Everyone performs well when there is no pressure. The most successful teams on the planet are at their best when it counts the most. They rise to the occasion. It doesn’t matter whether it is a web designer meeting a deadline, a student taking a midterm, or a violinist performing a recital in front of a full concert hall. Top performers become more poised when the conditions are most intense. When you multiply the necessity of poise and resilience under adverse conditions to a team of collaborators, it only takes a fraction of the whole to buckle under pressure to make the entity collapse. It’s a house of cards.
Leadership coaches, sports psychologists, and even sex therapists everywhere know how to fix this problem. Basic anxiety management skills define the foundation of the treatment plan. Next, take a look at your team leaders. Are they trying too hard? Have they checked out? Are they responding to the fear centers of their brains and concluding they are frauds? Get to the bottom of the anxiety and discover its powerful ability to disable.
As Seth Godin writes in his 2012 book, V is for Vulnerable, “Anxiety is experiencing failure in advance. Tell yourself enough vivid stories about the worst possible outcome of your work and you’ll soon come to believe them. Worry is not preparation, and anxiety doesn’t make you better.” Like many teams, the Chicago Bears’ struggles are not arising from some convoluted cocktail of complex competition dynamics. They just have a serious case of good old performance anxiety.
