Choke

What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To

Sian Beilock

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781439109625
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking
• Index: Psychology

Why do the smartest students often do poorly on standardized tests?

Why did you tank that interview or miss that golf swing when you should have had it in the bag?

Why do you mess up when it matters the most—and how can you perform your best instead?

It happens to all of us. You’ve prepared for days, weeks, even years for the big day when you will finally show your stuff—in academics, in your career, in sports—but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke. It’s not fun to think about, but now there’s good news: This doesn’t have to happen.

Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, reveals in Choke the astonishing new science of why we all too often blunder when the stakes are high. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically "clicks" into place and the perfect golf swing, tricky test problem, or high-pressure business pitch becomes easy? In an energetic tour of the latest brain science, with surprising insights on every page, Beilock explains the inescapable links between body and mind; reveals the surprising similarities among the ways performers, students, athletes, and business people choke; and shows how to succeed brilliantly when it matters most.

In lively prose and accessibly rendered science, Beilock examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and practice and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors. She sheds new light on counter-intuitive realities, like why the highest performing people are most susceptible to choking under pressure, why we may learn foreign languages best when we’re not paying attention, why early childhood athletic training can backfire, and how our emotions can make us both smarter and dumber. All these fascinating findings about academic, athletic, and creative intelligence come together in Beilock’s new ideas about performance under pressure—and her secrets to never choking again. Whether you’re at the Olympics, in the boardroom, or taking the SAT, Beilock’s clear, prescriptive guidance shows how to remain cool under pressure—the key to performing well when everything’s on the line.

CHAPTER ONE

THE CURSE OF EXPERTISE

Russian tennis player Dinara Safina has had quite a bit of success on the world tennis scene. The twenty-three-year-old has competed in two Grand Slam quarterfinal matches, two semifinal matches, and three finals. She even spent time as the World Tennis Association’s number-one-ranked player in 2009. But despite seven advanced round appearances, Safina has yet to win one of professional tennis’s Grand Slam titles. Any way you slice it, Dinara Safina has faltered while playing on the biggest tennis stages.

It’s crucial to a tennis player’s reputation to win championship matches. Even though you may be the top player in the world according to the computers, if you can’t prove your worth when it counts the most, you become known as a “choker.” And when you show that you are not a clutch player, people stop rooting for you. Even you stop rooting for yourself.

“I put too much pressure on myself,” Safina remarked after a surprising early third-round exit at the 2009 U.S. Open. Now, every time Dinara Safina steps on the court, whether or not she can win a big title is what’s on her (and everyone else’s) mind.

My job is to help people avoid these types of failures.

Today, I’ve been booked to speak at a Fortune 500 company retreat at Robert Redford’s posh Sundance Resort in the mountains of Utah. The company president has gathered all her VPs for two days of brain-storming about ways to identify the best and brightest hires and how to help these hires perform at their best under the most pressure-filled circumstances. Basically, I have come to Utah to help the VPs prevent their employees (and themselves) from going down Dinara Safina’s path.

I had spoken to the president over the phone a few days before my trip and, from our chat, had gotten the impression that she intended the weekend to be about 90 percent work and 10 percent rest and relaxation. Now, as I look at her VPs sitting slightly slouched in their chairs in front of me, and outfitted in shorts, sandals, and T-shirts, I get the feeling that they may have reversed the ratio of work to play. Nonetheless, they are all gathered in the resort’s main conference room to hear what I have to say.

I have a hunch that my audience will be a bit skeptical of whether I, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, have anything useful to report. After all, what does an academic know about the business world? These VPs are not particularly interested in psychology, my field of study, but they are interested in what it takes to be successful. Fortunately, I happen to know something about this because I study—to put it simply—human performance. My research tries to explain how people succeed at what they do, whether it’s on the playing field, the putting green, in the orchestra pit, or in the boardroom.

