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Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed - Hardcover

McGinn, Daniel

 
9781591848301: Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 159184830X ISBN 13: 9781591848301
Verlag: Portfolio, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Closing the sale. Asking for a raise. Nailing the big presentation. Of the 2,000 hours you work every year, your success or failure is determined in the couple of dozen crucial hours when you need to bring your absolute best. Will you?

The last few minutes before a major challenge can be terrifying. Ever wished you knew how to make sure you ace the make-or-break test, audition, or interview?

We often feel the most powerless just before we’re expected to act powerful. As you’ll learn in this life-changing book, practice might make perfect, but perfection is useless if you can’t summon it when it counts. Pulling off a great speech or the pivotal at bat also requires the right kind of mental preparation.

In Psyched Up, journalist Daniel McGinn dives into the latest psychological research and interviews athletes, soldiers, entertainers, and others who, despite years of practice and enviable track records, will ultimately be judged on their ability to delivera solid performance when it’s their turn to shine. For instance, he reveals...

• How Jerry Seinfeld’s jacket and Stephen Colbert’s pen help them get laughs.

• What General Stanley McChrystal said to Special Forces before they entered the battlefield.

• Why the New England Patriots hired the DJ from the Red Sox to help them win.

Among other counterintuitive insights, McGinn reveals why trying to calm your backstage jitters can be worse for your performance than channeling it into excitement; how meaningless rituals can do more to prepare you in the final moments than last-minute rehearsal; and how a prescription from your doctor could help you unleash your best skills.

Whether you’re a sportsperson or a salesperson, an actor or an entrepreneur, one bad hour can throw away months of hard work. There’s so much conflicting popular advice that we often end up doing the wrong things. McGinn separates the facts from the old wives’ tales and shares new, research driven strategies for activating your talent, optimizing your emotions, and getting psyched up to take the spotlight.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DANIEL MCGINN is an editor at Harvard Business Review. His writing has appeared in Wired, Inc., the Boston Globe Magazine, and Newsweek. He lives in suburban Boston with his family.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Fighting Back Against Fight or Flight

Should you "calm down" or just embrace the adrenaline rush?

When Noa Kageyama was seven years old, he attended a summer music program at Ithaca College, and like most music camps, this one culminated in a recital. Kageyama, who was raised in central Ohio, had begun playing violin at age two. At five, he'd traveled to Japan to study with Shinichi Suzuki, creator of the famed Suzuki method of music instruction. By six, he'd played his violin on television. So by the time he was seven, Kageyama was a seasoned performer. As he stood waiting to go on stage, he felt relaxed and at ease. What could possibly go wrong?

Then, a few moments before his turn, a young female violinist took the stage and had a meltdown. She kept stopping and starting, as if she were forgetting the song. The distress on her face was obvious, and watching from a few feet away, Kageyama experienced an epiphany-one that would change the course of his life. "The whole concept that something bad could happen on stage popped into my awareness. I didn't know that could happen, because I'd never seen that before," he says. As he waited to play, Kageyama began to feel this strange mix of feelings, a kind of apprehensiveness that was so unfamiliar he didn't even know what to call it.

Despite this nascent anxiety, Kageyama performed just fine at the Ithaca recital. Afterward, he kept practicing the violin every day. As a teenager, he played with adult symphonies, won fellowships, and studied with world-famous violinists. During his senior year of high school, each weekend he would fly from Ohio to New York City, to participate in a precollege program at the Juilliard School. Along the way, he never experienced a full-blown panic while performing.

Still, he did experience subtle signs of anxiety. Sometimes his hands would sweat excessively. Sometimes his mind would wander. "There was this frustration over why I couldn't consistently play the way I was capable of playing, even if I was prepared," he says. Although his performance anxiety was not particularly noticeable to observers, he began to see it as an unpredictable, pernicious tax that unjustly subtracted from the expected return on the time he'd spent practicing.

