The Feel of It

Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance
by John Eliot, Ph.D.

(Page 6 of 6)

Athletes who've actually been in the Trusting Mindset are notoriously inarticulate about what happened. Franz Klammer could not get much beyond the description that "nothing" was going on in his mind. Most athletes tend to stress how little control they try to exert - "I was playing out of my mind" is a common description - while they let their skills simply take over. Similarly, astronauts, pilots, and well-trained soldiers who have performed superhuman feats with their lives on the line talk about being a little concerned at first - "and then my skills kicked in." Actors and musicians tend to talk about it in spiritual terms: "I was in the present." "I stayed in the moment." Some performers have described an almost out-of-body experience in which playing the role or the music comes so easily that they have the feeling of hovering over their own performance, feeding off the audience's response, watching themselves like an external observer.

And while the press has not quite gotten to asking wizard entrepreneurs, CEOs, heart surgeons, or other highly successful business executives what it felt like to score big under pressure, I have, and their answers are pretty much the same as what I have heard from the many athletes and musicians I have worked with or interviewed: They were so totally involved in what they were doing that they can remember only the feel of the performance; they weren't cautiously thinking through their steps or evaluating themselves.

I think you know the feeling. Go back to key-tossing, to that sense of doing something that doesn't really count, the freedom of performing like a kid at play. Nothing is riding on throwing the keys, so you just let them go, and perfectly every time. Here's another example I like. It's one that former college football coach and NFL Super Bowl champion Jimmy Johnson used to help his players play with more abandon, and which I now use in my class:

Put a two-by-four board on the floor and walk from one end to the other.

It is not hard. Not one of my students has ever fallen off the board. If you videotape yourself doing this exercise, you will see that your foot hits the middle of the board every step of the way, as if you were walking down the street. Your eyes just look past the board at the far end, to where you're going, and your feet just move.

Now suspend that board thirty feet in the air and walk from one end to the other.

It's a lot harder. I suspect that your form would change: You'd inch along, maybe extend your arms for balance, look down at the board or the ground below. Or maybe you'd stand at one end and say, "No way!"

Yet the process it takes to walk across that board - on the ground or thirty feet in the air - is exactly the same. Even for the midair walk, all you have to do is look at the other end and go, as if you were walking down the street (or walking along the board as if it were on the ground). Theoretically. Practically, it's a different matter. And this, I believe, illustrates the feeling that accompanies the Trusting Mindset perfectly. A tightrope walker is in a Trusting Mindset in an environment where everything screams: "Watch out! Be careful, gauge every step, get back in the Training Mindset!"

The difference between circus performers and the rest of us is that they have trained themselves to perform just like squirrels and step onto a sky-high, swaying wire, effortlessly and simply, as if out on an afternoon stroll.

Speeding Toward the Bottom Line

It is easy to see how this kind of trusting mentality might work for an actor or musician caught up in the moment of performance. Like a downhill skier, they are in no position to stop and evaluate what they're doing. They, too, have to adjust on the fly. But what about the business world, where rationality and evaluation rule, where success is determined by profit and losses? Every quarter, financial officers are checking the balance sheets. In business, the definition of a successful performer is "making your numbers." Surely, that requires depending on the higher processing of the cerebrum.

But legendary business performers don't think this way. Like legendary athletes, they divide their time between working on their game and playing it, between training and trusting. And while in business verbal skills are likely to be more important than motor skills, business superstars practice accessing their inner squirrel in order to perform their best in high-stakes situations.

Consider sales. The salesman on a call has to give a spiel about a product and must be prepared to answer questions on the spot. For the experienced salesperson, the closed loop processing of information will occur just as it does for the key-tosser or basketball player (though using different neurological networks). Sensory stimuli will be sent to the parts of the brain that specialize in cue recognition and language production (Wernike's and Broca's areas, named after the scientists who discovered them). Depending on a customer's questions and reactions, a skilled seller will generate a pattern of explanations, facts, or illustrations. Just as the athlete relies on the right motor patterns ingrained from years of practice, sales pros - or any top business executive, for that matter - will trust the visual, spatial, and verbal patterns stored during their education and work experiences to be at their side during an important deal. They, too, just let it happen. When you talk to great salesmen, they tell you stories of pulling off an amazing close. Typically, the result was unanticipated. They went into a meeting, began talking to the guy on the other side of the desk, whom they didn't expect to be in a buying mood. They break the ice by talking about the football game on Sunday, marveling at how Emmitt Smith took over Walter Payton's all-time NFL rushing mark at thirty-three years old in his final opportunity to break that record in front of his family and home crowd. Suddenly, they realize that they were both at the same game, sitting only two rows away from each other! The experienced salesman reacts to that coincidence by building on it, keeping the conversation flowing, looking for more connections that might create the kind of bond with his client that will clinch a sale. They proceed to discover other things in common: friends, colleagues, interests. Before they know it, two hours have passed and, better still, the meeting ends with a handshake worth six figures.

