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Can Stress Help You Achieve Peak Performance?
About this Episode
To perform well you do need a certain amount of stress to help propel you forward towards your goal. To produce optimal performance during a challenging situation like a test, you’ll need to be mentally and physically alert. You are not going to perform well on an exam sleepy and unfocused.
The right amount of stress and alertness to produce optimal performance is call “arousal”. The problem is if the intensity of arousal gets too high then you enter the realm of anxiety, worry and overwhelm and end up with the exact opposite of optimal performance, and your mental and physical alertness declines. Too much fear and anxiety can create static within the mind and make logical thinking difficult.
Now the right level of arousal for optimal performance can be tracked on the Yerkes – Dodson Curve. In the early 1900s, two psychologists were researching peak performance and discovered that the right amount of arousal can produce optimal performance results.
The bottom line, going left and right, represents your arousal or your stress level, the line moving up and down represents your performance. So you can see that a certain amount of arousal, a certain amount of stress, can put you in the optimal zone for peak performance, the green zone, the right amount of stress can put you in the zone for growth and learning. But you need to harness it, because if you keep producing that mental and emotional arousal then you can end up in anxiety, panic, breakdown and burnout and it crashes into the ground. If you don’t control that arousal it will turn into stress, anxiety and panic and you’ll end up in the red zone.
When studying for a test, someone on the far left in the blue zone, they have little arousal, they’re bored, disengaged, they’re not going to study very hard for very long, and probably not do well on the test. Over on the far right, in the dark orange and red zones, there is so much anxiety and panic you leave the “optimal” zones here in green in the middle, your confidence and self-esteem start to decline, you have trouble focusing and thinking logically, you may feel fatigued, even sick, and your ability to study, remember the information, or take a test diminishes greatly, performance declines.
You can also look at this like drinking coffee. If you’re a coffee drinker then you know that a cup of coffee can give you a boost of energy and focus, but too much coffee can make you jittery and make it hard to focus and think clearly.
To borrow an analogy from author Glennon Doyle, true anxiety feels purposeful, something we feel driven or motivated to take action (we want to pass the test, cross the finish line first). True anxiety can also be a deep inner knowing or intuition that something isn’t right (walking into the dark alley, hearing the rattlesnake in the bushes near the trail your hiking). However, false anxiety has a high-frequency trill of fear attached to it. It’s got a lower vibration, a longer wavelength.
Now the Yerkes – Dodson Curve shows that some arousal helps us get to peak performance. And if you think about it, a test is a performance. When thinking of someone giving a performance you may think of a musician, or an actor on the stage, or an athlete. But performance is also defined as “the execution of an action, something accomplished, the ability to perform.”
And that is what a test is. A test or exam is showing what you know about that subject. To pass a test we must have the ability to perform well, to execute the action of taking the test well. Just like an athlete, musician or actor, you have to perform at your best in that moment. You must bring all that you know, all that you learned, studied and trained for, into the present moment and perform to your best.
And to take it a little further, knowing the information and being tested on that knowledge are two different things. Knowing refers to the understanding of information, the comprehension of what you have studied and learned ... Performing is what you do with that information … Knowing is understanding music theory and being able to perform a piece of music on your own. You know how to play it. Performing is getting on stage and executing that theory and playing that piece of music in front of an audience. Knowing is understanding that swinging a bat at a particular speed and at a particular angle will hit the ball thousands of feet. Performing is using that knowledge to knock the ball out of the park to get a home run.
One of the big problems with test anxiety is you may know the information backwards and forwards but because of high anxiety, stress and fear that moves you into the orange and red distress zones and you can’t perform on the test, just like the musician who knows the music backwards and forwards in rehearsal but gets so nervous in front of an audience they choke and don’t play well. You see you not only have to know the information … you have to be able to convey the information during an exam, the performance.
Now the Ace Any Test course was created to help you reduce and eliminate test anxiety, and of course you want to eliminate the useless, unnecessary and unresourceful distress, panic and worry, the orange and red zone anxiety that keeps you from performing on tests at your peak potential. You want to get rid of the false anxiety that is keeping you from doing well on a test.
But as you can see with the Yerkes – Dodson Curve there must be some arousal because a little bit of arousal is actually great for delivering your best performance. You want to be in the green zone … So you only want to eliminate the useless, unnecessary, unresourceful anxiety and fear of the orange and red zones … you want to eliminate the false anxiety around tests. And that is what you’re going to be doing in this course … You will eliminate all the useless, unnecessary, and unresourceful test anxiety you were experiencing in the past.
So you can see if you’re over here in the orange and red zones, in the distress zone … you can see that if you reduce your stress to optimal levels of arousal, move over to the green zone, here in the center of the curve, you’ll be able to deliver peak performance during a test. And I’m going to teach you many amazing techniques that you can use to quickly feel calm and relaxed before and during tests, these are simple yet powerful techniques you can use anywhere.
These are powerfully effective tools you can use whether you’re dealing with unnecessary mild worry to severe panic. Any stress that is unresourceful to achieving peak performance during a test will be eliminated. These powerful tools will be a great help in feeling better fast. And the healing effects increase the more you use these methods. They stack upon each other and grow stronger and more powerful so … you will take tests with a calm, peaceful and confident state of mind and body.
Like anything new you learn, the more you practice the better you get at it because the neural pathways for that new skill become stronger and faster. So the more you practice and use the techniques I’ll teach you in Part 2 of this course - the better you are going to feel; and the better you feel - the more motivated you will be to use the techniques; and the more you use the techniques the faster … you’ll create calm, peace and confidence within your body and mind right away.
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PROGRAM YOURSELF FOR CONFIDENCE
My Free Gift To You
As my gift to you go to AceAnyTest.com and there you can download for free the Program Yourself For Confidence training with 5 different recordings to program yourself for confidence.
And if you or a loved one struggles with test anxiety, whether you get really nervous before an exam, or an audition, job interview or giving a presentation or a speech in front of a bunch of people then check out the Ace Any Test online training program. It’s the most comprehensive course for test anxiety relief.
There are 12 lessons filled with techniques and strategies for turning off the fight or flight stress response and for building super confidence. There’s over 6 hours of video training, over 40 recordings to download and practice with and over 20 PDF worksheets to print out so you have the techniques right in front of you.
Go to AceAnyTest.com today to find out more about eliminating test anxiety easily and quickly.
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