How to Perform Under Pressure: Build Preparation That Survives Chaos

Pressure rarely waits until your calendar is clear.

It arrives during difficult conversations, major decisions, family problems, organisational change and moments when other people still expect you to perform.

The real test of preparation is not whether you can execute when you feel confident and everything is going well. It is whether your preparation remains available when your thoughts are scattered, your emotions are heightened and the situation is moving faster than you would like.

Dougal Allan has spent more than 20 years learning what that requires. As a two-time Coast to Coast champion, elite endurance athlete and member of the Emirates Team New Zealand crew that won the 2024 America's Cup, he has repeatedly operated near the limits of his physical and mental capability.

His experience points to a simple principle: when pressure hits, you should not have to invent your response. Your preparation should already have built it.

Most people prepare for the outcome

When people decide to pursue a difficult goal, they naturally imagine the result.

An athlete pictures crossing the finish line. A business owner imagines landing the client. A leader imagines delivering the transformation. Very few people instinctively picture the hundreds of ordinary, repetitive and uncomfortable actions required to reach that moment.

Dougal puts a number on it. The finish-line moment people picture, he says, is roughly 0.01 percent of the total time spent in the pursuit. Everything else, the other 99.9 per cent, is the process.

That distinction matters because the outcome can't sustain you every day. It's too distant and too uncertain. Consistency comes from finding meaning in the work that happens when nobody is watching: the early mornings, the sessions nobody sees, the years without a guaranteed result.

Leaders face the same choice. You can become consumed by whether a project succeeds, whether your decision is praised or whether you receive the promotion. Or you can concentrate on the actions that make a strong result more likely.

The outcome provides direction. The process provides something you can actually execute.

Choose difficulty before difficulty chooses you

Dougal built a deliberate relationship with discomfort, drawing on the idea of antifragility: the difference between something that breaks under load, something that merely resists it, and something that gets stronger because of it.

His own comparison is a muscle under load:

An antifragile muscle lifts the weight and gets stronger as a result.

He isn't arguing that suffering is inherently noble, or that people should ignore genuine warning signs. His point is that avoiding all discomfort doesn't produce a life without pain. It leaves you less prepared when unavoidable hardship arrives anyway.

The lesson for leaders isn't to manufacture pointless hardship. It's to stop designing work and development around comfort alone. If you want people who can perform under pressure, they need practice carrying responsibility, uncertainty and difficult decisions before the consequences get severe.

Stop fighting the discomfort

During brutal interval sessions with the Team New Zealand cyclors, Dougal used a mental check-in drawn from Steve Magness's book Do Hard Things: instead of trying to block out the pain, name it.

This is where you're at right in this moment. Can you just live here for a bit longer, or is this too much?

He didn't need to convince himself the pain felt good, or pretend the remaining minutes would be easy. He only needed to answer that one question honestly, then check back in when the next wave of discomfort hit.

This matters because resisting an uncomfortable reality consumes attention. Accepting that the situation is hard frees that attention for your actual response. A leader under pressure can run the same loop: what's happening right now, what am I feeling, what remains in my control, what's the next action I can perform well. Shortening the time horizon stops the whole situation from becoming psychologically unmanageable.

Stop chasing other people's numbers

Dougal is honest that the method didn't always hold. During one twenty-minute power test used to benchmark fitness and settle positions on the boat, he pulled out early.

I think I got about ten minutes in. It was at the eleven-minute mark where I realised I'd only just passed halfway, and I couldn't go any longer. I stopped. I pulled out.

The post-mortem was specific. He'd gone into the test tracking numbers his teammates had talked about wanting, not his own.

The following weeks went back to basics: know your own numbers, set your own goals, trust that doing your job well stacks up on its own. That's the practical risk in comparison: it quietly redirects your attention from execution to someone else's scoreboard. Visible outcomes rarely show the preparation behind them; social media shows the finish line, not the failed tests and the years of repetition. External standards still matter, but the immediate focus has to stay on the actions you control.

Trust reduces the weight of pressure

Emirates Team New Zealand ran to around 150 people, with only eight on the boat itself during the 2024 defence.

Dougal didn't need to understand the hydraulics he was powering. His job was to generate power whenever the boat needed it, and to trust the people around him to be exceptional at theirs.

I don't need to know how the hydraulics work, because old mate over there is the hydraulic engineer, and I trust that he's the best in the world at his job. He trusts that I'm the best in the world at my job. That's how you win an America's Cup.

High-performing teams don't need everyone interfering with everything. They need each person to master their own contribution and trust others to do the same. Getting there wasn't automatic. Nine athletes competed for four boat positions, directly against each other, but once selected, everyone backed the crew that raced. Dougal is clear that trust, integrity and loyalty aren't built by saying the words. They're earned through repeated action, under conditions where it's hard to fake anything.

When preparation had to hold

The clearest test of Dougal's preparation didn't come from physical pain.

In the final weeks before the Cup, it became clear to him that he'd be navigating a divorce once the racing was over. Most of the wider team never knew. A small number of cyclors he trusted did, and gave him what he needed without letting it pull focus from the campaign.

Every race carried two realities at once: competing for one of the most significant trophies in sport, and knowing a major personal transition was waiting on the other side of it. He performed anyway, and the tool he leaned on was the same one built through years of ordinary training:

What can I control? Not what can't I, what can I control?

He still had to carry the weight of what was coming after. The preparation just gave him something to execute anyway.

A practical framework for performing under pressure

Dougal's experience suggests six principles leaders can apply.

1. Define your responsibility. Be precise about the contribution only you can make. Ambiguity creates additional pressure when conditions deteriorate.

2. Build standards around controllable actions. Measure whether you followed the required process, not only whether the final outcome went your way.

3. Practise with manageable friction. Don't wait for a crisis to discover how you respond to difficulty. Seek assignments and situations that stretch your capability without creating reckless risk.

4. Create a reset question. Use a short question that returns your attention to the present. "What can I control right now?" is often enough.

5. Build trust before you need it. Pressure is the wrong time to begin establishing relationships. Trust must already have been earned through competence, honesty and repeated follow-through.

6. Decide who you will be under stress. Values matter most when following them has a cost. Define the behaviour you expect from yourself before emotion begins making decisions on your behalf.

Pressure reveals what you have rehearsed

Preparation can't guarantee things go to plan. It can't remove fear, failure, grief or uncertainty. What it can do is give you something reliable to return to.

Dougal's own summary of what stress actually exposes is the clearest way to end this:

When we're not under stress, we can basically choose who we want to be, and pretend to be someone we're not. Under stress we can't. We've just got to be our true self.

Dougal Allan is a two-time Coast to Coast champion and member of the Emirates Team New Zealand crew that won the 2024 America's Cup, in conversation with Chris Turkington on the Fireside Leadership Podcast.

The article covers the framework. The episode has Dougal walking through the eleven-minute pull-out in full, how the cyclor group actually built that level of trust, and what it took to hold his performance together through the Cup while carrying something much heavier off the water.

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To learn more about leadership development, high-performing teams and decision-making under pressure, visit Aegis Leadership