even when the warmup is going great; here, you often see shooters rush the shot, or not account for the additional stress that knowing it’s go-time causes. Alternatively, if you can’t find your sight to save your life in warm-ups, it can send you spiraling towards despair. Thrasher says that you have to figure out how to turn off the “predictive mechanism…I always say to young shooters: Bad sights, good first target. Good sights, good first target.” In other words, you’ve got to let go of how you feel during the warmup and realize that you can show up and perform your best anyway.
This advice isn’t just for world-class shooters, it’s for all of us. And yet our minds are constantly inundated with the exact opposite.
Consider social media and podcast land, where we put the emphasis on the perfect routine or ritual to get us in the right state to perform. You need to stare at the sun, drink your coffee at the exact right time, jump into your cold plunge, and on and on and on… all to get to the exact state where you can finally conquer the day. Or maybe your WHOOP or Aura Ring needs to show you a good (or at least not terrible) “readiness” score. But that mindset makes you fragile.
When you can’t nail your routine, or when, for whatever reason, your routine doesn’t leave you feeling energized or “ready,” it’s so easy to hit the mental eject button: today’s just not my day. But this isn’t necessarily true. Yes, routines really can help. Yes, every great performer uses routines. Yes, you should probably have a few routines yourself. But they are not destiny.
One of the best things that can happen is that you feel horrible before you start something that matters, and then surprise yourself during the activity itself: The great race after a warm-up filled with dread. The productive writing session when you were half-asleep going in. The pitch that blew your boss away when you wanted to be anywhere else before you opened her office door. These experiences help you realize that you don’t need the perfect warm-up to perform well, that you don’t have to feel great to get going. You just need to get going. Sometimes, you just might surprise yourself.
When you’re feeling great, ride those waves. But when you aren’t, it can be helpful to say: Don’t pre-judge the main event based on how I feel during the warmup. Anything can happen. How I feel now doesn’t dictate how I’ll feel when the gun goes off, when the curtain is pulled back.
Human performance is complex. For all we know about what contributes to our best days, there is still so much that we don’t. Let’s say that peak performance tracks perfectly to how you feel during the warmup about seventy percent of the time. That leaves us with the thirty percent, it doesn't. Thirty is a big number, especially throughout a lifetime. This ought to be plenty of reason to give yourself a chance. You never know what’s going to happen: Bad sights, good first target. Good sights, good first target.
-- Steve and Brad
