Pressure-Proof Confidence

The moments that matter most rarely feel calm. When the room is watching, consequences are real, and your heart is thumping in your ears, practice confidence often falls apart. We dig into that performance gap and share a practical, science-backed path to make your skills travel from safe rooms to high-stakes arenas.

We start with Sarah’s journey from silent manager to someone who can speak up in senior meetings, revealing how solid habits still crumble when visibility, hierarchy, and uncertainty spike. I share my first board presentation and the reframe that stripped away mystique: they weren’t dissecting my every word, they were moving through an agenda. From there we map the biology of pressure. The amygdala flags social threat, the sympathetic system floods you with adrenaline, the prefrontal cortex goes dim, working memory shrinks, and attention tunnels. That’s not weakness; it’s human.

Then we get specific. You’ll learn the five mechanisms that derail performance and a framework to train pressure tolerance: gradual exposure across rising stakes, simulating pressure with audience, time limits, evaluation, artificial consequences, and elevated heart rate. We show why performance dips at first and why that’s the point. We practise recovery lines so stumbles don’t end the attempt. We reframe threat to challenge using real evidence rather than wishful thinking, and we separate skill learning from pressure training so your brain isn’t overloaded.

Finally, we share six execution strategies for the moment itself: accept the physical response, use micro actions, externalise attention, recall your evidence, commit to imperfection, and have a recovery plan if you freeze. High-stakes confidence isn’t the absence of anxiety; it’s the ability to act while anxious. Each imperfect rep becomes proof you can perform under load, and that evidence compounds into durable confidence when the stakes are real.

If this helped, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s training for a big moment, and leave a quick review telling us the one pressure element you’ll add this week.

Chapters

• 0:10 Framing The Performance Gap
• 1:16 Sarah’s Breakthrough Meets Real Stakes
• 3:44 A First Boardroom Shock
• 6:35 Why High Stakes Break Skills
• 9:16 Biology Of Pressure Explained
• 11:01 Five Mechanisms That Derail You
• 14:05 Training Pressure Tolerance
• 16:18 Simulating Stakes In Practice
• 18:00 Expect And Use Imperfection
• 19:03 Recovering When Things Go Wrong
• 20:09 Reframing Threat As Challenge
• 21:06 Separate Skill And Pressure Training
• 22:00 Sarah’s Yearlong Ladder Of Stakes
• 22:58 Six Execution Strategies That Work
• 25:15 What Real High-Stakes Confidence Looks Like
• 27:09 Compounding Evidence Under Pressure
• 29:09 Turn Struggles Into Training Data
• 31:06 Teaser: Building Team Confidence

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Let's talk about confidence. Episode 4. Confidence under pressure. High stakes performance. Welcome back to Let's Talk About Confidence. I'm John M. Molch, and if you've been following the series, you now understand how confidence is actually built. Through accumulated evidence and by pushing through the boring middle bit. Through progressive challenge across increasing levels of difficulty. But here's a question we haven't addressed yet. You've practiced in relatively safe situations. You've built evidence, you've seen progress, the behaviour's becoming more automatic, then the stakes become real, the consequences matter, everyone's watching, the pressure is intense. Will you actually execute? This is what we call the performance gap, and it's where many people discover the practice confidence and performance confidence are two different things. Today we're talking about confidence under pressure, high-stakes performance, how to bridge the gap between I can do this in practice and I can do this when it really matters. Because here's what 27 years has taught me. You can build solid foundation confidence through practice, but if you haven't explicitly practised under pressure, you'll struggle when pressure arrives. Most people assume confidence will automatically transfer from low-stakes practice to high stake performance, but it doesn't, at least not reliably. In this episode, I'm going to show you why high stakes change everything, what happens to your brain and body when pressure hits, and most importantly, how to build a specific kind of confidence that holds up when your consequences are real. So let's dive in. Remember Sarah. Over the past three episodes we followed our journey. She started as a new manager who couldn't speak up in meetings, built confidence through small assertions, and pushed through the bone and middle bit. She saw progress. She moved through progressive levels of challenge. By month ten, Sarah could speak up in meetings reliably, make substantive challenges, voice concerns, and the behaviour had become relatively automatic in team settings. Then came the moment that revealed a performance gap. It was a senior leadership meeting Sarah invited for the first time the agenda, a restructuring proposal that would affect project timelines across the business. Sarah had serious concerns. The restructuring would eliminate the buffer time her team relied on for any procurement delays. The same delays she'd built continued to be for on her own projects, but no one else in the room was close enough to the details to see this. She knew she should speak up, she had the evidence, dozens of successful assertions and team meetings, she had the