Welcome to this weeks guest blogger, one of our lovely business associate, Dr Ross Hall!
With a Doctorate in Psychology, Dr Ross is a HCPC registered practitioner psychologist. His areas of expertise include: developing team and individual confidence; dealing with perceived performance pressures; the anxiety-performance relationship; developing ability to remain task focused.
Visit his LinkedIn
Ever wondered what performance psychology can offer business?
The worlds of sport and business have been closely linked for decades. Many articles, throughout all forms of social or hard print media, constantly relate sporting terminology or analogies to the notion of performance in business.
Indeed, performance excellence has attracted much debate across a numerous context, for example but not limited to:
Coaching
Teamwork
Team building
Personal or team motivation
Burnout
Psychological development across the lifespan
Furthermore, sport has a lot to learn from high performing business teams. Interpersonal skills and leadership characteristics are among the most important aspects of developing team cohesion.
If you have ever reflected on your personal performance and wondered whether your decisions or actions were clouded by your emotions or what others have said to you, there is some good news. You can learn to remain calm when under perceived pressure, by understanding and learning how to control those things that are within your control…
What are these (psychological) things?
Mental imagery: the ability to form and control images of performances or events in your mind.
Performance routines: How you routinely prepare for performances, not rituals or superstitions, but performance preparations that enable you to remain focused and on task.
Self-talk: Our internal dialogue, which for most needs to be positive and self-affirming, but negative self-talk can also have a positive impact, for some. No one can make you think negatively and yet most of our daily thoughts are automatically negative.
Arousal regulation techniques: These can help ‘get you up’ or assist in relaxing or calming you down.
Sustaining attention or focus: Remaining on-task when there are competing demands and pressures.
How can you learn how to control yourself and your actions when under pressure?
First we need to compare and contrast exceptional performances to perceived catastrophic failures.
What are the psychological similarities and differences within each situation?
Can you use the psychological skills from best performances and apply them to our not so good ones?
Simply put, yes you can, but this takes time and dedication, but the impact upon yourself and your team is tangible.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ and developing sustainable relationships based on trust, honesty and respect are key to any long-term performance effectiveness. The first step though is learning about yourself and how you can make progress in ‘controlling the controllables’.
If you want to know more ways of applying performance pyschology in your business, we can help connect you with Ross by contacting us
#BusinessPerformancePyschology #ControlControllables #BusinessPyschology #Businessmindset #HandlePressure
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