How to Train Yourself to Be Cool Under Pressure..

Last weekend after giving the okay for special forces soldiers to raid a compound where the world’s most wanted man was believed to be hiding, President Obama straightened his bow tie and went off to roast Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Funny and unruffled, the President gave no indication he was feeling the strain of his momentous decision. He was, in short, a pretty cool customer.

It was an impressive display of calm under pressure and inspires the question — how does he do it? Is the ability to handle stress an innate characteristic like height or eye color, or is it something us mere mortals can learn to do too? According to Justin Menkes, the author of new book Better Under Pressure, the answer is very much the latter. “Attributes have a range of genetic influence and the ability to deal with pressure is on the far side of the continuum in terms of preparation versus genetics. Your ability to deal with stress is overwhelmingly about preparation,” he told Entry-Level Rebel in an interview.

Obama-level coolness is within all of our reach, says Menkes, who reminds young people not to be overawed by cool performances from those in senior positions: “It is indisputable that they can do those highly pressured, extraordinary things that they see the masters do. The masters have been preparing for 40-45 years. Excellent, expert preparation got them there. They weren’t born a star.”

So how do you go about building up nerves of steel? Very much like you would go about building up abs of steel, says Menkes, who recommends a progressive increase in strain for those who want to toughen up. But be warned, like with physical exercise, strengthening your nerve isn’t necessarily comfortable:

There’s no simple A, B, C. You can’t just read books — it’s not like that. It’s not ‘OK, I put a little post-it on my desk for a daily mantra “Remember you’re terrific!”‘ That’s useless. You have to build inside your brain, your consciousness and your stomach a knowing that you can handle it.

You have to put yourself in situations that elevate your sense of stretch, whether it’s a presentation, public speaking or a task that causes you fear like taking lead in a Monday morning meeting. Take initiative on something, but not something that is over your head because what is essential is that your experiences along the way are positive.

If you put yourself in situations that are just so extreme, then the probabilities are you aren’t ready and it can go badly. Then your memory attaches negative experiences to pressure and that doesn’t help. We want you to associate elevated pressure with a confidence that you can handle it, and you do that by elevating the situations of stress where there’s a risk of failure but you’re well enough prepared for it that odds are it’s going to go well. You put yourself in several of those and then you have that internal memory of ‘I can handle pressure.’ And then you keep elevating it.

It may sound like a less than pleasant process, but Menkes insists that becoming a cool customer is key for business leaders of the future. “The biggest distinction in the 21st century is an ongoing elevation of pressure and complexity,” he warns. “That’s not going to go away, so you have to find a way to find it invigorating. The people that will thrive it are those who understand it, accept it and take advantage of it.” Better get practicing then.

By,
Jessica Stillman

5 Ways Managers Can Become Real Leaders

When you’re new to something, you make mistakes. That’s how you learn. Young managers make lots of mistakes. It still makes me cringe to think about how incompetent I was as a young manager.

But hey, that’s just the way it works. You get out there, screw up, and hopefully learn from your mistakes.

Unfortunately, not everyone does … learn. That’s the business world’s natural selection process at work. Sometimes young managers self-destruct before their careers even have a chance of getting off the ground.
Here are five ways young managers terrorize their employees and sabotage their own careers:

1. Full of authority they think they’ve suddenly acquired with a title, they order people around and expect quiet compliance and obedience.

2. They put the micro in micromanager, becoming little Napoleon control freaks who don’t just tell employees what to do, but how to do it, too.

3. Thinking they’ve acquired something important that they’re afraid to lose, they stop taking risks for fear of failure.

4. Taking their perceived importance way too seriously, they become full of themselves, enslaved by a hyper-inflated ego.

5. They think they’ve actually arrived somewhere instead of realizing that they’ve only just arrived at the beginning.


And so on. In short, they act like children. We give children a lot of leeway because we figure they’ll eventually grow into mature, fully functioning adults. But like I said, young managers don’t always follow that template. Some make it, others fail miserably, and everyone else falls somewhere in between.