capability. But this wasn't a team meeting. The CEO was there, the entire executive team, her boss's boss, people she'd never worked with, people who could determine her career trajectory. The stakes were completely different. The restructuring presentation was halfway through when Sarah realized she had to say something. But this wasn't a team meeting. The CEO was there, our boss's boss was there, people who could determine her career trajectory. She told me later I could feel my heart pounding, literally, feel it in my ears. I started rehearsing what I'd say. I have a concern about the timeline assumptions. Simple, eight words, but every time I tried to open my mouth I thought, what if the CEO thinks I'm being obstructive? What if they wonder why I'm even in this meeting? She stayed silent. Presentation finished. Questions? None. The meeting adjourned. Sarah walked back to her desk, sat down and typed out an email she never sent. Only things she could have said, then she deleted it. This is the performance gap. Let me tell you about my own version of this moment. Early in my career I was a senior manager in banking. I came from a sales and training background, not technology, but found myself in charge of a large IT programme designed to support the sales staff. I was asked to update the full board on progress, including the CEO. My first board meeting ever. I was anxious, nervous, before going in, I practised what I was going to say, how to say it, what tricky questions I might be asked, I thought I was ready. Then I walked into that room. It was very grand, very formal, the full board sitting around a long table, the CEO at the head, and everybody looking at me, and I realized this was completely different from practising. The pressure was real. Physical. I could feel my heart rate change. I stumbled on my words, forgot a couple of points I needed to land, and I lost my train of thought at one point and had to pause to recover. It wasn't smooth, it wasn't polished, and it wasn't what I'd rehearsed, but I got through it somehow. Afterwards I realised something important. It was only one of twenty topics they had to discuss that day. Mines was just an update. No decisions required, they weren't analysing every word. They were trying to get through a packed agenda, and that reframe helped me. But what really built my confidence was going back month after month. Each time it got easier. Not because the board changed, because I changed. The mystique was stripped away, I knew what the room looked like, I knew where people sat. I started to understand what they actually wanted from me, which was much simpler than I'd feared. The first meeting wasn't perfect, but it was the first step, and each imperfect attempt built evidence that I could function in that environment. Sarah had built genuine confidence at lower levels of challenge, but she hadn't built confidence for this level of stakes and pressure. And when the pressure hit, her brain and body responded as if she'd never practised at all. And this performance gap's universal. I see it across every domain. The salesperson who can't who well they can handle objections and practice, but frees when a major client pushes back. The leader who can have difficult conversations with direct reports, but avoids them with senior stakeholders. The presenter who's confident small group settings but panics present to large audiences. Same pattern, foundation confidence exists, but it hasn't been tested under real pressure. So when pressure arrives, performance collapses. The performance gap isn't about lacking confidence. This is crucial to understand. Sarah had real confidence. She built it properly, accumulated evidence, pushed through the bone and middle bit, progressed through multiple levels. The confidence was there. What she lacked was pressure tested confidence. She'd never practised it with her heart racing. Never practised when her mind went blank, never practiced when physical stress responses kicked in. She practised the behaviour she hadn't practiced the behaviour under pressure. And your brain knows the difference. So what makes something high stakes? Let me define it. Because it's not about objective importance, it's about perceived threat. High stakes means significant consequences. The outcome matters. Success creates opportunity, failure creates problems. Maybe it's high visibility, others are watching. Your performance will be evaluated and your reputation is involved. It could be relationship risk. Speaking up might damage your relationship you value. Silence protects relationships but undermines your role. Could be a career impact. This moment could affect your trajectory. Opportunities might open or close based on this performance. Identity threat, failure here might confirm fears about yourself. Maybe I'm not cut out for this role. Uncertainty. You don't know how others will respond. The situation is less predictable than practice. Notice these are all threats, not physical threats, but your brain often responds to them as if they were. And that's the problem. Your brain can't tell the difference. Here's what neuroscience shows you. Your amygdala, the threat detection centre, responds to social threats similarly to physical threats. Speaking up in front of the CEO triggers a similar neural response to encountering a predator. Obviously the CEO isn't going to physically harm you. Your rational brain knows this. But your amygdala doesn't care about rational analysis. It detects threat, it activates your stress response, and your body prepares for fight, flight or freeze. And