In 1999, as a twenty-three-year-old a graduate student at Juilliard, Kageyama signed up for an elective class called "Performance Enhancement for Musicians," taught by a sports psychologist who'd previously worked with Olympic athletes. The course taught him that backstage jitters are an unavoidable part of a musician's life, and that even if you can't entirely eliminate them, you can systematically develop skills to perform well despite them. "It was such an eye-opener," Kageyama says. "It's not a crapshoot out there. There are things I could do to get better at this."

The course had an unintended consequence: It led him to quit playing violin altogether. As an undergrad, Kageyama had majored in psychology, and the more the young violinist considered what really interested him, the more he realized he wanted to teach people the skills he'd learned in the Juilliard course, rather than play music himself. So after graduating from Juilliard's master's program, he moved to Indiana University to pursue a PhD in psychology. Today his violin sits in a case that is rarely opened.

Instead, at 11 a.m. on a September morning, Professor Kageyama stands in Room 102 at Juilliard, teaching a new version of the course that changed his life. Kageyama is thin and soft spoken, with close-trimmed black hair. Around him in a circle of chairs are twenty grad students, instrument cases-violas, cellos, flutes, bassoons-at their feet. The previous week, in the semester's first class, he'd made the students take their instruments, one by one, to the front of the room while he fiddled with a video recorder set up on a tripod. (He didn't actually record the performances. He used the camera, and told students he would send the videos to Juilliard's dean, to increase their stress levels.) He told each student to play for sixty seconds, but then actually set a timer for ninety seconds, to flummox them. He wanted to see them play under pressure.

In this week's class, he alternates between lecture and discussion, focusing on how adrenaline and the body's physiological fight-or-flight response can have particularly detrimental effects on musicians. Pianists' fingers will go cold; shallow breathing and dry mouth can wreak havoc on musicians playing wind instruments. To help these students learn to cope better with these phenomena, Kageyama leads them through a relaxation exercise called centering, and then schedules appointments with each student to go over their individual results from an 84-question Performance Skill Inventory, which highlights each musician's particular strengths and weaknesses in dealing with performance anxiety.

As Kageyama and I exit the classroom and walk uptown to a Chinese restaurant, he tells me his plans for next week's class: He's going to make the musicians do calisthenics until their hearts are racing and their bodies are sweaty, and then have them play their instrument. "It's distracting when your heart is pounding," he says, but if you practice playing while feeling that sensation, it can become a little less unnerving. "It's the same thing you need in an audition-to see past what your body is saying, and to focus on the task at hand."

Kageyama compares a musician facing an audition to a rocket that's poised on the launch pad, experiencing the ticktock of the countdown. Rather than experience this countdown passively, he wants students to practice specific steps to get them ready to launch. The ultimate goal of his fifteen-week course, he says, is "to ensure that, in those last few seconds, you're set up as best you can to be successful."

2.

In helping humans perform, psychology is the software, but biology is the hardware. Much of what performance psychologists like Noa Kageyama do is help people control and adjust to the chemical processes happening inside their bodies-and the emotional responses they create-when they're getting ready to perform.

These processes primarily involve the hormone adrenaline and the emotion of anxiety. Finding ways to control this biological and emotional response is the first step in making better use of the countdown period Kagayama describes.

Doctors first identified the adrenals, the small organs attached to the top of the kidneys, in the sixteenth century, but it took anatomists three hundred years to figure out what purpose they served. By the mid-1800s, doctors began seeing a pattern in patients with tumors on these organs: When the adrenals weren't working well, patients suffered from low blood pressure, fatigue, and fainting. In the 1890s, doctors began injecting adrenaline, which they extracted from adrenals, into animals (and a few humans) and observing how this mysterious substance resulted in instantaneous jumps in blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration.

In one 1903 experiment reported by the New York Times, a researcher used anesthetics to stop a dog's heartbeat, rendering it lifeless for fifteen minutes, and then revived the animal with a shot of adrenaline. Afterward, the researcher was besieged with letters...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
159184830X
ISBN 13 
9781591848301
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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