Ideas - From tests to sports, why we choke when it matters most

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Under pressure, our nerves can take over. At job interviews, performing in front of an audience and it's definitely present in sports. But why do our skills desert us at such a crucial moment? And what can be done to avoid choking? Studies have shown that when people tell themselves they're excited rather than nervous, they perform better. This podcast explores more ways to avoid the choke and why it happens. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 23, 2022.Guests in this episode:Sian Beilock is a cognitive scientist and author of Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting it Right When You Have to and How the Body Knows its Mind. She's recently been named President-elect of Dartmouth College.Sandra Bezic is a former Olympian and Canadian champion in figure skating (with her brother Val), and is now a producer, director and choreographer.Carolyn Christie is a retired member of the flute section of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. She now teaches classical flute at McGill and is also a Certified Mental Skills Consultant.Niklas Häusler is a neuroscientist and co-founder and CEO of the German startup company Neuro 11.Noa Kageyama is a performance psychologist. He maintains a blog and podcast, Bulletproof Musician.Elizabeth Manley was world and Olympic silver medalist in figure skating in 1988, and is now an executive life coach.Jennifer Montone is the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra.Aaron Williamon is head of the Center for Performance Science, a partnership between the Royal College of Music and Imperial College, London.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyand. The greatest sporting event on the planet has to be the World Cup of Soccer. Millions and millions and millions of soccer fans across 32 countries experiencing thrilling highs and devastating loans. This is the ultimate test of nerve. And sometimes the sporting fate of an entire nation will come down to this. It's penalties to decide the winners of the World Cup. They're braced between the two goalkeepers, one of whom,

May well end up being the hero. This is the moment fans dread. And this is Ideas contributor, Peter Brown. To decide the championship match on penalties, it's absolutely nerve-wracking. And nerve-shattering, as it was for Italian fans in the 1994 World Cup final. Romato Baggio, the savior of Italy,

throughout this tournament, stays rooted to the spot. But in 2006, Italy reached the final. titles again. It all comes down to this. Twelve years ago, Roberto Baggio missed from the spot in the final against Brazil. But if Fabio Grosso can put this penalty away, then the Azuri will win the World Cup. Italy are champions of the world. Peter Brown's documentary is called Flop Sweat, Why We Choke When It Matters Most.

Flop Sweat. The Panicy Perspirators. that pours out of us when we're afraid we're about to flop. Some golfing god is with the young man at this moment, and it'll be interesting again to see what he does now. At the 1999 British Open, French golfer Jean van der Velde was having the tournament of his life. He's going to be at least three shots ahead.

Which is a massive lead on the final hole, so massive that his name had already been carved into the trophy. But then he hit a wild shot. Uh-oh. And that bouncing. and seemed to go way to the right. And then he hit another. I don't believe this.

Well, what is going on here? His golfing brain stopped about 10 minutes ago, I think. And then he hit his neck shot out of the tall grass. I don't believe it. This is so, so, so, so sad. And so unnecessary. Now his ball was sitting. in a shallow stream.

Well, we've seen a few miscues and mishaps in our golfing careers, but... Oh, Jean, Jean, Jean, Jean. What are you doing? On earth are you doing? Jean Vandeveld was choking. The next part is the worst. Vandeveld takes off his socks and shoes, stands ankle-deep in the water, right next to a stone wall, the height of his head, thinking, Maybe he can somehow hit the ball out of the water and over the wall onto the green.

I've never seen anything like it before. To attempt to hit the ball out of there is pure madness. Now, Jean-Clee, would somebody kindly, go and stop it. John Vandeveld's collapse at the British Open is considered the greatest choke in the history of professional golf. And the question posed by commentator Peter Alice... What is going on here? That is the question of this documentary. In my research, I've looked a lot at why in those situations where ironically we want to perform at our best, we can't put our best foot forward.

And I talk about that as choking. Cion Bylock wrote the book on this subject. Literally, it's entitled, simply, choke. It's not in the physical aspect of them being able to do their skill. It's more in the ability to execute it when it matters most. And now Lester throws over and throws it. It goes it away. Chicago Cubs fans will never forget the sight of their pitcher, John Lester, struggling to make a simple throw to first base.

And Sagarra on his way to second. It looked like he was running, and John Lester, that's not even close. The throw to first may be the easiest thing a pitcher has to do. There's the butt, Lester, bare hands, and got him. But for several years, that throw gave Lester fits. He just bounces it over there. He even resorted to throwing his glove with the ball still in it. Snag by Lester, and Rizzo drops his glove so he can catch Lester's glove.

