Two seconds left in game five of the 1997 Western Conference semifinals, Kobe Bryant is bringing up the ball with the potential to win the game. He shoots. Airball.
Overtime. He shoots again. Airball. Again. Airball. Another time. Airball.
Now he needs to score or it’s really over. Airball. Walking off the court, the thought of where his young career would end up must have loomed on his mind.
Kobe went to make 8 buzzer-beating shots. EIGHT. To put that into reference, only Michael Jordan and LeBron James have more. He went from having five airballs in a massive playoff game to being recognized as one of the most clutch players of all time.
How did he make that switch? How can we turn pressure situations into opportunities for us to thrive?
Firstly, what exactly is pressure? Pressure is the expectations that we and other people put on ourselves to perform.
No, what is it actually? It’s imaginary constraints that we place on ourselves based on what we think people think we should do. An imaginary force that we place on ourselves to live up to standards that aren’t ours.
So can we begin to change our perception of pressure?
Instead of thinking about what others think about us, we can begin to focus on the thing that we are doing at this moment. In addition, if we can shift our concentration and attention to the process rather than the opinions of others, we can begin to ignore pressure altogether. We will have total control of how we act. We’ll get the double benefit of eliminating pressure and having more focus on our craft.
Discomfort
In a podcast episode of The Daily Stoic with Ryan Holiday and Steve Magness, Steve Magness emphasized that truly elite athletes focus most of their attention on the mental game, rather than worrying about the technical aspects of their sport or how their parents/coaches may perceive their performance. They put an emphasis on the cliques of “Keep the main thing the main thing” and “Focus on the present” and how those cliques separate the most elite athletes from athletes potentially a level or two below. So what should we be focusing on? Discomfort.
Discomfort is the only way you can learn. Adam Grant emphasizes this point through Hidden Potential: “The best way to accelerate growth is to embrace, seek and amplify discomfort”. You must be willing to start before you are ready because otherwise you won’t make the mistakes that are necessary to improve.
This is easier said than done. For the most part, we avoid discomfort. We play it safe – only doing the things that are convenient to us. We aren’t running that marathon or pursuing that dream of ours because it takes too much time to put in the work and the reward isn’t guaranteed.
As a society, we need to incentivize people to make mistakes, so that they can learn how to deal with pressure and grow from the experience. We have a tendency to shy away from failure and perceive failure as a death sentence. We have a belief that after we fail, everything is lost and that we have nothing going for us. Carrying that belief, we continue to narrow our skills to the point that the things that we are doing aren’t valuable and easy to replicate.
By contrast, if we embrace failure and choose to learn from our mistakes, we can continue to expand and continue to improve. Carrying that mindset, we dissociate from the result and release ourselves from the pressure of performing. We allow our brain to allocate more resources to the task at hand.
At the age of 22, a young man got fired as a newspaper artist from a Missouri newspaper for quote on quote, “not being creative enough”. Now this could have been a major setback for him, although it wasn’t. That man went on to create potentially the most recognizable entertainment company worldwide, completely changing the television/movie production sector. He had a net worth between 100 to 150 million dollars (the equivalent of about 750 million to 1.1 billion dollars in today’s world). Walt Disney was not a man who was going to be stopped by “failures”. He kept on believing in his abilities and the vision of what could be done.
Perspective
The ability to make myself small has helped me tremendously while dealing with pressure situations. When you think about it, this moment is one moment for one human being in the history of billions of people in a gigantic universe. The fact of the matter is that the thing or moment that you are afraid of likely doesn’t even matter in the long run. You’ll likely forget in 2 seconds or 2 minutes or 2 days or 2 weeks or 2 months or 2 years.
As you see the world from a more detached view, the thoughts and opinions surrounding you will dissipate. You’ll understand pretty quickly that they are just thoughts that your mind is creating to preserve your survival and hold no bearing unless you allow them to.
In an interview many years ago, Kobe Bryant described how he broke down pressure situations.
“[S]tepping back and saying yeah, I am nervous about this situation… Well, what am I afraid of? And then you kind of unpack it and then it gives you the ability to look at it for really what it i,s which is nothing more than your imagination running its course.”
I feel that it’s important to acknowledge that you are fearful about something and accept the feelings that may be arising within yourself. But, I think that you have to cultivate stillness in those situations, so that you are capable of looking at your emotions from a rational place versus an emotional place.
And, that takes practice. You have to practice stillness on a daily basis in order to be able to tap into it when it matters the most. After you are capable of looking at your emotions, you can proceed to break them down and see what your emotions actually are.
