Part 3: Stay Calm Under Pressure
It's extremely difficult to play cricket while you are asleep; you need to be awake and alert. In other words, you need to be sufficiently aroused to perform at your best. But if you become too aroused, your performance will suffer and you'll start to make mistakes.

Cricketers often allow their arousal level to become too high when they are in pressure situations, such as near the end of a close match. At times like these, their muscles become tense, they have difficulty focussing on the task at hand, and tempers sometimes flare. And when this happens, winning positions often turn into losing positions.

Learning to control your arousal level will help you to retain your competitive advantage. If you can remain calm while your opposition is stressed, you will give yourself a much better chance of winning. But before we look at how to remain calm, let's take a quick look at how you create your own arousal level.

How You Create Your Own Pressure
Most people believe that pressure or stress is caused by what is going on around them. For example, if the batting team needs three runs off the last two balls of an innings, you might think that such a situation would naturally make anyone tense. But we know that different people react differently in the same situation, so it can't be the situation that causes the reaction, otherwise everyone would have the same reaction.

Obviously, there is something else that causes the reaction. That something else is your attitude. Here's how it works:

Situation + Attitude = Arousal Level

If you have nervous thoughts, you will feel nervous; if you have confident thoughts, you will feel confident. The key to staying calm in pressure situations is not to change the situation, but to change the way that you think about it. You may have very little control over the situation, but you do have control over your attitude. Before we look at how to change your thoughts, let's examine the types of thoughts that create stress.

Stress-creating thoughts are usually negative and fall into two broad categories: (1) overestimating the seriousness of the situation, and (2) underestimating your ability to cope. Some examples include:

• I'll probably go out first ball.
• We must not lose.
• It would be terrible to lose.
• I must take wickets or make a big score.
• I can't stand these close finishes.
• Everyone will think I'm a loser if I do something wrong, such as drop a catch.

1. While it is desirable to do well, it is not compulsory. When you tell yourself that you must do well, you place added pressure on yourself. It is far more effective to remind yourself that you want to do well, but that you don't have to succeed. By changing the demand that you do well into a preference, you give yourself every chance of remaining calm and retaining your competitive advantage.
2. Getting out cheaply, or losing an important or close match can be a real pain. However, it is not the end of the world. You create extra stress for yourself when you believe that failure is terrible or awful. These words exaggerate the seriousness of the situation and distract you from the task at hand. Learn to replace these words with more accurate ones such as disappointing or unfortunate.
3. As noted in the paragraph above, getting out cheaply, or losing an important or close match can be a real pain, but it's not fatal. Neither are close finishes fatal. You'll be surprised at how empowering it can be to say the following sentence to yourself: "I don't like this situation but it won't kill me". This simple, yet powerful sentence can relieve you of considerable pressure, provided you convince yourself that you actually believe it.
4. Being a better cricketer won't make you a better human being. Similarly, a poor performance does not make you a less worthy individual. Learn to separate your performance from your identity. By all means rate how well you play, but don't use that to rate yourself as a person. Avoid calling yourself names such as 'Loser', or 'Klutz' etc. These labels are a symptom of self-rating; they destroy your self-confidence and add extra pressure.

• Imagine yourself smiling, feel the muscles around your eyes relaxing.
• Take a long, slow, deep breath in.
• As you breathe out, say the word 'smile' to yourself.
• Let your whole body go limp.

Summary
To reduce the pressure that you put on yourself:

1. Focus on what you are doing.
2. Remind yourself of the four stress-reducing attitudes.
3. Apply a quick relaxation technique.

These three skills will see you remaining calm in pressure situations and will give you an advantage over your opposition.