The choke also haunts the world of musical performance. You can play this in your sleep and you've performed it dozens or hundreds of times before. And then suddenly you blank out or you get confused and you almost feel like you don't know the piece at all. and you don't know what comes next. Noah Kagayama has a podcast and blog called The Bulletproof Musician. He coaches musicians on the psychological dimensions of performance. Sandra Bezik does the same for figure skaters. I know that a lot of coaches will tell their students,

and I've probably said it too, just like practice. It's no different. It's just another practice. And you're standing there thinking, this is not another practice. This is the Olympics. We all have choke moments all the time. I mean, every day, right? When you're introducing yourself to someone new that you want to impress and you can't remember their name and you're kind of fluttering on your words, like these are pretty

well-learned skills, right? We all have them. When we get so good at performing these well-learned skills, we tend not to think about every step of performance. What trips up our steps? is pressure. In these high-stress situations, we worry. We worry about the situations, its consequences, what others will think of us. And one of the ways that we try and control this

is by trying to then control what we're doing. And when we try to take control, we activate the wrong part of our brain. We have this front part of our brain, the frontal cortex, which is great for doing so many things, for planning ahead, for juggling lots of information, in our mind. And researchers have shown that oftentimes we have sort of too much activity, too much attention to detail, and often that can be rooted to the frontal cortex, which is

that seed of our cognitive control. The other thing that seems to not be helpful is to focus too much on the minutia, the mechanics of the technique that we're implementing in the moment. Because as soon as we start either monitoring what our muscles are doing or trying to control what our muscles are doing, we start experiencing choking or things start falling apart pretty quickly. I would be worried about something that was coming up, and that would take my mind off what I was actually doing, and it would block me from doing a skill I could do standing on my head backwards. Carolyn Christie teaches classical flute at McGill University,

and also coaches musicians on the mental skills of performance. I never had to think about how a finger would move or my air pressure or any of that because I had practiced it, and I knew it inside out. And by thinking, I have to move my little finger to the right and then down, I already missed the note. Overthinking. Cion Bylock calls this phenomenon paralysis by analysis. Paying attention takes time. It can disrupt the flow, the sequence of events, and can bring into conscious awareness aspects of our skill that should be better left on autopilot.

It's kind of odd to think that paying attention to something could hurt it. But we've all had this experience. It's kind of like, you know, imagine if I asked you to shuffle down the stairs and think about your knee while you're doing that, you'd fall in your face. The idea is that we have a limited capacity. We can only pay attention to so many things at once. And when we start paying attention to things that normally we wouldn't focus on, we can disrupt them. My name is Aaron William and I'm head of the Center for Performance Science, which is a partnership between the Royal College of Music and Imperial College. London. When people are entering into a state of high performance anxiety, we feel our heart rate

going up, the blood pressure will be going up, heart rate variability goes down. Blood is pumping to big muscle groups because we are getting to a state of being ready to fight or to fly. And what that means with the blood, leaving the core into those big muscle groups is that we get a sense of butterflies that we experience in the stomach. I used to want to throw up when I was nervous Canadian figure skater Elizabeth Manley. There were days I would literally be standing there waiting to step on the ice and I would say to myself, why do I do this to myself? I would be sitting backstage wanting to keep my fingers moving and to keep playing

because I was afraid that somehow in the five minutes between the last time I was playing notes in the practice room and the time I walked on stage, somehow I would lose my connection to all my skills. And then we can start getting in all these mind games where, you know, you miss a note backstage. And it's like, oh, crap, is that going to happen on stage? And like, it actually makes the nerves worse sometimes. Those moments of anticipation are when performance stress is at its highest. The peak levels of physical responses to anxiety happen backstage. When people are just ruminating, they have nothing else more to do than to think about how things might go when they go out to perform.

We see peak physiological responses. And it's absolutely crucial at that point when this is happening that people start to interpret those signals in the most positive way. The main physical element that causes problems on stage is muscle tension. Whether it's related to our breathing or to how we move our body, fingers, wrists, shoulders, etc., there's a tendency to get tight. And I think to utilize fewer degrees of freedom, you can see the increased rigidity and, like, tentativeness. and the tendency to try to control things as opposed to trusting the motor skills that you've already cultivated

over the weeks and months previously. Now, this is where things can go horribly wrong. The cognitive symptoms, then what we have is a probability when you push the system more and more and more, we have this probability of some sort of catastrophic drop-off in performance quality. So this is called the catastrophe theory.

It was laid out in sports some years ago. And it doesn't mean that things are going to go horribly wrong, but the probability of a memory slip in performance or some sort of crash happening in the performance is more likely to be there. I just rushed the bejesus out of everything, and I compressed all the spaces, and just kind of like my whole timing structure

was completely whack-a-doodle by the end there. So I think definitely rushing, compressing, playing sharp, tightening up on the horn. Jennifer Montone plays principal French horn with the Philadelphia Orkamp. Your breathing is shallower, so your sound goes to the top side of the sound, and you sound a little shrill and a little strained. Your shoulders go tight, and therefore then everything's a little more pinched, not as open and resonant. These signs are all too familiar to musicians and athletes, who can often recognize when others are about to choke even before it happens.

