Do It Like Bourne: Automate Your Best Response Under Pressure

From Outperform The Storm · 07:56

Show by Martin Soorjoo | Coach and Strategist

Do It Like Bourne: How to Automate Your Best Responses Under Pressure You know what works. You've learned the techniques. Some of them you've felt work — shoulders down, head clear. Then the pressure builds, the question comes from the side of the table you weren't watching, and you forget to use any of it. Not because you lack discipline. Because the thinking part of your brain is the first thing pressure takes offline — and that's the part that would have remembered. In this episode, Martin Soorjoo introduces if–then planning — known in the research as implementation intentions — one of the most heavily tested techniques in performance psychology, with over six hundred experiments behind it, and one that almost nobody outside a psychology department has heard of. Drawing on seventeen years of coaching founders, executives and lawyers under pressure, he explains why good intentions fail in the moment, and how a two-part sentence, properly installed, turns your best response into a reflex you chose. The model is Jason Bourne in the diner: no idea who he is, but he knows the registration of every car outside and which man in the room could handle himself — because it was drilled into him until it no longer needed him to think. If–then planning gives you the same thing for a board meeting. Without the years, and without Treadstone. You'll discover: Why "I'll stay calm" is a wish, not a plan — and what the brain needs instead The three parts of an if–then plan: the trigger, the response, and the step almost everyone skips Why the trigger can be something someone does, or a thought or feeling inside you — as long as it's precise Why the response must be an action you can actually take, never a result you're hoping for The two ways to use it: scripting the pressure moments, and building the daily base What the research found when negotiators, athletes and people under a deliberate stress test had a plan — and when they didn't The three ways to install a plan — on paper, out loud, in your head — and why stacking all three is what makes it fire One plan to write this week, and what to notice when the cue arrives Every technique you have ever learned for performing under pressure works — if you use it. The gap between knowing and using was never about willpower. It was a decision you hadn't made yet. You already know what works. Decide when. Sources: Outperform The Storm on Apple Podcasts

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