The Olympic training method that teaches leaders to perform under pressure

In 1986, when one of us (Juan Carlos) joined the Olympic Center in Madrid, Spanish archery had a habit nobody questioned. When the weather was good, archers practiced. The moment it turned windy or rainy, they packed up and went home. His coach, Eduardo Jimenez, came to archery from handball and gymnastics, so his eyes were fresh, and he caught it immediately. In competition, he pointed out, you keep shooting through wind, rain and storms. So why does everyone leave the field the moment conditions get hard?

So from that day, coach and archer practiced no matter what. The first time it rained, they were the only two left on the field. Juan Carlos came back the next day with towels, extra socks and a plastic cover for his scope, and getting ready for bad weather became part of the training.

A year later, at the 1987 Spanish Outdoor Championship, the weather was good for three days and Juan Carlos was in the top group. On the final day, heavy rain and gusting wind arrived, conditions none of his competitors had practiced in. He was excited, and he knew exactly what to do, because he’d done it many times. His scores went up in the worst conditions of the competition, and he won the championship. He wasn’t the most talented archer there, but he had trained for the weather everyone else avoided.

In our work together, teaching leaders through archery, we’ve come to see that this is the core of how Olympic athletes prepare, and the part leaders skip. You already prepare for the predictable, but Olympians also train for the unpredictable, and they do it by making practice deliberately harder than the event. Here is how to apply that to your own high-pressure moments, whether that’s an investor pitch, a board meeting or a negotiation that could make your quarter.

Train above the load you will face

Elite archers practice with heavier draw weights so competition weight feels easy. They shoot at longer distances so competition distance feels close. They train with distractions, from background noise to coaches calling out scores.

You probably do the reverse. You rehearse the pitch alone, in silence, with unlimited time, and then you walk into a room with skeptical investors and a hard stop. So run your next important rehearsal above competition load: present to colleagues who interrupt you, challenge your numbers and give you less time than the real meeting allows. If the rehearsal is harder than the event, the event can feel like a step down.

Raise the stakes in steps, and bring your recovery tools

Pressure tolerance is built gradually, and the science goes back to the 1950s, when psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe showed that anxiety responses could be unlearned through systematic, incremental exposure paired with relaxation, on his reasoning that you can’t be relaxed and anxious at the same time. Working with more than 400 executives who shoot arrows under competitive pressure in our leadership program, we apply the same principle. Identify the situations that spike your stress, then build a ladder of four or five versions of them at increasing intensity, and climb it one rung at a time.

One caution from Juan Carlos’s coaching: exposure only builds tolerance if you practice recovering at each level. An archer who shoots under pressure without rehearsing how to reset breathing and body between arrows just accumulates stress. The same applies to you. At each rung of your ladder, practice a recovery routine, even something as simple as one slow breath cycle and a posture correction, until it’s what you do automatically when the stakes rise.

Prepare for specific adversity, in advance

After that first rainy practice, Juan Carlos learned to keep his leather finger tab in a protected pouch, because wet leather changes the release. He learned to cover his scope so he could still see where each arrow hit. Every one of those decisions was made before the storm arrived.

So do the equivalent for your next high-stakes situation. List the three most likely ways it goes wrong: the demo fails, the person who actually decides sends a deputy, the meeting gets cut from an hour to 20 minutes. Decide now what you’ll do in each case. Under pressure your thinking can narrow, so the decisions you make in advance are the ones you can rely on. Juan Carlos’s competitors hadn’t decided anything in advance, and they spent the final day deciding what to do about the rain while standing in it.

Seek out the storms

The biggest change is in what you choose to practice on. Juan Carlos was calm in the rain because he knew he had shot in it many times.

Look at your own calendar with Eduardo’s fresh eyes. Where do you only ever practice in good weather? If every rehearsal is friendly, every dry run generous with time and every stakeholder review pre-aligned, then you’re training for conditions that won’t be there on the day. This month, schedule one deliberately hostile rehearsal, build one pressure ladder for the situation that most reliably rattles you and write down your three adversity decisions for the next meeting that matters. Prepare for the predictable, and train for the unpredictable.