One example was Patrick Chan in Vancouver. When he stepped on that ice for that long program and they did a close-up because I was commentating. Elizabeth Manley did commentary for CTV at the 2010 Olympics. When they did a close-up, my heart just started to pound because he looked like a deer in headlights. And he looked terrified. Liz Manley, you've got goosebumps. I'm so nervous. It's terrible. I just wanted to stay well. So does an entire building and a nation as well.

Patrick Chan has to be perfect. the number is out there if he can skate clean second triple axle oh down he goes he took off way too fast for that triple axle and he did not get the body through for that rotation Patrick Chan finished fifth in Vancouver my heart is just empty right now

Patrick Chan is got to be, you know, ranked in the top three best skaters that have ever existed. But when he would have those bad skates, I could see it in his eyes before he went on. What Elizabeth Manley spotted there has been called the quiet eye phenomenon. Top performers, whether it be basketball players shooting free throats or golfers about to putt or surgeons about to make an incision or tie knot, that before they execute the skill, their eyes tend to be more fixated on a single spot for a moment of time. Whereas the less effective performers' eyes were kind of darting around much more actively. When a basketball player cannot miss a shot, the word that the commentators use is unconscious. They say this player is unconscious. Is that an apt word for that situation?

Yeah, I love it. I mean, I wouldn't say they're unconscious because we're definitely conscious. but they're not relying on conscious, explicit attention to do what they're doing. And ironically, if they do start thinking about it, if they spend a lot of time up at the line, or all of a sudden they start missing shots and then get a reputation as a choker and start paying a lot of attention to them, that's when they mess up. There's a tactic football team's used to make an opposing player mess up. It's called icing the kicker.

When one team is about to kick a field goal, the other side will call a timeout. So the kicker has to wait and wait and think and maybe overthink. Calling that time out can actually help disrupt performance because it gives the player time and attention to dwell on what they're doing. And we've shown in my lab that when you give players that time to sit over the ball, if they're taking a putt, for example, it can actually lead to. to worse performance. I liken it to driving and talking on a cell phone in a way. It has nothing to do with the physical aspect of the cell phone, right? Everyone thinks, oh, it's just bad to hold a cell phone.

No, it's the mental aspect. We can only do so many things at once. Ceylon Bylock's research has shown that worrying takes up too much mental bandwidth, whether it's worrying about the actual performance or what others may expect from us. That's why even star players can underperform, often in front of a home crowd. Some research has shown that being in front of friendly faces and this expectation of success can be a lot of pressure that actually leads to worse performance. You know, I liken it in my personal experience to performing

when, you know, I have my most supportive fans at the table. Like, it can be great when you succeed, but the consequences of failure are often larger. They loom larger. You're letting down not just yourself, but the people around. you. And there's another very specific kind of worry that can affect performance. If you're a woman walking into a situation where you're the only woman in a room and you are having to now juggle the fact that you want to perform well and you're also aware of

expectations of what others think are that you have to hold sort of the card for all women everywhere. That can be an added stress. Here comes Elizabeth Manley of Canada, their national champion, and she was fourth after yesterday's compulsory fingers. If one story epitomizes the harm that the preconceptions of others can do, it's the story of Canadian figure skater Elizabeth Manley. When I competed, we had very few opportunities to actually compete. Before major events like the Olympics or World Championships,

skaters had only two or three competitions to prepare. It's not that I was really inconsistent. I may miss one jump. but because people only saw me twice a year or three times a year, they would always say, oh, she always falls, or she always misses the big jump, or she does this, or she does that. You know, I would do 10,000 run-throughs in training, and I'd be great, and I'd go to a competition, and I'd slip on one jump,

and then, you know, people would say she's inconsistent. At the same time, she was also dealing with mental illness. I went through a very serious breakdown in depression at 16 years old. I lost all my hair. I gained 50 pounds in water retention. They, you know, I went completely bald. They didn't know what it was. And then that's when I was diagnosed by a specialist.

So I quit skating and then I got treatment and realized a lot of things about myself. It's like I found Liz. Elizabeth Manley returned to skating and her preparations for Calgary were going well, partly because she was carefully avoiding the media and all their expectations. But then... Two weeks before the Calgary Olympics, my... local newspaper here in Ottawa, reached out to my coach and said, we really want to do an article. She doesn't have a lot of press. So we'd like to do a nice article. So they came to my mother's

house. I was living with my mom at the time. And we had just bought a little teacup poodle. And it was just a puppy. It was a size of a hamster when it was a puppy. And when the reporter came in and saw it, he said, this is wonderful. Let's take a picture of you on your couch. And we'll put the puppy. Her name was Pixie, the dog. We'll put Pixie on your shoulder. No skating shots, just a feel-good Liz article. The next day, I ran across the street and I got that newspaper and I came home and I was the front page. I was the entire page of this newspaper. And right there was this big picture of me and pixie.