suddenly all that practice confidence becomes inaccessible to you. Not because you lack it, because your brain is shifted into threat mode. And threat mode doesn't prioritize executing practice behaviours, it prioritises survival. This is the performance gap, the distance between I can do this when I'm calm and I can do this when my threat response is activated. And bridging this gap requires specific practice. Let me show you exactly what happens in your brain and your body when stakes are high and pressure hits, because if you understand what's happening, you can prepare for it and prepare yourself to execute despite it. So what happens when threat response activates? Your amygdala detects threat, could be the CEO in the room, could be everyone looking at you, could be the magnitude of the consequences. It doesn't matter what specifically triggered it. Once threat detected, a cascade begins. First, your sympathetic nervous system activates. Stress hormones flood your system with cortisol and adrenaline. Your body prepares for physical action. Heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, muscles tense, breathing becomes shallow. This is your fight or flight response. It's evolved over millions of years to help you survive physical danger. Second, your prefrontal cortex, responsible for all your complex thinking, decision making, and executing practice behaviours, that starts to go offline. Blood flow redirects the areas needed for immediate survival. Your capacity for complex thought diminishes. Third, your work and memory capacity drops. You can't access information as easily. That confident language you practiced, suddenly inaccessible. Your brain has essentially decided this is not the time for complex performance. This is the time for basic survival. And here's the devastating part. The more you care about performing well, the more threat you perceive, the more pressure you feel, and the more your performance degrades. The stakes that make you want to perform well are the same stakes that make it harder to perform well. This is the performance gap in action. Let me show you some specific mechanisms. Mechanism one, cognitive narrowing. Under pressure, your attention narrows. You focus on the threat, not on the task. Sarah and that senior meeting, her attention was on the CEO's potential reaction, not in articulating her concern clearly. The salesperson with a major client, their attention is on what if they walk away? Not on understanding the objection properly. Your attention gets hijacked by threat detection. The actual task becomes secondary. Mechanism two, work in memory degradation. Under pressure, your capacity to hold and manipulate information drops significantly. The articulate point you prepared can't access it. The structure you practised, gone. You're operating on reduced cognitive capacity. Mechanism three, physical interference under pressure. Physical stress responses interfere with execution. Your voice shakes, your hands tremble, your breath becomes shallow, your mouth goes dry. These physical responses make execution harder, but more importantly, they feed back into your psychological state. I'm experiencing symptoms. That means I can't handle this. That increases threat, that intensifies symptoms. It's a vicious cycle. Mechanism 4. Explicit monitoring. Under pressure, you start consciously monitoring behaviours that should be automatic. Like Sarah thinking, how should I say this? What if I say it wrong? Maybe I should phrase it differently. The conscious monitoring disrupts automatic response. Behaviours that felt smooth in practice become awkward under pressure. Athletes call this choking. Golfers who overthink the swing, tennis players who suddenly can't serve. The conscious monitoring undermines that automated skill. Same thing happens with confidence requiring behaviours under pressure. Mechanism 5, avoidance seems attractive. Under pressure, your brain offers you an easy way out. Don't do it, stay silent. Avoid the discomfort. And because the immediate relief of avoidance feels better than the discomfort of action, many people take that. Said it stayed silent, immediate relief, but last in regret. Now this isn't weakness, it's biology. I want to be very clear about this. If you struggle to execute under pressure, you're not weak. You're not a failure. You're experiencing normal biology. Every person I've ever worked with, including the highest performers, they experience these mechanisms under pressure. The difference between those who execute and those who don't isn't that high performers don't feel pressure. They feel it intensely. The difference is high performers have practiced under pressure. They've trained themselves to execute despite threat response activation. And that's what we're going to build. Here's what gives me hope after all these years: pressure tolerance can be trained. Your amygdala can learn to recategorise high-risk situations from threat to challenge. Your prefrontal cortex can stay more online under pressure through repeated exposure. And your body can learn to excrete despite physical stress responses. But this doesn't happen automatically, it happens through specific practice. Not just practising the behaviour, practising the behaviour under pressure. Let me show you how. Building pressure tolerance requires a different approach than building foundation confidence. Foundation confidence practices safe situations, accumulate evidence, build automatic behaviours. Pressure tolerance, deliberately introduce pressure elements into your practice, train your system