My work isn’t limited to identifying the keys to success at work and at play. I also study why people fail to perform their best when the stakes are high and everything is riding on their next move. In my research I explore how a straight-A high school senior can score three hundred points lower on his actual SATs than he did on the practice tests he took repeatedly before the big testing day. I am also interested in how a professional golfer like Greg Norman could enter the last day of the 1996 Masters with a six-stroke lead and end up losing by five strokes. Or how Dinara Safina let another Grand Slam title slip through her fingers by double-faulting on match point at the 2009 French Open finals. Finally, I try to understand why some of the very team members who work under the VPs I am speaking to today might bomb their next big presentation in front of an important client. I want to know how we can identify talent, those most likely to fail and those most likely to succeed when the pressure is on.

Today I am speaking without a computer—with only a piece of paper with a few notes jotted down to guide me. Even though I give several talks each year, it can be a bit daunting to be without the security blanket of my computer and the accompanying graphs of research data to guide my speech, especially when I’m not talking to college students who at least have to feign some interest in what I say to earn a grade. Because I research why people fail when they are under stress, if I find myself at a loss for words, I can always joke about doing “me-search,” researching the types of pressure-induced failures that I, myself, have been known to fall prey to.

As the room quiets down, I explain that my goal for the next few hours is to provide the science behind the intangible: creativity, intelligence, choking under pressure. Anyone can become a better leader, worker, and performer with the realization that seemingly trivial aspects of the environment and of their mind-set can greatly affect success. They don’t yet look convinced, but everyone perks up when I start to unpack some pretty counterintuitive research findings that just might change how they operate. For instance, the more experience you have as a leader of your company, the worse your ability to manage your team members can become. More experience, worse performance. This seems crazy, but I can back up my claim with actual research.

EXPERTS COULD USE A CRYSTAL BALL

Before becoming a professor in the Department of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, Pamela Hinds spent several years working at Pacific Bell and Hewlett-Packard trying to figure out how people’s work and daily lives change with the introduction of new technology like computers and cell phones. Ten years ago it was hard to imagine that almost everyone would be reachable by cell phone. Part of Hinds’s job was to anticipate these digital advances and determine how they would affect people’s work, life, and play. Today, in her academic position, Hinds pursues many of the same research questions she did when she was in the business world. One topic she’s been exploring is how people who develop and market new digital technology estimate the time and difficulty it will take others to learn to work these fancy tools.

Most of us have had the frustrating experience of fumbling with a new cell phone or handheld device, wondering if the developers devoted even a minute of their time to making the use of our new toy anything less than agonizing. My friend Jackie counts herself as a digitally frustrated consumer. Several years ago, Jackie’s law firm bought her and all the other lawyers new handheld digital organizers. “It’s supposed to make my life easier?!” she skeptically exclaimed to me one day over coffee. Jackie had graduated at the top of her class from the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law and was already earning accolades at her first job at a high-powered San Francisco law firm. But she was not what one would call “computer savvy” and, as she was forced to adopt more and more technology, her detestation for all things electronic was growing. The day after Jackie was given the handheld device, she sat down at her kitchen table to learn how to operate her new tool. A couple of hours later, she let out a big sigh and returned it to the box, where it has sat on her kitchen table for two years, never touched again.

Hinds’s goal is to ensure that cases like Jackie’s don’t occur too often. One way to do this is to understand how digital technology developers anticipate the trouble that folks like Jackie will have with their new toys. If the highly knowledgeable makers of these products can foresee the problems that new users will have, then—hopefully—such problems can be eliminated.

Experts are called upon to predict the performance of those less skilled all the time. Managers like the VPs to whom I am speaking today, for example, must estimate how much time it will take their employees to complete a project. Teachers must predict whether their students will be able to complete homework assignments and tests in the allotted time. Baseball coaches must understand the types of problems that a pitcher may encounter when learning to throw a new curveball. If not, how will the coaches devise the right training techniques to help their pitcher out of trouble? Yet stepping outside your own point of view and relating to people who have less knowledge and skill is not such an easy task. Managers, teachers, and coaches are not as good as one might think at these estimates. Hinds’s work has shown us that these experts make particular kinds of mistakes when anticipating the performance of beginners.

