Practice under pressure

Why difficult conversations are so stressful

In 2004, Sally Dickerson and Margaret Kemeny analysed 208 laboratory studies of acute stress to understand which situations trigger the strongest hormonal response, measured through cortisol, the main stress hormone. Their conclusion: the tasks that provoke the strongest responses and the slowest recovery combine two ingredients. A social-evaluative threat (the feeling that others are judging you) and a lack of control (the sense that the outcome is not entirely in your hands).

That is an exact description of a difficult conversation. Delivering bad news, addressing a team member's behaviour, responding to a furious client, negotiating a pay rise: each time, someone is assessing you, and you cannot control their reaction. It is no coincidence that the most widely used protocol for inducing stress in the laboratory, the Trier Social Stress Test, involves speaking in front of an impassive panel.

What stress does to your brain

The prefrontal cortex loses its grip

In 2009, Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten reviewed decades of research in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the effects of stress on the prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for working memory, flexibility and self-control. Even moderate acute stress, particularly when it feels uncontrollable, rapidly impairs this region's functioning. Control of behaviour then shifts towards older, more automatic circuits that favour reflexive responses and habits.

In practical terms, under pressure, you do not do what you planned. You do what you are used to doing. If your instinct is to justify yourself, give in or counter-attack, that is what will take over.

Worries take up space

In 2005, Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr studied a familiar phenomenon: losing your composure at the crucial moment. In their experiments using maths problems, pressure reduced performance, but not equally for everyone. Those with the best working memory, and therefore the strongest performance in calm conditions, suffered the greatest decline. Their explanation: worries (“what if I fail?”, “what will they think?”) consume the working memory needed for the task.

The same thing happens in a conversation. Some of your attention goes into an internal commentary (“he's taking this badly”, “I'm going about this the wrong way”), leaving less available to listen, choose your words and keep track of what you are saying.

Practise with pressure, not without it

If stress brings habits to the surface, the solution is to build the right habits in conditions that resemble the real situation. Several fields where mistakes are costly have understood this for a long time.

The experiments with basketball and darts players

In 2009, Raôul Oudejans and Rob Pijpers conducted two experiments with expert sportspeople. Basketball players practised free throws for five weeks, either under normal conditions or with deliberately induced anxiety. Darts players threw from a climbing wall, either close to the ground or high up. In the final high-pressure test, only those who had practised with anxiety maintained their performance. This was true even though they still felt anxious and their heart rates remained elevated. The authors suggest that they had grown accustomed to the sensations of anxiety, to the point where those sensations no longer disrupted their movements.

This is an essential point: the aim of practice under pressure is not to stop feeling anything. It is to perform well despite what you feel.

What the meta-analyses show

In 2021, William Low and colleagues brought together studies of pressure training in sport and law enforcement. Across 14 studies and nearly 400 participants, both novices and experts, the effect on performance under pressure was moderate to large (g = 0.67), with remarkably consistent results. Their recommendation to coaches: create training environments that involve pressure rather than simply increasing the volume of training.

An earlier meta-analysis by Tamara Saunders, James Driskell, Joan Johnston and Eduardo Salas, published in 1996, examined stress inoculation, a method developed by psychologist Donald Meichenbaum. Across 37 studies and more than 1,800 participants, this approach substantially reduced performance anxiety and anxiety felt in the moment, and improved performance under stress.

Stress inoculation has three phases, which translate well to conversations:

1. Understand what stress is and what it does (this article).
2. Learn and rehearse techniques for coping with it: a strong opening sentence, a way to rephrase something, a question to regain control.
3. Apply these techniques in situations that gradually become more realistic, often through role play.

As with a vaccine, the principle is exposure to a small dose that prepares the body for the real one.

Relabelling anxiety as excitement

Most people think the best thing to do before a stressful moment is to calm down. Alison Wood Brooks, at Harvard Business School, tested this intuition in 2014. Before various stressful tasks, participants were asked to tell themselves either “I'm calm” or “I'm excited”.

• Public speaking (140 participants): those who had said “I'm excited” gave longer speeches, which independent assessors judged to be more persuasive, competent and relaxed.
• Karaoke (113 participants): the average pitch accuracy score was 80% for the “excited” group, 69% for the “calm” group and 53% for those who had said “I'm anxious”.
• Maths (188 participants): the “excited” group scored around 8% higher than the other groups.

The explanation: anxiety and excitement are physiologically similar states, with a racing heart and a body on alert. Moving from one to the other is easier than moving from anxiety to calm. Interpreting these sensations as energy rather than a threat directs attention towards what you might gain rather than what you might lose.

This works well alongside practice. When you have already experienced these sensations during a rehearsal, and the rehearsal went well, it becomes easier to read them as a sign that you are ready.

Setting the right level of difficulty

Not all pressure is equal. Practice that is too comfortable prepares you for nothing: if the person you practise with is always understanding, you will never have worked on responding to hostility. Practice that is too intense, by contrast, risks reinforcing fear rather than reducing it.

The principle shared by effective methods is progression. Start with a cooperative conversation partner, then add an objection, then someone who becomes defensive, then someone who interrupts. Master each level before moving on to the next. This is the logic behind the third phase of stress inoculation, and it is also what distinguishes training from simply putting someone in a difficult situation.

The other condition is that mistakes must have no consequences. To get used to pressure, you need to be able to fail during practice, try again immediately, and succeed on the second or third attempt. It is this repeated success under pressure that builds confidence, far more than words of encouragement.

The limits of these findings

We need to be precise about what the research shows. Studies of pressure training come mainly from sport, the military and law enforcement, rather than workplace conversations. The mechanism is well established: stress brings habits to the surface, and becoming accustomed to pressure protects performance. Applying it to conversations makes sense, but has been measured less directly.

These studies also concern acute, short-lived stress. Intense or persistent social anxiety calls for support from a healthcare professional, not practice alone.

Put it into practice

A three-level exercise for the next conversation you are worried about:

1. 1Level 1, the cooperative version. Say your message out loud to a conversation partner (a colleague, someone close to you or a practice tool) who accepts it without resistance. Aim: make your opening clear and fluent.
2. 2Level 2, the version with resistance. The other person raises the most likely objection. Aim: respond without abandoning your message.
3. 3Level 3, the difficult version. The other person becomes angry, falls silent or interrupts you. Aim: keep just one thing intact, such as not justifying yourself.
4. 4Before the real conversation, notice the sensations (heart, hands, breathing) and tell yourself: “I'm ready, this is energy”. You have felt them before during practice, and you succeeded.