And I was so excited. And then when I saw the headline above the picture, because I was so taken by how cute the picture was, it said manly, dogged by inconsistency, will never win a medal. And the entire article talked about me having a nervous breakdown, suffering from anxiety and depression. And because I suffered from mental health issues, that meant that I wasn't tough enough to even be considered to win a medal. And when I read this article, something snapped in me. I literally went upstairs into my bedroom. I grabbed my famous pink dress that everybody remembers and my skates,

and I threw them out in the garage floor. I unplugged the phone. I stayed in my pajamas, and I think I ate everything in the fridge. Like, I just had a complete breakdown. Elizabeth Manley told her coach she wasn't going to compete in the Calgary Olympics. I said, how am I supposed to go out in front of two and a half billion viewers worldwide? do what I know I can do, but two and a half billion viewers think that I suffer for mental health.

So he gave me 24 hours to think about what I was doing. And I went back to that ring. But what happened was because I was so emotionally, you know, run over. My body took a toll and I got very sick. And that's why I was so sick in Calgary with the flu. And there's nothing you can take because of drug testing. Zero. Zero. When I arrived there, yeah, I had a fever of 104. I blew an eardrum on the flight on the way out. I had walking pneumonia and zero that we could do for it.

Interestingly enough in those 24 hours, I really did a lot of thinking and I turned it into anger. And I said, I'll show them. The homegrown product, Elizabeth Manley of Canada, who's had so many tough times in her life, personally, emotionally, put on a tremendous amount of weight one time, has fallen an important competition. In that little heartbeat, when everything is still right before the music started, do you remember that moment? Oh, yeah. My heart was pounding out of my chest. I was in my pose and I felt like I couldn't breathe. This is the big night. She could win a bronze medal. So I always opened up with one jump. It was called a double flip jump and then I would go for the big jump and I was the only girl at the Olympics to do it. And when I hit that jump, it's something came over me that I'm on. I'm on. And it was like you hit that big moment, that big element or whatever it might be.

You get into the space where you're like, okay, you did the biggest jump of the games out of any woman. Long after time, an important championship, she has missed key jumps. She is so solid tonight. She also works with a sports psychologist. Seems to be working for her. It was incredible. One of the moments that I remember the most was when I came down the side of the rink at the very end of the program to the last jump and the last spin, all I heard was a thousand shutters of cameras. What a great night for it.

And I remember laughing, like in my head going, oh my gosh. Like, it's coming to the end. Like, I did it, you know. She did it. She did it. A look of wonder. A look of wonder and joy and pure relief. Elizabeth Manley's critics expected her to choke.

And she triumphed. Wouldn't it be great if every human being could have one moment like this once in their lives? Liz went and got them all right. You're listening to Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes.

They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrists detect early signs of eye and health conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book a eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.caver's.ca to learn more. Are you ready to inspire the next generation in French? At the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Education, our teacher education, French as a second language program, prepares you to become the teacher's students remember. Whether you're

beginning your career or looking for a meaningful change. Our immersive training, supportive community, and hands-on classroom experience set you up for success. Teach FSL. Join our community. Apply today at u-A-odowa.ca.com. This is Flopswet, why we choke when it matters most, by ideas contributor Peter Brown. And Peter is here with me right now. Hi, Peter. Hello, Nala. Peter, have you ever choked? Nala, I have choked under the tiniest amount of pressure.

I have choked when I was playing pool with my friend Neil. Neil and I play pool every once in a while. And our arrangement is you have to win best of seven. So you have to win four games to be the victor. And the last few times we've played, I have won the first three. So I was up three nothing, only had to win four. I had it in the bag. And then I, the Jean Van de Valle, of playing pool with my friend Neil,

lost the next four games. And I remember clearly, as soon as I win that third game, I feel that choke taking me over, which is why, and I'm about to land the segue, Nala, which is why I'm even more impressed with what Elizabeth Manley did that night in Calgary when she won the Olympic silver medal. That was fantastic. You knew you had to give a great performance and you did. How did you overcome all the pressure? Actually, I haven't felt a lot of pressure here. I've been off of my own and I've been so prepared for this competition. The way Elizabeth Manley prepared and the tools she used show us some of the most effective

techniques athletes and musicians use to avoid choking. Part of it, of course, is developing anxiety management strategies, whether it's having pre-performance routines like the ones that basketball players will use before each free throw. Music performance coach Noah Kagayana. Or whether it's learning pretty standard strategies like, deep breathing, the ability to release muscle tension, the ability to focus in a more meditative way on the immediate present and so forth. For Elizabeth Manley, anxiety management meant isolating herself from her competitors. I would come in at the last possible minute, even to the point where