Because Hinds spent several years working at Pacific Bell, it isn’t so surprising that she decided to use cell phones to explore how experienced individuals go about understanding the performance of novices. Hinds asked sales clerks, cell phone customers (with some experience using the phones), and other people (with no experience at all with the new technology) to estimate how long it would take a new user to master the phones.1 Yes, cell phone novices do exist—or at least they did in the mid-1990s, when this study was conducted.

After everyone had given his or her learning estimates, Hinds asked the folks who had never used a cell phone before to stick around and actually learn how to operate the new technology. The new users only had the written instructions that come tucked in the phone’s package as a guide. Hinds kept track of how long it took these people to store a greeting on voice mail, for instance, or to listen to the messages in their voice mailbox. She then compared the novices’ learning time with the estimates that everyone had given for how long it would take a new user to master the phone.

You might expect that salespeople would be stellar predictors. After all, they are experts in the technology they are trying to sell and they also deal with ignorant customers on a daily basis. Surely they must have a good understanding of the problems that new users face and of the time it will take them to succeed. But, unfortunately for the salespeople, something gets in the way of experts’ ability to predict novices’ performance. We psychologists call this something the curse of expertise. There is no crystal ball.

The “curse of expertise” trips up experts when they try to predict others’ performance.

Salespeople focused so closely on their own performance and how effortlessly they operated the phone that they had a hard time predicting novices’ mistakes. Because of this, salespeople were the least accurate predictors of the new users’ learning time. It took the new cell phone users around thirty minutes to complete all the tasks—such as recording an outgoing voice-mail message and saving and deleting mailbox greetings. The salespeople estimated that it would take novices less than thirteen minutes to master all of these phone skills. This is just about the time estimate given by the people who had never used the phones before. So, our experts performed like novices. They fell victims to the curse of expertise. Interestingly, the customers who had some (but not a ton) of cell phone experience were the most accurate predictors.

These findings puzzled Hinds, so she decided to give the salespeople some help. In another part of the experiment, before asking the sales men and women to predict new users’ learning time, Hinds had the salespeople recall some of their own learning experiences—thinking back to the points of confusion and problems that they themselves had encountered when attempting to use the new phone for the first time. She even told the salespeople to keep these experiences in mind when making their predictions. Unfortunately, her advice didn’t help. The salespeople again underestimated the time it would take novices to complete the phone tasks—not changing much from their original thirteen-minute estimates.

How could it be the case that experts perform like novices? Well, something interesting happens as people get better and better at performing a skill—and this occurs whether we are talking about programming a cell phone, riding a bike, or parallel parking in city traffic. They forget stuff. Think about riding a bike. How exactly do you do this? Well, yes, first you have to get on the bike and pedal. But there is a lot more to it than that. You have to balance, hold on to the handlebars, look at what is in front of you. If you miss any of these steps, falling is a real possibility. This usually doesn’t happen when proficient bike riders are actually riding, but if you were to ask a bike rider to explain the “how-tos” of this complex skill, he would forget details. This is because the proficient bike rider is trying to remember information about bike riding that is kept as a procedural memory, as we psychologists term it.

Procedural memory is implicit or unconscious. Although procedural memory is mostly used to guide the performance of athletic skills, it creeps up in all sorts of tasks—like programming a cell phone. Similar to running a play in football or acing your opponent in tennis, operating a cell phone (for example, navigating through several screens to the point where you can enter a password to retrieve your voice messages) involves complex motor movements linked together to reach a goal.

You can think of procedural memory as your cognitive toolbox that contains a recipe that, if followed, will produce a successful bike ride, golf putt, baseball swing, or fully operating cell phone. Interestingly, these recipes operate largely outside of your conscious awareness. Your own facility is because, when you are good at performing a skill, you do it too quickly to monitor it consciously. This makes it hard for you to articulate what is in your procedural memory. If you don’t think about the specific steps you go through while performing a task, reporting these steps to someone else (or using these steps to estimate the time it might take others to perform the same task) can be difficult.

