Dealing With Pressure in Sport by Focusing on the Other Three P’s – Process, Practice, Performance
- Apr 18
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 21
Written by Alex Manos, Elite Athlete Life Coach
Alex Manos is a Coach for Elite Athletes and Professional sportspeople. He is the founder of Athlete Life Coaching, which is a bespoke coaching business that focuses on coaching the human behind the athlete to maximize performance in their sport and life.
The three P’s of professional sport, process, practice, and performance, not only drive improvement and results but also play a crucial role in managing the pressure athletes put on themselves. By sharpening focus on these three pillars, athletes can transform how they experience and respond to pressure in their careers.
Sport is one of the few things in life that is finite. It has a starting point, an endpoint, and a result. But what if athletes approached it slightly differently and realised that, like most other things in life, it is infinite?
The lens through which we look at things has a big impact on our perception of time, progress, and success.
Let’s take tennis as an example and look at a season. It consists of many tournaments, split into different categories and played on different surfaces. Each tournament has a number of matches you need to win in order to win the tournament, and each carries ranking points, which are adjusted throughout the year. This then determines which tournaments you play in.
Furthermore, if you do well in a tournament one year, to defend those points the next year, you have to do equally well in the same tournament. So the incentive is to keep winning and progressing far in tournaments. This isn’t a novel concept in sport or, indeed, in life, where winning comes with rewards.
There is no denying that a certain level of pressure and stress can be healthy and can motivate and discipline athletes, but often the scale tips too far the other way, and athletes underperform under the weight placed on outcomes, results, points, and success in sport.
To address this, let’s focus on three key areas that can support athletes, the 3 P’s.
Practice
It is impossible to excel at something without putting in the miles. Even the most gifted athletes still practice hard. I was under the illusion that some of the greats of the sport practiced less because they are “naturally” gifted, so they need fewer hours honing their craft. It’s not true.
The reason it often looks effortless to them is the hours of training they have put in. I was surprised to hear how much Roger Federer and Ronnie O’Sullivan, the world’s most successful snooker player, actually practice.
There are no shortcuts. The volume, intensity, and structure of your practice will prepare you for your match, game, or event.
The event is the showpiece that will take care of itself, and by the time you reach that point, it is harder to influence the outcome. But practice is where you can analyse and curate your craft without the pressure of outcome.
My advice to athletes is to treat practice as if it were the main event. This is where the body and mind do the work.
Key takeaway: Consistent, focused practice builds the foundation for performance under pressure.
Process
“Trust the process”, a classic cliché in the sporting world. And it’s true, but it has conditions.
What if the process isn’t right? Here, you need to look at all the components of being an elite athlete and ensure you maintain the high standards required. Diet, sleep, recovery, practice, hydration, gym work, mental agility, and resilience. An athlete is the sum of many moving parts that make up the whole process.
What if the people involved in the process aren’t the right ones? Sport is a short career on the whole, and it’s too short not to have the right team around you. Finding your tribe and people you trust is not always easy and can be even more difficult when you realise you need to make a change. Loyalty and not wanting to lose people’s friendship or connection play a big part.
Unfortunately, this is where athletes need to be even more self-centred and selfish than they are, this is a necessary trait. Your sport is your business and livelihood, like any other profession. You have to be prepared to have difficult conversations, make challenging decisions, and change the people around you if it is in your best interest.
What if you are focusing on the process, but nothing is changing? This is determined by how you measure change and by the timeframe you use to assess the outcomes.
If the timeframe is too long all the time, to lessen the pressure on short-term results, it can lead to a lack of focus and too much weight on process over outcome. If it is too short, unrealistic expectations can be set, leading to setbacks being seen as failures in the process.
This is where it is critical, with your coaching team, to set clear, tangible, subjective, and objective goals in the short, mid, and long term. Some will be controllable and some won’t, but they can all be worked towards and monitored.
Key takeaway: Regularly review and adjust process goals to stay on track and reduce pressure.
Performance
“Winning is all that counts.” “The performance is what matters.” Which one is it?
Well, it is both, and it also depends on your sport, philosophy, and the level at which you are competing.
Let’s take two very different sports, diving and football. Diving requires precise and accurate performance to win or score highly. Football does not. In football, you can play badly, have worse stats than the other team, and still win. The opposite is true, too.
The key to focusing on performance is how you analyse it, when you analyse it, and what you focus on. It is very easy to win something and then not look at your performance or, if you lose, to overanalyse it.
My three key points would be this:
Just because you are winning, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t analyse how you won, what could have gone better, and what to work on next time.
Every loss doesn’t need an in-depth autopsy. Sometimes it is best to move on and accept that it was “a bad day at the office”.
Analyse outside of competition time. This allows exploration and detailed examination at times when competition is not the focus.
Key takeaway
Separate analysis from immediate results to foster objective performance improvement.
Bringing it all together, sport becomes more manageable when you have a system that aligns your focus on these key areas at the appropriate times.
A life coach or mental performance coach like myself can help you clarify your focus, structure your approach, and take your athletic career to the next level. Together, we can identify areas of improvement and create a concrete plan for success.
If you are ready to improve your performance, gain confidence, and maximise your potential, I invite you to connect with me. Let’s work together to elevate your game.
Read more from Alex Manos
Alex Manos, Elite Athlete Life Coach
Alex Manos is changing the landscape for how coaching and mental training can benefit Elite Athletes. Having spent 25 years as a physiotherapist, half of which was working in professional sport, he turned his career to coaching several years ago. Passionate about developing athletes as humans first, his work focuses on self-discovery and realization of how their life outside of their sporting arena is a reflection of life in it. Put simply, his coaching philosophy is "Where the athlete meets the human".