international skating union started running around the building saying Elizabeth Manley's not here yet. And my coach by the time I had arrived had already scouted out, you know, whether it was in a janitor's closet or under some, you know, construction stuff, whatever. And we just went around to the other end where the locker rooms were at the opposite end and just found a quiet area and kept my headset on and did some stretching, warming up, always did a walk through on the ground of my program, listen to my program, and then just sit with my sports psychologist. But 10 minutes before I stepped on warm up, we were talking about the Blue Jays. Like he just, he would completely keep me my head out of what, you know, I'm at the biggest moment of every athlete's career at the

Olympic Games and I'm about to put my life and career on the line in four minutes. He had to distract me from that. But all these measures are meant to mitigate the stress. They don't and can't eliminate it. I remember standing there and I was saying to myself, remember to breathe because there were years where sometimes I would hold my breath because I was afraid if I threw. breathe, I would like knock myself off a technique or something, right? But that was really what my focus was, was just get to A and get to B because I was so sick. Just do it. You can do this. And it was all self-talk. Self-talk. You've probably heard that term before, or seen self-talk in action. Tennis players muttering to themselves before they serve. Basketball players about to try a free throw.

It's supposed to direct their focus away from dangerous overthinking. One effective kind of self-talk is writing down your worries. First of all, it helps you understand what's stressing you out and give meaning to it. It also can kind of download it from mind so it's less likely to pop up and distract you in the moment. And we've shown, for example, that people who are anxious about math, if they're given the ability to write about it before they go into a math test, can perform better. But there's a flip side. negative self-talk can be devastating for performance.

Musician Jennifer Montone learned to manage her negative self-talk with images. For me, whenever the negative self-talk gets in there, that's a turtle on its back with legs flapping in the air. And that guy doesn't go anywhere. So, you know, it's like, ah, so basically I have to flip myself over and then give myself a purpose and a story, getting myself back on my strong legs and then saying what I want to say. Her performance coach also taught her other visualization techniques that she's been using for years.

You imagine yourself hula hooping, so you wiggle your hips a bit, and then the hula hoop turns into a ring of fire. Then it gets smaller and smaller until it's right around your waist, then it zaps inside your body and becomes a ball of fire. Getting smaller and smaller until it's about the size of a ping pong ball, and it attaches to your body. spine, two inches below the belly button and two inches inside. It's a place where martial artists fight from. It's chi, force, energy, power, concentration, focus. And everybody has sort of a power center there. You can feel that energy going up your spine behind your belly button, behind your chest, behind your throat. And then it's going to come burning. out your eyes and bore a hole through the paper or the screen or whatever's in front of you.

Helping reframe our own self-talk in those situations can be really important. Whether it's speaking about what we're going to achieve, that can be helpful. So focusing on the positive rather than the negative, approaching rather than avoiding. According to Cey on Bylock, telling yourself you're nervous can sink a performance. But if you tell yourself you're excited, that changes everything. So we've actually shown for example, that when students are sitting for really important tests, when they interpret their sweaty palms and beating heart as a sign they're going to fail, they do.

But if we can remind them that that beating heart is a sign, that the heart is shunting blood to the brain so they can focus and think, they actually perform better. I also tried to use the energy, the electricity in the building, and use it for myself and sort of being intimidated by it, thinking that could be for me. I'm going to take that. I'm going to take that and use that for me.

I remember my coach saying something to me once, and I always stuck on my mind. Elizabeth Manley. If you're not nervous, it's not good. Because nerves give you the adrenaline. Nerves give you that push. What he would say to me is, it's good to have butterflies in your stomach.

Just make sure they're flying in formation. Whenever C-on-Bylock feels nervous, she does something that might seem paradoxical. She takes the pressure off herself by shifting the focus onto her multiple selves. I'm a professor. I'm a president. I'm a researcher. I'm a mom. Like, all of these things play into who I am. And I think it's important because when I do poorly at one, I have the others to fall back on. I think, you know, there is research showing that taking perspective, realizing that a situation isn't the end of the world can be helpful. and I think it's very hard as a young athlete to have that thousand-foot view. But if there's a single habit that leaves you vulnerable to the choke,

it's preparing the wrong way with no pressure at all. Carolyn Christie. A big part of my problem in its one or two times that I feel I choked in the symphony was that I practiced the skills. I practiced the part I could play it so well. I played it many times very well. but I hadn't practiced the part under pressure before the big performance. I think practicing under stress is one of the best ways to get ready for a stressful situation.

