The Pressure Principle by Dave Alred

The Pressure Principle by Dave Alred

Author:Dave Alred
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241975107
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00


The Trolley Dash

You drive to the small local supermarket and pull up outside on double yellow lines. You can see a traffic warden a couple of hundred yards down the road. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to run in and buy a pint of milk, a bunch of grapes and a packet of cornflakes. Your time starts … now!

You would no doubt be able to complete this task pretty easily, assuming there wasn’t a huge queue to navigate, and drive off before the warden was on to you. Congratulations, you have performed effectively under pressure.

What if we change the scenario? You’re on the yellow lines with the traffic warden 200 yards away, but this time you have to pick up a bag of brown sugar, four chicken breasts, a box of washing powder, a litre of orange juice, unsalted butter, a packet of raisin bagels, a bag of spinach, a dozen eggs, a packet of cherry tomatoes and two tins of tuna in oil, as well as the items earlier. Still feeling confident?

It’s likely that you’d either forget something or get a ticket or both. The less you have to remember, the easier it is to perform under pressure.

If you’re unlucky enough ever to have assembled a piece of flat-pack furniture, you’ll be familiar with the booklet detailing the components and the step-by-step instructions. What almost no one ever does is read the instructions from start to finish, attempt to absorb all that information in one go and then go off and try to put the thing together. Instead we use the instructions as cues and concentrate on each step, looking only at the instruction relevant to the task at hand. As each step is completed we move on to the next, using the information in bite-sized, manageable chunks. Of course, there’s probably a screw or crucial piece missing, in which case, well, you have my blessing to handle that particular pressure situation as badly as you like.

So, back to your trolley dash: if you were instead given three items to find to start with and then regular updates on your shopping list announced over the supermarket tannoy as you entered the relevant aisle – ‘Your next three items are …’ – you’d be able to absorb and act upon these items in a much more efficient way. There wouldn’t be any hesitation or paralysis as you frantically tried to remember if it was tuna in oil or in brine, and it’s the same in any pressure situation: keep the amount of details to remember to the absolute essential minimum, because it won’t get any easier to remember them when things get stressful. That’s why when preparing for a test it’s essential to concentrate on what you will be tested on, rather than attempting to memorize everything involved in the subject.

If you were a small business owner applying for a bank loan, you might not be expected to remember every single transaction in the history of



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