to function despite threat response activation. So let me give you a framework for this. Principle one is gradual pressure exposure. You don't build pressure tolerance by jumping straight in to the highest stake situation. That's how you reinforce the threat response. Instead, you gradually introduce pressure elements into practice. Start where you have foundation confidence, then systematically add pressure. Level one, team meetings with slightly elevated stakes, maybe where decisions have more visibility than usual. Level two, cross-functional meetings with people she doesn't know well, more uncertain about how people react. Level three, meetings where a boss is present but perhaps not leading. Hierarchy present but not directly evaluating. Level four, meetings with senior stakeholders. They're present but not the most senior. High stakes but not maximum stakes. And then level five, senior leadership meetings, maximum stakes, maximum pressure. Notice she didn't go straight to level five. She rebuilt with progressive pressure exposure. So principle two is simulate pressure and practice. You can deliberately add pressure elements to practice situations. Here's what I've seen work. Pressure element one, add a stake artificially. I'm going to practice this presentation. If I don't do it well, I'll have to donate£100 to a cause I disagree with. It's artificial sure, but it creates real pressure. Your brain doesn't know the difference between artificial and real. Stakes are stakes. Pressure element two, add an audience. Practice with colleagues watching. Even one person creates a certain amount of pressure. Three peoples more, ten people's significant pressure. Pressure element three is add time pressure. I have to make this decision in 60 seconds, no more thinking time. It forces you to execute despite wanting more time. It simulates real world pressure where you rarely have unlimited time. Pressure element four, add evaluation. After practice, you're going to have to give me critical feedback. Knowing you'll be evaluated creates pressure. It forces you to execute, knowing judgment is coming. Pressure element five is add physical stress. Do some push-ups, walk up some stairs before you practice. Get your heart rate elevated and you're breathing heavy, then execute. It simulates the physical state you'll be in when stress response activates. Sarah used all of these practice assertions with colleagues watching, with her boss observing with artificial stakes with elevated heart rate. Initially, a bit brutal. Her performance degraded under simulated pressure, just like it degraded under the real pressure. But with repeated practice she improved, not because pressure became comfortable, because she trained herself to execute, despite discomfort. Principle three is expect performance degradation initially. Here's what happens when you first add pressure to practice. Your performance will get worse before it gets better. Behaviours that felt automatic without pressure become effortful with pressure, and this is normal. It's the whole point. You're training yourself to execute when your threat response is activated. That's harder than executing when you're calm. So expect a performance drop. Don't interpret it as a regression. It's evidence you're training the right thing. Sarah's experienced first-time practising assertions with colleagues watching her. Her performance dropped dramatically. She stammered, lost her train of thought, she felt embarrassed. But that was valuable practice because she was training herself to continue despite stammering, despite losing her train of thought, despite feeling embarrassed. That's the skill. Continuing despite the difficulty. Principle four, practice recovery from disruption. Under pressure you'll get disrupted, your mind will go blank, you lose your place, you'll see something awkwardly. The question isn't will I get disrupted? The question is can I recover when I get disrupted? That recovery ability is trainable. And practice deliberately disrupt yourself. Stop mid-sentence, lose your place, then practice recovering. Oh sorry, I lost my train of thought. Let me come back to that. The main point is practice saying I need a moment to think about that. Practice saying, let me rephrase that more clearly. Practice continuing after you've stumbled. This trains recovery, which is way more valuable than training flawless execution. Because under real pressure, you will get disrupted and recovery is what matters. Principle five, reframe pressure as challenge, not threat. Your brain interrupts situations based on your appraisal. Same situation can be appraised as a threat or a challenge. Threat appraisal, this could go badly, I might fail, this could damage my reputation. Challenge appraisal, this is difficult, I might not execute perfectly, but I can handle the difficulty. The appraisal changes your physiological response. Threat appraisal, performance degrading stress response. Challenge appraisal, performance enhancing activation. This isn't about positive thinking, it's about accurate appraisal. You can handle difficulty, you've evidence of this, dozens of practice attempts, multiple levels of progression. Sarah's reframe before senior meetings, not what if I say the wrong thing, the CEO thinks I'm incompetent. Instead, she was saying, This is a high pressure situation, I'll probably feel anxious, my heart will race, that's normal. I can speak despite anxiety, I've done it many times. Same situation, different appraisal, different physiological response, better execution. Principle six, build pressure