How to Use Nerves to Perform Your Best

Most of us have been taught that nerves are a problem we have to solve. The vast majority of advice that gets recommended to manage nerves centers on trying to calm down, but what if I told you that this advice is counterproductive? After winning The Players Championship, PGA Tour golfer Cameron Young described his nerves as useful and how they help him become capable of better performance. In this episode, we break down why your body’s response to pressure is actually designed to help you perform. If you’ve ever struggled with anxiety in big moments, this episode will give you a new way to understand it and a better way to use it.

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Transcript

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For some reason, most of us have been told that the goal under pressure is that we need to calm down. We're often advised to hone things like various breathing techniques or apply different mental strategies to help us eliminate things like our nerves. But what if that advice is actually backwards? What if the very thing that you're trying to get rid of is actually the thing that can help you perform at your best? Now, this past weekend at the Players Championship, Cameron Young opened up in his uh post-championship press interview about his own nerves during the tournament, particularly the final round. He basically told the reporters that he won because he understood how to use his nerves. So today I want to challenge the way that you think about pressure and nerves and help you realize that either for yourself or someone you care about, that elite performers, they don't eliminate nerves. They've simply learned how to channel them. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callinly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callenly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So this past Sunday, Cameron Young captured his second PGA tour win at the players' championship. After the round was over, he was asked during his interview about his nerves, specifically also, though, about how playing in the recent Writer Cup helped kind of prepare him for moments like Sunday. His response, though, was I thought really interesting. He said, Dealing with nerves is tricky. They make your senses kind of heighten. Typically I actually hit the ball a little farther, so it makes you capable of more. But if you kind of let them get in the way, obviously it can kind of be disastrous. Now, what I liked about this comment is that he didn't say that nerves make you worse, which I think sometimes again is what we've kind of been led to believe. What he basically said was that they make you more capable, but only if you work with them, not against them. And he doubled down on this idea later in the interview when he talked about his approach to the week as a whole. He said he knew that the course was going to be difficult. So instead of chasing results, he just committed to focusing entirely on his process and just focusing on executing one shot at a time, letting go of the outcome, being accepting of whatever happens, and just staying locked in at the on the task at hand. If you get a chance to read it or check out more of that interview, it's really filled actually with quite a few different uh mental game insights like this. But I want to go back for a quick moment to the idea that we've been led to believe that our nerves are a problem to solve. Physiologically, this isn't true. When you feel nervous, yes, your heart rate speeds up, but your focus sharpens, right? Your eyes dilate, which is going to help you lock in on what the task at hand. Your muscles are going to start firing and your reaction time is going to improve. Your body is going to be mobilizing energy that you can use. It's your system preparing you for a meaningful moment. Now, if you could bottle all that up into a pill and then you were to give it to someone, that person would probably get banned with a performance-enhancing drug. So think about that. Your body naturally, naturally produces a performance-enhancing drug. So the issue really isn't the presence of one's nerves, it's how you interpret them. Because the moment that you label the nerves as a threat, you're going to start fighting your own biology. Think of nerves like free energy that you can leverage. What if we viewed our nerves as like our brain warming up? Your body has to warm up for performance. So does your brain. Nerves are your mind messaging your body that you're doing something exciting, something meaningful, and it's time to perform. So, what could be a way that we could take all of this and apply it? I think the first is just to understand that like your goal when it comes to a high pressure situation, whether it's in sport or any other aspect of life, isn't to try to calm down necessarily. It's to channel that energy that you get from those nerves. Instead of saying I need to calm down and relax, just remind yourself that your brain's warming up and you're being gifted that free energy that you can use and use it to help you focus and perform optimally. Now the second thing, again, tied to what uh Cameron Young talked about, is to make sure that you have defined and you're clear and anchored to a good process because one of the things that we know can really cause nerves to spike, particularly because all of a sudden it becomes very like threatening, is when our focus gets hijacked by outcomes when we get overly concerned with results. This is where I think a lot of people lose control. You don't manage pressure though by controlling results. You manage pressure by narrowing your focus to the task at hand and what's important now. So ask yourself, what does good execution look right here, right now? Bring your attention and your focus back to the task right in front of you. Because outcomes, they're gonna create a lot of anxiety, but your process it's almost like it kind of gives you a sense of stability. It keeps you kind of again grounded so that way you're less less apt to ride that emotional roller coaster that we can often experience in these kind of high pressure moments. One of my all-time favorite quotes around this too actually came from Joe Madden, the former Major League Baseball manager, who used to say that the process is fearless. There's a lot more anxiety and fear gift-wrapped with outcomes than within our processes. So, all this to say, under pressure, your body isn't trying to deliberately betray you. It's trying to help you prepare for what's upcoming. The question becomes, are you gonna fight it or are you gonna learn how to use it? Because the performers who separate themselves, I think at the highest level, they aren't the ones who all of a sudden feel less or they don't feel nerves at all. They're the ones who've learned how to do more with everything that they're feeling, nerves included.