What I’ll be talking about today asks the question…

“How well do you handle high pressure situations?”

Let me share a personal story with you.

At one point in my life I was interested in becoming a pilot so I began taking flying lessons. At the time I was living in Florida.

I knew that after a certain amount of flying hours with an instructor that I would be required to start flying solo…the thing was, I didn’t know at what exact moment.

So one day I was on a flying lesson and we flew from the Boca Raton Florida airport over to the Pompano Beach airport which was only a few minutes away.

At that point my instructor gets out of the airplane and said told me I was ready to do my first solo.

I felt comfortable about soloing being that I had a number of flying hours already under my belt.

At that moment I just went about my business and did a few touch and gos around the airport which included flying over the coast line….

No problem.

Then one other day I was on a flying lesson and my instructor wanted me to practice doing a stall.

When I went into doing this flying maneuver I went into a spin and the airplane was basically pointing face down while over part of the Everglades.

Even though it all happened so fast it was certainly a very high pressure situation.

Even before he told me to practice doing the stall I felt a bit uneasy about it.

Thankfully my instructor was in the airplane when I went into that spin otherwise I wouldn’t be here today writing about it.

I still remember him sitting there with his arms folded, calm as can be, and then he pulled us out of the spin I went into (Note- There were duel controls in this airplane)

Why am I bringing this up and what does it have to do with you and how well you handle high pressure situations?

Because the only way that someone can be in a high pressure situation is if they aren’t prepared and at the same time have started thinking about failure.

Here’s a quote from former baseball manager Tommy Lasorda…

“Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it’s because you’ve started to think of failure.”

Think about the situations that have occurred in your life when you felt a lot of pressure. It can be any situation that you perceived as being a high pressured situation.

How did you handle that situation?

Then think of other situations in your life that you may not have perceived as being high pressured but then someone else said to you, “I don’t know how you handled that difficult situation so well, there’s no way I could have dealt with that.”

Here’s something very important to remember…

There is a relationship between being prepared and your ability to handle a perceived high pressure situation.

In other words…

The more prepared you are, the lower the probability of being in situations that are “high pressured.” So in a sense the better prepared you are the less often you’ll feel pressured in any situation.

I gave you one of the many examples of that in my flying lesson story.

I was prepared to fly solo even though my instructor sprang that surprise onto me and said I was ready. For some that may have been a high pressure situation. For me it wasn’t.

Then there was that spin I went into which was certainly a high pressured situation for me in that moment.

Why?

Because I really wasn’t prepared to do that flying maneuver. For some people that would not have been that big a deal, especially if they were better prepared.

The best way that you can reduce your probability of being in high pressure situations is to get very clear on what it is that you want and to take the time and effort and prepare for it.

Whether it has to do with your finances, your relationships, your career, or any area of your life, the better prepared you are, for both sides of the outcome, the more likely you are to not be in high pressured situations to begin with…

They may be high pressured situations to others but not to you because you would have prepared for them and know how to handle them.

Always know that there are two sides to everything in life, whether they appear that way on the surface or not.

Not only will you handle situations better by knowing this but you’ll also see both sides of your magnificent and brilliant self.

When you truly can see this, in addition to being more relaxed in what may seem like difficult situations, you’ll realize the brilliance and genius of who you are…

And then you can use that along with your uniqueness to provide a tremendous amount of value to the world by being your amazing self.