So, if that list of unsavory characteristics describes managers you’ve had or even have now, and they’re not exactly spring chickens, now you know why. Because they never grew up.

We talked about this in Are You a Dysfunctional Manager? or, as some call it, the 5 Stages of Management Development. But what we didn’t discuss is whether there’s some way for managers who are stuck in the “screw up” stage to get with the program. Actually, there is.

It’s counterintuitive, but most of the characteristics people tend to assign to youth are actually adult characteristics, and vice versa. Seriously, it’s true. Here’s the Counterintuitive Guide to Growing Into a Mature Leader:

* Lighten up. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Figure out where you left your sense of humor. Get over yourself. After all, you’re nothing special, just a flesh and blood manager trying to make it in a tough and highly competitive corporate world. Once you take the pressure off yourself, you’ll begin to realize how counterproductive it is to micromanage your poor employees.

* Let yourself fail. Make mistakes. Take risks. Believe it or not, you have less to lose than you think and, in fact, far more to lose if you don’t take risks. They say “no pain no gain,” and “no risk no reward.” But the truth is that, if you don’t take risks, your risk of failure actually goes sky high because playing it safe is a sure way to fail. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in business management and leadership, it’s true, nevertheless.

* Give up control over the little things. Just let them go. Instead, set your sites on the big picture. Set mid-to-high-level goals so you - and your employees - can actually use your brains and skills to achieve them, instead of constantly scrambling and reacting. Imagine accomplishing those goals by motivating, engaging, and challenging your people to do their best. Imagine that.

* Remember life. Most of us think we’re on a path to somewhere, but actually, we’re not. This - what you do every day of your life - is all there is. Life is about connecting with people. And business life is about satisfying your customers and stakeholders who also happen to be people. It’s also about doing a good job, which, incidentally, will make you feel good. They say life is short, but I think it’s long. No matter how old or experienced you are, you likely have a long way to go. Remember that.

By,
Steve Tobak

Lead Under Pressure Like You Were Born for It..

Under Pressure: Learning to be a "Clutch" Leader

In the sports world, a “clutch” player performs best when the pressure is on, backs are to the wall, and all eyes turned their way. Think Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Martina Navratilova. When it was all on the line, they not only didn’t wilt, they got better.

Is there such a thing as a clutch leader? Do you know managers or CEOs who rise above when everything is on the line? A bigger question: Can you learn to be clutch?

The latest issue of Harvard Business Review is spun around the topic of military leadership, and there is an interesting blog post on HBR.org about how military cadets learn what it takes to be clutch. New York Times business writer Paul Sullivan, author of Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t recounts a talk he gave at West Point on the subject.

All clutch leaders display five traits, he said: focus, discipline, adaptability, being present, and fear and desire. Read his post for more depth on each of these.

Sullivan’s good news for the rest of us is that organizations can train their performers to respond well to pressure. Sullivan says there are three things business leaders can learn from cadets:

1. Focused on a goal.

“When they graduate they will be deployed to lead a platoon, probably in Afghanistan or Iraq. They know the responsibilities and the risks. And everything they are doing is preparing them for that moment. Do you know what your primary mission is at work?”

2. Continuous improvement.

“They work in an organization that is continually striving to be better. When a mistake happens, the Army tries not to let it happen a second time. Are you aligned with the right organization? Or if you’re leading that organization, are you prepared to change things that aren’t working, even if change could be hard or even a reversal of something you implemented?”

3. Practice for success.

“These cadets are given the physical and mental training that will help them do their jobs at the highest level. They know you have to be able to perform a task perfectly under normal conditions before you can expect to do it in a stressful situation. Can you say the same thing? Are you able to do your job at a high level every day? If not, then you should not be surprised when you make the wrong decisions under pressure.”

Will following this advice make you the Michael Jordan of your business? Well, maybe not–some people are just hard-coded for success in tough situations. But working at focusing on the objective, adaptability to the environment and improvement of skills sure puts whatever natural abilities you have in the best position to succeed when the going gets tough.


By Sean Silverthorne (B-NET)