Practicing under the kind of conditions you're going to perform under, like close the gap between training and practice, whether you're taking a test or on the soccer field. You know, one of the reasons I've asserted that we don't make penalty shots or free throws at the same level that one should looking at the objectiveness of this shot is that people don't practice them in the right ways. They practice them by themselves or when, you know, at the end of practice, make something on the line. Have coaches should have the whole team watching. And if, you know, someone doesn't make a shot, maybe the rest of the team runs or does something that puts it on the line, get people used to what it's going to be like. I think there's a lot of research showing that's so important. Can Messi put Argentina in front? Nicholas Hausler is a neuroscientist who works with professional soccer players, specifically on penalty kicks.

And he's tucked it into the corner brilliantly. We always get this criticism, for example, people saying, yeah, but you can't recreate a final, a situation from a final. With 80,000 people watching, you can't do that. And I've never said that because I also know, from a brain point of view, it's impossible. Even if I put you in a perfect virtual reality setting, your brain will know this is not the final. And you can try to replicate it as much as you can.

It will never happen. But it's not about recreating that situation. It's about developing your... your own mental routine. And the analogy I always like to use is, if you're a soldier and I, you know how to work with a knife and I put you with the jungle anywhere in the world. You know how to defend yourself against anything. Yeah, because you know about how to use it perfectly.

Without our mental training, basically, it doesn't matter if the player plays a championship final or if he plays, I don't know, in the round of 16 of the league cup, in the end, the mental techniques are the same and the player knows even if it's the first time I have ever to shoot a penalty. I know what to do and I know what will help me or increase the chance of shooting a perfect penalty. We would do run-through trial competition run-throughs at home and training. We would go through all those steps so I could get used to it and get myself in that place that I needed to be. Elizabeth Manley's training included a sports psychologist who brought this idea of performance practice to the table to prepare her for anything that might happen.

My coach used to make me train sick. You know, he wouldn't let me miss training. I could have the worst flu bug or the cold or whatever it might be, and he'd forced me to go in for at least an hour because he wanted me to learn how to train if this ever happened at a big event. And lo, lo and behold. I got very sick. I was so sick in Calgary with the flu.

When I arrived there, yeah, I had a fever of 104. I had walking pneumonia. Tiger Woods father famously made him practice in the rain and would shout and make other distracting sounds, all to prepare a fledgling tiger for the conditions he'd encounter on the course. For about 10 years, we've been running a performance simulation suite at the Royal College of Music. Erin Williamham heads the Center for Performance Science in London, England. Now, what happens is that our students can book in to use this space throughout the academic year. When they book the space, they're given a very specific performance time.

They need to be there early to warm up, get dressed. And so when they do arrive, they're shown to a green room where they can practice, they can warm up. They're met by a backstage manager. And the backstage manager, just as would happen at any respectable concert hall worldwide, will come in to give them a countdown for performance to make sure that they're ready when the audience is ready. So you're on in 30 minutes, you're on in 15 minutes, and then please come with me. Now, from the green room, they move into a backstage. area. And here, what the student experiences is they can overhear an audience through the door. The lights are down.

They can't talk or otherwise the audience would hear them. The backstage manager is with them, and the backstage manager is looking at CCTV footage of the front of the house and doing lots of work to prepare for the performance. And all the while, the student is waiting. When the backstage Stage manager gets the cue that the front of house is ready for them to start. He or she will turn to the performer and open the door and usher them out onto stage. And at that point, the students are hit by the spotlights and through those spotlights, they can see an audience in front of them. Now, the audience that they see is moving, it's interactive, but it's projected onto a screen.

They're life size. They're usually quite a polite, well-behaved Western classical audience. That's where we're training our students mostly. But they do things like cough. They sneeze. Sometimes their phones will go off. And we can control all of those reactions from backstage while the student is on stage. And as the student takes that moment to get in the right place at the right time,

that mental state, where they're ready to perform. we can control different interactions of the audience as they go through. And they perform, and we video this from many different angles, and students can review those videos later. And at the end of a performance, we can cue our audience to give a number of different reactions. So they can applaud very enthusiastically, just demonstrate that they like the performance.

They can applaud quite coldly to show that, well, was fine, but let's move on to something else. They can give a standing ovation, or they can even boo. The point is to develop those skills of preparation, delivery, and review that can be systematically studied and examined and improved. The simulator can also create what must be the most stressful situation for a musician. Hello?

The audition that can make or break a career. Start whenever you are ready. Here the students are staring down the projected image of three people, the audition panel. The audition panel can respond in one of three ways. They can be very happy with what's happening. They can smile. They can be indifferent or they can be downright negative, even aggressive looking. And then at the end of the audition, they can also respond as they were listening in a positive,

indifferent or a negative way. Thank you. I think we've heard enough. The extreme example might even be like an orchestral edition. Performance coach Noah Kagayana. It's not just a performance where you hope the audience goes home happy. You're trying to beat, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of other musicians who are playing the exact same things who are going for that one single job that you may not have another opportunity to try to win.