In order to be in control of your emotions, you have to actively open up time for stillness in your life. Stillness is crucial to overcoming pressure as it keeps you grounded in the moment instead of stuck in your own emotions and thoughts. It allows you to see the moment for what it is, which is simply just a moment in time.
Recently, I have been actively trying to cultivate stillness and become more present. Whether I’m on the train or I just woke up, I like to sometimes shut down my thoughts and simply be present within the moment. I like to appreciate the sound of the birds or the river flowing across the train window. You must begin to start cultivating this during the calmer moments because if you can’t cultivate stillness when nothing is going on, you won’t be able to cultivate stillness in the pressure scenarios.
I have found the role of stillness in my life extremely useful in the hospital setting. For the most part, I’ve found my ability to remain present helpful in executing my skills. I’ve been actively shifting things out of my control, such as a patient’s mood, which could affect my focus and performance, into things in my control (emotion regulation). I find that when I’m capable of doing that, I’m performing at my best. Because if I’m able to take the energy that I’m putting into the things out of my control into things within my control, I’ll automatically be performing up to my potential.
For now, you may not be able to do this at the moment, so I suggest that you visualize yourself in those tough moments and then break down the emotions.
Recently, I got called out by my instructor for not understanding the ins and outs of a specific procedure. She gave me advice that stuck with me.
“You have to visualize and imagine every step of the process in your mind before practicing the procedure.”
It is impossible to understand the feelings or experiences that you will experience for situations that you haven’t gone through. You have to embrace the discomfort of accepting opportunities and trying things that currently aren’t in your repertoire. Whether that be through visualization, practice or experience. If you are an athlete, visualize yourself being in game conditions and practice the looks that you may get in game. If you are an artist, keep on refining your art until you are capable of producing the work that you are proud of. If you are a parent, test out different ways to help support the development of your child. This is the only way you get better. You will only get better as time goes on.
Preparation
Ultimately, you have to put yourself into situations where you must confront yourself.
The first time that I did my evaluation for drug administration, I was nervous as hell. The mistakes flowed out of me; took too long here, forgot to do this. The issue for me wasn’t my nerves; everyone was nervous. The issue was the lack of preparation I had made before the evaluation. I hadn’t received any feedback prior to the evaluation about my efficiency and technique. I didn’t take the initiative to actively prepare and put myself in the best position.
When I returned for my redo evaluation, I was much calmer. I had spent time with a teaching assistant to hash out all of the issues with my injection technique, and I had practiced the sequence for drug administration enough times to the point I was well below the permitted time. However, this doesn’t mean that things didn’t go wrong or I didn’t make mistakes. I took an excruciating amount of time trying to get the right amount of liquid in my syringe. The difference this time is that I was ready for whatever happened. Even if something wouldn’t have worked, it would not have made that much of a difference to my focus because I was ready for anything.
The only way you can truly know whether you are ready for the occasion is by putting yourself in similar situations which require the same skills that you need to succeed.
“My colleague Angela Duckworth finds that instead of relying on willpower to push through a strenuous situation, they change the situation to make it less strenuous”.
The only way you’ll be capable of doing this is if you’ve placed yourself in that situation enough times to the point where you are capable of thinking and calming yourself from the nerves that will be presented to you.
Take Steph Curry for example. Whenever he’s training or practicing for his craft, he and his trainer, Brandon Payne, are designing the exercises to simulate play-like conditions and push the envelope in terms of developing Steph’s abilities. They are meticulous in ensuring there are no wasted exercises. He can use the skills that he practiced in game because he practiced them in game-like conditions. His training is the key to his outlier shooting and hand-eye coordination.
If you can get to a place where you’re automatically doing everything without thinking, that’s where you want to be. Where pressure has no impact on your actions. Where the results don’t matter. Where you are just in the present. That’s where we want to be.
.References:
“The Story of a Man Who Was Fired for a Lack of Creativity but Went on to Build His Own Empire.” Bright Side — Inspiration. Creativity. Wonder., 19 Aug. 2020, https://brightside.me/articles/the-story-of-a-man-who-was-fired-for-a-lack-of-creativity-but-went-on-to-build-his-own-empire-798520/.
YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEQgT0PKbU8&ab_channel=ESPN. Accessed 9 Sep. 2025.
“Most Buzzer Beaters in NBA History.” BetMGM, https://sports.betmgm.com/en/blog/nba/most-game-winners-in-nba-history-bm05/. Accessed 9 Sep. 2025.
The Incredible Net Worth of Walt Disney. https://greenlight.com/learning-center/fun-facts/walt-disney-net-worth. Accessed 9 Sep. 2025.