tolerance separately from skill learning. Here's a mistake I see often trying to learn a new skill and build pressure tolerance simultaneously. That's just too much. You're asking your brain to learn new content while managing a threat response. It's very, very difficult. A better approach is learn the skill in low pressure situations first. Build your foundation confidence, then add the pressure elements. Don't try to learn how to present and handle high pressure audiences at the same time. Learn to present in low pressure situations, then present under pressure. Separate skill acquisition from pressure tolerance training. Let me show you what that looked like for Sarah. Months one through three, she was building the foundation confidence. Team meetings, low stakes, focus was learning to speak up. Month four through six, adding mild pressure, cross function. Functional means. Slightly elevated stake, she was focused on executing with some pressure. Months 7 through 9 adding moderate pressure. Boss was present, some hierarchy, practice in McCollie's watching. The focus was executing despite elevated stress response. Months 10 through 12, adding significant pressure, senior stakeholders present, but not the most senior. High stakes, artificial pressure in practice. The focus functioning despite a strong stress response. Month 13, senior leadership meeting, maximum pressure, and she spoke up. Not perfectly, her voice shook, she had to pause to gather her thoughts, but she did it. Because she trained herself to execute despite voice shaking, despite needing to pause, despite imperfect performance. One year from foundation confidence to pressure tested confidence. Not fast, but systematic, and it worked. You've built foundation confidence, you've trained pressure tolerance, now you're in the high stakes moment. How do you actually execute? Let me give you what works. Strategy one is accept the physical response. When pressure hits, your body will respond. Heart racing, breathing shallow, hand sweating, voice shaking. Don't fight it, accept it. Fighting the physical response makes it worse. I shouldn't be this anger. What's wrong with me? Why can't I calm down? That internal fight amplifies the response. A better approach is to say my heart's racing, that's my body preparing me for performance. This is normal. I can speak with my heart racing. Accept a physical state and execute anyway. Sarah, my heart's pounding, good. That means my body's ready, I'll speak anyway. The physical response doesn't have to stop you fug sorry. Accept a physical state, execute anyway. Sarah, my heart's pounding, good, that means my body's ready, I'll speak anyway. The physical response doesn't have to stop for you to execute. You can execute despite it. Strategy two is use micro actions. When your working memory is degraded under pressure, compet complex behaviours become difficult. So break it down to the smallest possible action. Not give my entire perspective, just say the first sentence. One micro action, execute that, then the next micro action. Sarah, just say the opening. I have a concern about the timeline. That's it, just that sentence, then see what happens. She said it, then the next microaction emerged. Let me explain why. Microactions bypass the overwhelm. You're not thinking about the entire performance, just the immediate next action. Strategy three is to externalise your attention. Under pressure, your attention goes internal, you're monitoring yourself, judging your performance, noting your anxiety. That internal focus makes execution harder. Deliberately externalise your attention. Focus on the external environment, not your internal state. What's actually happening in the room? What's the person saying? What's the actual question? Not how am I doing it? Do I sound confident? Are people judging me? Sarah in that scene you meet and she forced her attention external. What's the actual concern about this restructuring? What specifically could go wrong? Focus on the content instead of herself. Reduced internal monitoring, and it made execution easier. Strategy four is remember your evidence. Under pressure, your brain offers you doubts. You can't do this, you're going to fail, everyone will see you're not capable. That's the inner critic amplified by pressure. Counter it with evidence, not positive affirmations, evidence. I've done this 30 times in team meetings, I've done this fifteen times with moderate pressure, I've practiced this under simulated high pressure five times. I have fifty pieces of evidence I can handle this. Then a critic is lying. Your evidence log is truth. Sarah, before speaking in that senior meeting, quick mental reminder, I've made assertions in high pressure situations twelve times. I'm not guessing if I can do this. I've twelve examples of doing this. The evidence steadied her enough to begin. Strategy five, commit to imperfection. Under pressure, perfection is impossible, except us now. You will not execute as smoothly as in practice. Your delivery will be less polished, you might stumble, you might need to pause. That's fine, and that's expected. The goal isn't perfect execution. The goal is executing at all. Sarah didn't speak perfectly in that scene you mean she paused twice to gather her thoughts. Her point wasn't as articulate as it would have been in a team meeting, but she spoke. That's what mattered. Committing to imperfection removes the additional pressure of trying to be perfect. You're just trying to execute. That's enough. Strategy six, have a recovery plan. Sometimes despite all your preparation, you