You’re most likely to choke when the external demands or pressure of the situation overwhelm your personal resources to cope with it.

Ultimately, when choking, not only does your performance in the moment decline, but it can trigger a vicious cycle of self-doubt, shame, guilt, and fear, making it all the more likely you’ll choke again, limit taking future risks, and even suffer long-term mental health consequences, such as the PTSD experienced by Olympic champion René Holten Poulsen.

When under threat, your working memory becomes impaired, meaning you have trouble making sense of and acting on new information, become more prone to recalling and reliving negative emotional experiences, and consciously overthink behaviors that should be second nature. These can elevate your breathing and heart rate, dilate your pupils, and even cause you to sweat. When you choke, physiologically, your body has entered into protection from danger mode and has released a cocktail of stress-related hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. At work, it might look like a difficult conversation, a negotiation, a pile of paperwork, or a public speech. That “something” is different for everyone. When we “freeze,” our bodies are engaging a threat response to something in our external environment. Nobody is immune: for example, Mahatma Gandhi had a choking moment during his first case before a judge and “ran from the courtroom in humiliation.” To help prevent “the choke” at work, we can apply learnings form the world of sports to the world of management. Maybe you lost your voice or your ability to think straight when speaking with an important client, manager, or audience. Most of us can reflect on a few of our own choking moments. But we hear less about the day-to-day chokes that happen at work. Choking under pressure, where one freezes and underperforms when it matters most - even despite deep expertise and years of practice - is well known in the world of sports.

Grace under pressure meaning