And so in situations like this, I think our mind is very much. much more easily tempted to focus on things that are unhelpful, like worrying about the committee or worrying about difficult passages or evaluating how things are going and trying to figure out if you're doing well or doing poorly. I had one very successful client who was a runner, and she would run 10 miles before her audition. Carolyn Christie. That would never have worked for me. I would have done slow breathing. I would have thought of my mantra. I can do this. I love to play the flute. because French horn is very physical, I have to do quite a bit of breathing exercises and yoga and meditation beforehand.

Jennifer Montone. I have some new exercises to soothe the vagus nerve, which is the big nerve that goes up and down your body. And a lot of your nervous system, you know, whether it's sort of inflamed and freaking out or is calm and at ease, has to do with the vagus nerve and how, you know, how much you're able to control it. Your nose breathe for maybe four seconds and then hum for eight seconds. So you just do.

And repeat. I would get to the hall an hour early. That kind of thing worked for me, whereas some of my other very successful colleagues would arrive at the hall at 10 to 8, 5 to 8, and they thrived on this last minute stuff. And now we arrive at the moment of truth. Practice is over. Rehearsals are done.

now the musician or athlete is about to perform for real. Things will either go well or badly right now. And the performer we're watching will live in the shadow of this moment for years. I've often wondered, in that moment, what are they thinking or not thinking? The one thing that's important not to be thinking about, of course, is whether we're doing well or not. So whether it's singing or humming or actually creating an instrumental sound in your head of what it is that you want coming out of your instrument, it seems that instead of self-monitoring and evaluating what's actually coming out of our instrument, it's more useful to focus on the sound that we want coming out of our instrument. If you're one-third listening, one-third feeling, and one-third thinking, you're in a very good balance with yourself.

I do remember balancing between thinking and not thinking, trusting training, trusting autopilot, or trying to trust autopilot. It's a constant push me, pull me, you know, with your mind when you're competing, or at least it was for me. Noah Kagayama uses the phrase mental choreography to describe a map or sequence that performers carry in their minds. The mental choreography of your thoughts during a performance is as important, perhaps, as the physical choreography in advance. Right before you play, I think about the music that is around a certain excerpt, and then, like, basically the air and the time that goes into it. Jennifer Montone. You know, it's in major, it's in minor, it's lusher, it's perky, or it's perky, or it's perky, or, it's aggressive or it's angry. You've got sort of the story and the singing, and then you've got

the groove, and then you've got the technique that you need to have in order to render it. You can say, I'll phrase to here, and I'll push on this note, and I'll come away on this note, and I'll color this, and I'll do this, and then go, you know, so I'm subdividing and breathing, and then you just hop right on. This is Jennifer Montone, hopping right on, talking us through a section of Ricard Strauss's Ein Helden-Laben. Mental Choreography in Action. So to start this, I'm vamping a rock band Mosh Pit, double bass, Frum, Frum, Frum, Frum, Fram, Fram, Frem, Frem, Firm, Frem, Firm, in my head, with huge expansive inhales and exhales before,

thinking noble and proud, generous cello slurs, exhilarating battle scene theme. It's okay. Ready? Crescendo your subdivision. Big breath. And go. lock into the cello pitch crescendo now accent and pickup and downbeat now subdivide smooth sixteenth now whoosh the air phrase to one make sure your g is not too sharp now sustained line of accents go for the

high a yeah there you go now loving theme you want to be smooth and singing phrased and relaxed now accents now go to the downbeat yet that dot dot dot dot that crescendo subdivision you got this flat, good. Blur through the lick. Now phrase to one. Now watch portal pitch. And you're done. We began with the agony of soccer fans watching their team fall short in a penalty shootout. And he's tucked it into the corner brilliantly. But one team in the English Premier League has enjoyed some success thanks in part to a new and scientific approach to performance practice. Is this the heartbreak moment? Harvey Elliott against Kepper. And he scored two. Will it ever end? February 27th, 2022, the Carabow Cup, a knockout tournament and one of the major titles teams in the English League compete for. After two hours of play in the final game, neither Liverpool nor Chelsea had scored.

So it all came down to the dreaded penalty kicks. Oh, he's made that look easy, isn't he? Shooter after shooter, after shooter, after shooter scored. He does. 10, 10. And unbelievably, the shootout went to an 11th round. No one from Liverpool had missed, not even the goalkeeper who took the 11th penalty.

