Managing your state for performance#

Your state — your posture, your breathing, where your attention is pointing, the tone of your self-talk — shapes how you perform. You tend to do well when you’re settled and focused, and badly when you’re tense and scattered. Many people assume they have little say over the state they’re in at a given moment. That’s not quite true: you can’t flip a switch, but you can nudge it, and the nudge often matters.

A note. Earlier editions taught this through the language of NLP — “anchoring” a state to a finger-squeeze, and “modeling” an expert to absorb their skill. The NLP framing hasn’t held up: systematic reviews find no good evidence for its specific claims (Sturt et al., 2012 ). But strip away the branding and a real, useful core remains, drawn from sport and performance psychology. Here it is, plainly.

Settle your state before you perform#

You can’t summon confidence by tapping your earlobe. What you can do is use a few things that genuinely move your state in the right direction:

• Steady your body. Slow your breathing, drop your shoulders, stand or sit tall. Your physical state and your mental state feed each other, so settling the body helps settle the mind.
• Reframe the nerves. That racing heart before an exam isn’t a sign you’re about to fail — it’s your body getting ready. Telling yourself “I’m fired up” rather than “I’m panicking” measurably improves how people perform under pressure (Jamieson, Nock & Mendes, 2012).
• Recall a time it went well. Bringing to mind a past success — vividly, in detail — is a real way to build confidence for the task in front of you. Confidence built on remembered mastery is the sturdiest kind (Bandura, 1997).
• Build a pre-performance routine. Athletes do the same small ritual before every serve, putt or shot — not magic, but a consistent cue that narrows attention and settles the body. A routine you repeat is far more reliable than a one-off trick, and the research on pre-performance routines in sport backs this up.

None of this fixes an underlying problem. A calm state won’t answer an exam question you never studied. But when you have done the work, managing your state stops nerves from robbing you of what you know.

Learn from people who do it well#

Watching an expert and copying what they do is one of the oldest ways to learn, and a sound one — observational learning is real (Bandura, 1997). When you want to get good at something, find people who already are, and pay attention to how they go about it: where they put their attention, how they hold themselves, the order they do things in, how they recover from a slip.

But be clear about what watching can and can’t give you. You can pick up an expert’s posture, pace and approach. You cannot absorb their skill by mirroring their breathing or eye movements — the hard parts (the judgement of a pilot flaring an aircraft to land, the feel a surgeon has for tissue) come only from doing it yourself, with feedback, over time. So use observation to set your sights and shape your approach, then put in the deliberate practice that actually builds the skill.

A simple way to use both ideas together:

1. Find someone who does it well — in person, or through interviews, biographies and recordings.
2. Notice how they approach it — their focus, their composure, their sequence. Ask them; experts often say “it just happens,” so probe with specific questions.
3. Borrow their approach, then practise the skill yourself with real feedback.
4. Settle your state with the tools above before you perform, so nerves don’t undo the practice.

The takeaway#

You have real, if modest, influence over your performing state — through your breathing and posture, how you frame your nerves, recalling past successes, and a steady pre-performance routine. Borrow the approach of people who do it well, but build the skill itself through practice and feedback, not imitation. Skip the magic-trigger promises; keep the parts that work.