Jim Citrin Leadership by Example

"I was mentally weaker on the important points."

That's how tennis star Novak Djokovic summed up his loss to player Roger Federer, who overcame seven set points to win his 12th Grand Slam and become the first man in more than 80 years to capture four straight U.S. Open tennis titles.

Perhaps you're an investment professional confronting swirling equity and debt markets that are as daunting as the raucous nighttime crowds at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. Or you might be a manager trying to keep your team together and your customers loyal as upstart competitors seem to appear out of nowhere.

Are you responding to the pressure like the cool, calm, and collected Federer, who delivers in the moment of truth? Or are you more like the talented but tortured Djokovic, whose emotions led him to tense up when it counted most?

A Learnable Skill

The answer lies in your mental toughness. If you believe that the ability to perform best in the most important moments is genetically endowed, i.e., you either have it or you don't, then you're not alone.

Most people look upon those special performers -- the trader who can exploit market chaos or the quarterback who pulls out a come-from-behind victory -- as fortunate aberrations.

But mental toughness is a learnable skill. With knowledge of how your mind and emotions work, deliberate practice in high-stakes situations, and focus and patience, you can develop this ability. When you do, you'll experience winning results and break through to a new level of performance and success.

Unemotional Rescue

It turns out that there are different areas of the brain that govern us when we're thinking clearly and calmly versus when we're operating in a state of anxiety or fear.

We perform at our best when we're guided by the area of the brain that plans and reasons. When we're nervous or fearful, however, the more base motor areas of the brain -- the ones that produce emotions -- take over.

Being guided by your emotions leads you to think short-term, seeking out instantaneous results or immediate gratification at the expense of strategy. Your emotions deceive you into believing that the way to perform best at any moment is to react with dramatic actions or bold strokes, even if being deliberate is actually the right course of action.

Embrace Your Failures

So how do you set about developing mental toughness? Through focused practice of how to think correctly in important situations, through building up a body of knowledge of how to deal with mistakes and setbacks, and through positive imagery.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, winning in any endeavor depends on a robust history of failure. To learn how to win under pressure, you first need to learn the proper mental attitude toward mistakes. You don't want your mistakes to be so important in your mind that they lead you to play it safe. Thinking of mistakes as the stepping stones to winning liberates you to keep challenging yourself and taking calculated risks.

When you do make mistakes, you need to assess them constructively. Properly evaluated, mistakes give you valuable feedback, allowing you to make corrections so that you don't repeat the mistake. But while it's important to recognize and analyze mistakes when they occur, it's just as essential to not think that acknowledging them is a sign of weakness. The ability to think about mistakes and remain positive is a sign of strength.

The reality is failure is always possible, even for the best performers in the world. Say you blew a client presentation and lost the business that should have been yours. Guess what? It also happens to the greatest rainmaker. Or you hit an easy overhead into the net. Well, so did Roger Federer in the Open final. If the best performers make mistakes, it only makes sense that it'll happen to you.

Performance Doesn't Determine Character

Beyond acknowledging the value of mistakes, there's a deeper reality that will help you free yourself from a debilitating fear of failure. That fear is often the result of an unacknowledged belief that the results of your efforts and your quality as a person are inexorably linked.

In truth, there's no connection between the results you achieve at work (or in sports) and your quality as a human being. This simple but profound insight can free you to be a more natural and mentally tough performer in all aspects of your life. The reason is that if you link mistakes to who you are as a person, you'll exaggerate the emotional responses of your actions.

Either consciously or subconsciously, your emotions lead you to think that if you perform poorly you did something wrong -- or worse, that you're a bad person. But just because things don't work out doesn't mean you've erred. You may have made the absolutely right decision and failed in the execution. Or maybe you selected the right course of action and did everything you were supposed to do, but your competitor got lucky.

It's equally important to know that just because something worked out well doesn't mean you did something right or were thinking correctly. You may have made the wrong decisions and just got a lucky break. If it worked this time, don't count on it happening again, especially when the stakes are high.

The Power of Positive Imagery

Applying positive imagery helps you prepare in advance for high-pressure situations and to recover your focus when necessary. High-quality images of your best client presentation, fairway iron, free throw, or team meeting allow you to experience yourself doing it right and help you feel ready to perform to your highest skill level.

These multi-sensory images take you where you want to go, and often where you've not yet been. Exercise deliberate practice to develop positive imagery skills.

For instance, Ted Williams, the greatest batter in baseball history, was meticulous about studying opposing pitchers. He would imagine what they would throw to him and then picture how he would react.

Mental Toughness in Business

In business, clarity of thought is the equivalent of mental toughness in sports. The ability to think through problems proactively using your mind rather than being reactively led by your emotions leads to high degrees of performance in business.

It entails performing an accurate assessment of a situation and focusing your decisions around the things that are under your control, rather than obsessing over outside factors. It's planning for contingencies and updating your action plan to take account of new information, and also making tough people calls, even if doing so means making some people unhappy.

To summarize, the mentally tough person is guided by a disciplined mind, which can be developed through the consistent practice of not letting your emotions guide you.