🔵 The Paradox of Performance

You know the feeling. You've put in the work. Hours of preparation, meticulous planning, every detail covered. You walk into that big moment confident you've got this.

Then it all falls apart.

It's not about lack of skill or insufficient preparation. It's about something far more fundamental that trips up even the most prepared performers: the inability to switch modes when it matters most.

This week, performance coach Adrienne Carter breaks down what she calls "The Paradox of Performance." Why elite preparation and elite execution require different mindsets, and how to master the shift between them.

If you've ever felt like your performance didn't match your preparation, this one's essential reading.

Coach’s Corner

Have you ever had a performance event where you felt completely prepared, yet when the moment arrived, you bombed?

We've all been there, and it's a terrible feeling.

Your preparation felt so good that the desired result seemed inevitable. But when it came time to perform, your thoughts were racing, overloading your mind, and eventually freezing under the pressure.

So what's the culprit?

This is something I refer to as the Paradox of Performance.

Elite performance requires elite preparation.

Elite performance also requires setting aside the preparation mindset when it's time to execute.

To be world-class, it's almost like you need two versions of yourself: one version spends its time crafting the skills, knowledge, and experience required to perform, and another takes those abilities and executes upon them.

Some are great at preparation. Some are great at execution. The best are world-class at both.

The Two Modes in Action

Let's break this down with some examples.

Major League Baseball players need to be scientists off the field and elite athletes on the field.

In between outings and in the off-season, a modern major league pitcher looks closer to a data scientist. With all the metrics available now, pitchers and their coaching staffs are constantly making minute adjustments to their grips and mechanics to achieve the exact movement on their pitches that complements their full arsenal. Then there's constant work on sequencing and batter tendencies to create attack plans that take advantage of specific batter weaknesses.

But once they step on the field, it's a different story. They use the adrenaline of the situation to fuel extra velocity and movement. If they get in their head too much about exact pitch grips and mechanics, things tend to fall apart.

On the field, it's more about feel and flow if they want to perform their best. Yes, they're still considering batter tendencies and sequencing, but they must also take into account how the batters reacted to previous pitches to determine how to attack them going forward.

As my Professional Baseball client Eli Villalobos puts it:

“While mechanics are essential to the game, my game derails when I’m too mechanical on the mound.”

Now, let's examine a sales team that sells complex software solutions to large corporate clients. During the preparation phase, the team must study their own product so they know it inside and out, and also delve deeply into the specific needs, structure, and habits of the prospective clients to tailor the pitch to the client's exact situation, with a script likely to be developed based on this research.

However, when the time for the pitch arrives, if they remain robotic and never deviate from the initial plan, things can often end in disaster.

In the moment, things rarely unfold exactly as the script is laid out. Clients will have questions you might not have anticipated, have a different viewpoint than you expected, or something else entirely that you missed. If you repeatedly emphasize a particular point or direction when the client is trying to go another way, then things will often go south quickly. A good sales team can use preparation to have a rock-solid plan and be able to read the room, making the client feel heard, helping them understand that the solution is perfect for them, and being flexible in their approach.

A third example is students preparing for an exam. It could be a college placement exam, such as the SAT, or more advanced tests like the MCAT or LSAT, which are required to gain admission to professional-level schools. Depending on the trajectory you want your career to take, these exams are key performance events in many people's lives.

There are entire industries built around optimizing preparation, and people spend months, even years, preparing for the moment.

I'm sure you've heard of people who were diligently prepared and aced every practice test but weren't able to translate that preparation when it was time to do the real thing. They knew all the answers, but instead of being able to focus on individual questions, the pressure of the moment short-circuited their mind and led to severe underperformance.

Making the Shift

So, if you find yourself in this situation where your execution doesn't match your level of preparedness, what can you do?

Preparation Mode vs Performance Mode

The first step is to understand the difference between Preparation Mode and Performance Mode. As we've discussed so far, these two modes require different mindsets.

Pre-game routines can be installed before a performance event to make it very clear which mode you're in. The exact routine varies significantly from industry to industry. A pre-game routine for an athlete will differ from that of a sales team or a student taking a test.

However, the goal remains the same: to transition from Preparation Mode to Performance Mode.

Fade To Grey Visulization

A technique I implement with my clients is a fade to grey visualization. This can be an intentional part of a pre-game routine, but also quickly accessible to clients who use it when they feel themselves overthinking, or struggling to execute to their expectation during a performance event. It can be done in just a few seconds if that's all the time you have, or over a few minutes if there's a bit more space, but it's really quite simple.

In your mind, you see your performance event in the highest definition, most vibrant colour and then notice how the rest of the world can fade to grey. In the time that you have, you make this distinction as vivid as possible, whether by turning a dial or flipping a switch. The goal here is to hyper-focus on what's essential to perform and block off the noise of everything else, including thoughts that are not helpful for execution. Deploying this technique when you're in preparation mode is essential practice, making it effortless to do this on command in the high pressure moments.

Install Performance Mode

Finally, we can install performance mode ahead of time. Throughout our lives, we often develop a series of subconscious programs that are detrimental to accessing performance mode.

Being highly successful at a performance event can mean a big shift. It can lead to a higher profile in your industry, promotions, significant income increases, or admission to a prestigious school. All things that greatly shake up the status quo.

These detrimental subconscious programs we have running are doing everything they can to maintain the status quo. That's where the type of performance coaching our team does comes in, eliminating these programs and installing a performance mode that's right for you.

Everyone has unique subconscious programs that hold them back from accessing their highest level of performance, and every industry's performance mode looks a bit different. Performance mode for a baseball player looks different than performance mode for a trader, which looks different from performance mode for a sales team. In a private coaching situation, we can tailor it to your specific needs.

Being elite at what you do requires elite preparation and elite execution, and the mindset needed for each of these can be vastly different. Understanding how to transition from one mode to another can be one of the most effective upgrades for optimizing your results.

Click Here To Learn More About Adrienne’s Coaching

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