He's roost it, 1110. And then it was the turn of the Chelsea keeper. Oh, he's missed it. It's not even close. Liverpool win the Carabal Cup in the most extraordinary circumstances. 1110 on penalties. Then four months later in the FAA Cup final,

Liverpool and Chelsea meet again. Sorry to put you through this, Chelsea fans. At the end of another two hours of goldless football within Chelsea and Liverpool, it will be settled at Wembley for the second time this year from a penalty shootout. In the seventh round of penalty kicks,

Liverpool player Costa Simicasse is next to shoot. The highest of dramas here. If he scores, Liverpool will, wins the championship. Simicus, poor Liverpool, and wins it for Liverpool. And just like in the League Cup, in the final here in February,

and they've done it via a penalty shootout. Every team in the league practices penalty kicks, but Liverpool had recently added a new tool to their arsenal. My name is Nicholas Hausler. I'm a neuroscientist and a co-founder and CEO of the German startup company, Nure11. Nicholas and a colleague had been working with Liverpool's players on their penalty kicks. They went to Liverpool practices and attached electrodes to every player's head.

We measure the brain activity, so right now we use EEG. The players practiced their penalties. And Nicholas then showed the players their brain scans. Using the EEG, we figure out basically what are the mental routines that help you, or the aspects that help you and things that may actually distract you. And then we try to figure out, okay, what are the things that distract you? How can we eliminate them in our training and then step by step, session by session? We improve this.

It's about controlling your brain. It's about the big thing is understanding your own mental processes, you know, and only by understanding it and controlling it. Some players maybe will look at the ball. Some will look at briefly at the target. Some will, you know, maybe just kind of have this blurry vision at the goal. Some people will be very, very precise about it. maybe it's you look at the grass next to the ball.

You know, everybody has their own little anchors, you know, that they can fixate upon. The thing is that you can train this as much as you want. If you don't hook up a machine that measures your brain waves, then it's hard to decipher, okay, but is this an anchor that actually helps or not? Yeah, so this is the, I think, the big difference to us with the new approach. That game in February 2020, when Liverpool won on penalty kicks 11 to 10, was the first major test of the work Nicholas and NER,

11 had done with the team. I might have been the guy in the stadium that has the highest heart rate, and I had to calm myself down again, you know, using the techniques that I know for myself, so breathing and meditating a little bit. For me, as a neuroscientist, it was actually even more than that. It was about, yeah, a revolution in professional sports because it was about applying neuroscience in such a high, you know,

high elite level context. And I feel very honored and, you know, like very privileged to have witnessed this and to be part of this. but in the end to be also completely honest I sat down and I just cried out of relief because the pressure was just so extremely high you know and it's Liverpool's League Cup once again

and the travelling cop is in ecstasy 11 from 11 Liverpool perfect from the spot and the most dramatic the most exhilarating and perhaps the craziest nil-nil you've ever seen ends with

Liverpool taking home the trophy. Which brings us back to this. It's an unenviable task for Christopher Waddle. A soccer player facing that gaping net on a penalty kick. Pierce can't look. Here goes Waddle. At the World Cup, at any championship, one of the world's best soccer players will try to make a shot he's nailed a thousand times in practice.

and he'll either be like Roberto Baggio in 1994 or like Canada's Julia Grosso in the 2020 Olympic final. To make history for Canada, she does. First time, Julia Grosso. Whether that soccer player succeeds or fails, and whether a particular dancer or skater, musician or golfer or gymnast nails their routine or chokes,

they'll be showing us something crucial. What I think is really interesting about trying to understand performance anxiety is that it gives us real insight into our ancient selves. So of course, when faced with threats in our environment, that are life threatening, we are going to fight or fly. It's very useful to have responses where our blood is pumping to big muscle groups and gets us into that state ready to go. And so therefore, this whole area of performance and performance anxiety is one where it allows us to ask questions about how we as humans and how we've evolved to deal with threat and challenges in our world are able to interact in the 21st century world. You're listening to Flopswet, Why We Choke When It Matters Most, produced by Peter Brown. The web producer for ideas is Lisa Iusel. Technical production, Nicholas Bonnan.

Nikola Lukshich is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly and I'm Nala Ayat. And I'm still here with Peter Brown. So after all that searching, what have you learned ultimately about choking? I have learned how to finally beat my friend Neil at Poole. This goes to how to sabotage your friend. I threw this question to Noah Kagyama, who is now my unofficial. performance coach. One of the things you can do, you can start messing with your friend by like asking

him what he's doing technically. It's like, oh, that was a great shot. Like, what did you do there? Like, you know enough about billiards and technique to like ask him leading questions about specific things. I'm sure you can think of all sorts of questions related to technique that you can ask him about so that he starts self-monitoring and potentially in theory is more likely to choke. Again, you might want to tell your friend about this afterwards and buy him a drink. Well, we'll see you at the pool table then. I guarantee victory. Thank you, Peter.

Thanks, Nala. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.