Neither the genuine pleasure of those two hours of work nor the sale that resulted was planned. No formula exists for pure salesmanship any more than for an astonishing round of golf or a great night on stage. Yet many companies give thousands of copies of books on "ten proven strategies to sell anything" to all of their employees, or actually have their own hundred-plus page sales manuals instructing 1) You dial the number; 2) You say, "hello"; 3) You begin by talking about . . . ; 4) You raise the problem, and then say ___. It's as if the work could be successfully completed by a well-designed computer program. But when you are thinking about how to sell, step by step, the kind of easy personal and emotional connection that increases your odds for selling disappears. The big sale is a lot less likely to happen if you are counting up the number of widgets you're selling, translating that total into gross and net profits, or keeping a watchful eye on your approach and delivery, instead of engaging your customer. Such self-consciousness only fires up your cerebral cortex, putting those billions of neurons to work, and in such an overloaded mental state, mistakes get made: You fail to pick up subtle but important cues from a sales prospect. You stumble over your notes in a presentation to the board, and when questioned, you give poor answers or explanations. After it's over you say, "Oh, I should've . . ."

Selling is very different from trying to be a salesman. Getting an A in "Sales and Marketing" at Harvard Business School is not the same as being what the celebrated General Electric CEO Jack Welch used to call an "A player" in the sales department at GE. One, in fact, is a classic example of the Training Mindset, while the other is a result of the Trusting Mindset.

That is not to say that great salesmen can ignore training. Far from it. Hundreds of hours of practice and sacrificed weekends spent at training programs are necessary to develop your talent. But there is a time to evaluate how you did and what you must do in the future to improve, and there is a time to perform. When sales count, when the company's bottom line is in your hands, it's time to enter the Trusting Mindset. The best executives go there all the time; they've purposefully devoted so much time to practicing thinking that way that they can switch it on at will. And so do the best entrepreneurs, surgeons, diplomats, politicians, and other best-in-the-business performers.

"When I concentrate on the target, I forget everything else," says Hisashi Yamada, a top engineer for the Toshiba Corporation in Tokyo. He's actually talking about his accomplishments as a champion archer. But Yamada switches on that same kind of trusting focus at work, where he is leading a joint team of Toshiba and NEC engineers in a tense race against Sony and Matsushita to develop the next generation of high-definition DVDs. From his years of competitive archery, Yamada knows that when he "forgets about everything else," he is likely to be more successful at whatever he does.

In fact, business people have to switch into the trusting mode more often and more quickly than athletes or even tightrope artists. Performing on the high wire, like most sports, is a programmed affair: The show is at 7 p.m., and so at 6:45 you are ready to go. In business, however, the phone will ring and suddenly you're talking to a client who has just announced that he's pulling a million-dollar account from your company. You are not only already out on the high wire, you are in the middle of a step. Only someone who's conditioned her instincts to be in the Trusting Mindset can keep from falling, from losing that million-dollar account.

How do great performers in every field switch on the trusting mode at will? Some do it intuitively, and that is why we call them "natural talents." Others, however, have learned to trust their abilities and their experience by gradually spending more and more time at work in the Trusting Mindset. You can learn it, too, but you have to be willing to be uncomfortable at first. If you're skilled at using your Training Mindset, just letting yourself trust will feel quite foreign.

Often when I describe the Trusting Mindset to my clients, they immediately ask, "What do I have to do to make it happen?" I tell them to do nothing - and then repeat it again and again. They look at me as if I'm crazy. But that's exactly how the best perform; they practice thinking of nothing when the pressure is on. To win medals at downhill skiing like Franz Klammer, you have to practice careening down icy cliffs at 100 m.p.h. No one else - or any 12-step program - will do it for you. Success depends on emptying your head rather than filling it. You can do that, too - if you're willing to retrain your mind. It will take some work. To join the ranks of overachievers will require you to make some perhaps uncomfortable and often misunderstood choices about how you think when you're performing. You must, for example, start putting more pressure on yourself rather than less.

Copyright © 2005 John Eliot, Ph.D.. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced without permission.

About the Author

Dr. teaches business and psychology at Rice University and is adjunct professor at SMU Cox School of Business Leadership Center. He is the former director of Rice's program in sports management and performance enhancement. In 2000, he co-founded The Milestone Group, which provides performance consultation and training to business executives, professional athletes, and corporations nationwide. Clients have included Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Adidas, NASA, the United States Olympic Committee, The Mayo Clinic, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and hundreds of elite individual performers.