won't execute in the moment. The pressure will be too much, you'll freeze. This doesn't mean you failed. It means you need a recovery plan. If you don't speak up in the meeting, can you speak up afterwards? Can you email your concern? Can you talk to one person on a one-to-one basis? Knowing you have a recovery plan reduces the pressure in the moment. If I can't do it now, I can still do it later. Sarah used this first scene you meet and she froze, she didn't speak, she regretted it. But she had a recovery plan. She sent her concerns to her boss afterwards in writing, requesting a one-to-one conversation. Definitely not as good as speaking up in the moment, but better than staying silent forever. And it gave her evidence. Even when I don't execute in the highest pressure moment, I could still execute afterwards. Let me show you what executing under pressure actually looks like, because it's not what most people imagine. It's not this feeling calm and confident, speaking smoothly, executing perfect, no anxiety at all, it's not. It's this feeling intense anxiety, heart racing, voice slightly shaking, and pausing to collect your thoughts, but speaking anyway, continuing despite the discomfort. That's high stakes confidence. Not absence of anxiety, not perfect performance. It's executing despite the anxiety, continuing despite imperfection. Sarah's current state, she still feels anxiety in senior meetings, still has a physical stress response, and still sometimes stumbles over words. But she speaks anyway, every time now, because she's trained herself to execute despite all those things. That's the skill. Not feeling comfortable, executing despite discomfort. And here's what happens when you repeatedly execute under pressure. Each time you execute despite anxiety, you build evidence. Evidence that anxiety doesn't prevent action. Evidence that imperfect execution is survivable. That evidence gradually retrains your amygdala. High stakes situations get recategorised from threat to challenge, I can handle. Not overnight, gradually, over dozens of high pressure attempts. Sarah now, twenty senior meetings executed, twenty pieces of evidence. Her amygdala has learned high-stakes meetings are challenging but survivable. Anxiety exists, but execution is possible. Her baseline anxiety in these meetings has reduced. It's not eliminated, it's just reduced. That's the compound effect. Each execution makes the next execution slightly easier. Not dramatically easier, slightly easier. And over time, over time, those slight improvements compound into genuine high-stakes confidence. Building foundation confidence is the first step, but foundation confidence doesn't automatically transfer to high-stake performance. That's a performance gap between I can do this when I'm calm and I can do this under pressure. The gap exists because high stakes activate your threat response. Your amygdala detects threat, your body prepares for survival, not performance, your cognitive capacity drops, your attention narrows, physical symptoms interfere. All of this is normal biology, not weakness and not failure. But it means you need to specific practice, not just practising the behaviour. Practice the behaviour under pressure. Gradual pressure exposure, simulated pressure and practice, training yourself to execute despite threat response activation, building tolerance for performing while anxious, while your heart racing, while it's imperfect. This takes time, Sarah's timeline, one year from foundation confidence to executing senior leadership meetings. But it's systematic, it's trainable and it works. The key insight, high-stakes confidence, isn't about feeling calm, it's about executing despite not feeling calm. You don't wait for anxiety to disappear. You execute with anxiety present. You speak with your heart racing, you continue despite imperfection. That's the skill. And like every skill we've discussed in the series, it's built through practice. Not thinking about it, not understanding it intellectually, doing it repeatedly under increasing pressure until your brain learns I can function under pressure. If you've built foundation confidence in some domains, ask yourself have you tested it under real pressure or only in practice conditions? If only in practice conditions, it's time to add some pressure elements. Start small, gradually increase. Train yourself to execute under pressure before real high stakes arrive. And if you've already been in high-stakes moments and struggled, that's data, it's not failure, it's data about where to practice next. What pressure elements need to be added to your practice? What recovery skills need to be trained? What pressure tolerance needs to be built? Next episode, we're going to tackle a question many of you have been asking. What about team confidence? Everything we've discussed so far has been individual. But what happens when you need a whole team to have confidence? When it's not just your execution but collective execution under pressure. We'll talk about that next time. But for now, remember this. Confidence under pressure is built the same way foundation confidence is built through accumulated evidence. But in this case, the evidence needs to be specific. Evidence that you can execute when threat response is activated, when anxiety is high and when stakes are real. That evidence is built through deliberate practice under pressure, not overnight, gradually, systematically. You can build this. I've seen thousands of people do it. I'm John M. Walsh. This is Let's Talk About Confidence. I'll see you in episode five.