Procedural memory is often distinguished from another form of memory: our explicit memory that supports our ability to reason on the spot or to recall the exact details of a conversation we had with our spouse the week before.2 It might seem odd that we have some memories in our heads that we can’t actually get at by looking around for them and others that we can consciously access, but once you know something about the makeup of the brain, this memory distinction is not so surprising. Simply put, explicit and procedural memories are largely housed in different parts of the brain and some activities rely more on the former type of memory and some on the latter.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for this memory division comes from the case of Henry Gustav Molaison, or H.M. On September 1, 1953, H.M. had surgery that was designed to remove a portion of the temporal lobes in his brain (specifically, the hippocampus) in an attempt to put an end to epilepsy-related seizures that couldn’t be controlled by medication. Although H.M.’s seizure disorder was eradicated by the surgery, he lost a majority of his hippocampus in the process, the brain structure that is involved in transferring new information we encounter into explicit, long-lasting memories. As a result, H.M. lost his ability to create new memories that lasted for more than a few seconds. If you would see him again after meeting him only a week before, he wouldn’t remember you. Interestingly, H.M. could still learn skills (such as the sequencing of finger movements needed to play the piano or how to trace a figure by looking at its reflection in the mirror) that rely heavily on procedural memory because this memory resides in brain areas, such as the motor cortex, basal ganglia, and the parietal lobe, that were not removed in the surgery.3 Of course, when asked, H.M. couldn’t tell you in detail how he performed activities based on these procedural memories, just as people with intact brains can’t tell you. Just think about the type of description you might get from Michael Jordan if he were asked how he dunks a basketball. He might invoke the Nike motto and say that he “just does it,” not because he doesn’t want to give away his flying secrets, but because he may not know what he does. As we get better and better at performing skills such as operating a cell phone or riding a bike, our conscious memory for how we do it gets worse and worse. We become more expert and our procedural memory grows, but we may not be able to communicate our understanding or help others learn that skill.

As we get better at performing a skill, our conscious memory for how we do it gets worse and worse.

At this point in my talk, the man sitting in front of me interrupts, introduces himself as John, and offers to share a story. I encourage him to go on and John recounts something that had happened to him a few months ago when his IT team was in the process of proposing a major change in the online flight reservation program used by one of the big airline companies—a change that would attract more customers to the airline’s Web-based reservation system and make the customers’ experience more enjoyable once they got there.

John had thrown out a deadline to his employees for developing the new software and for coming up with a presentation plan for the clients who would be in the office the following week. John did this on a Monday and had expected to see his team in his office by the end of the day Friday with the beginning of tangible products in their hands. All day went by on Friday and not one of his team members came by. Finally, toward the end of the day, one of his middle managers came to him and boldly announced that they didn’t have enough time to complete their tasks. At first John was quite annoyed. But after the employee explained how many hours they had been working and described all of the technical issues they had come up against, it dawned on John that he had underestimated the complexities of the work his team members had to complete. John himself had dealt with these complexities in the past when he was in his employees’ position, but he had totally forgotten about them when estimating how quickly his team could pull together the new product.

So what can business managers do to become better estimators of their team members’ skill and ability? Consulting with someone less experienced might do the trick. Recall that in Hinds’s research, the customers with some cell phone experience were the most accurate predictors of the time it would take a new user to master the phones. John had begun employing a similar strategy with his team that seemed to be working. Before handing out a big project, he now surveys several of his employees to get an idea of the problems they think they might encounter and the time and support they anticipate needing in order to resolve them. John thinks that asking these questions beforehand has helped put him and his employees on the same page. This leads to more accurate work estimates for his clients, on-time performance, and happier customers overall.

Experienced people benefit from hearing the thoughts of those who are less skilled.

Experienced people benefit from hearing the thoughts of those ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Curse of Expertise
• Chapter Two: Training Success
• Chapter Three: Less Can Be More
• Chapter Four: Brain Differences Between the Sexes
• Chapter Five: Bombing the Test
• Chapter Six: The Choking Cure
• Chapter Seven: Choking Under Pressure
• Chapter Eight: Fixing the Cracks in Sport and Other Fields
• Chapter Nine: Choking in the Business World
• Epilogue: Roma Never Forgets
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author