Mental Performance Coaching: How to Beat Test-Day Pressure

Co-authored With Mental Performance Coach Jen Schumacher, MS, CMPC:

Jen Schumacher is an expert in mental performance who provides individual training for Fortune 100 executives and partners, elite athletes, and professional speakers. Jen serves as the Assistant Director of the Performance Psychology Program at the Center for Enhanced Performance (CEP) at the United States Military Academy.

Most people don’t think of the GMAT as a sport, but athletes and test-takers face remarkably similar challenges. After months of preparation and commitment, you perform in an area you care deeply about, you’re evaluated by others, and you have limited control over the outcome. Whether you’re a track athlete with a final opportunity to make an Olympic Trials cut, an executive presenting to the board to make partner, or a student about to start a GMAT practice test, you’ve poured your heart into working toward a goal, and now it’s time to execute.

Mental performance coach Jen Schumacher has spent her career helping people perform under exactly this kind of pressure. She trains Fortune 100 executives, elite athletes, cadets at West Point, and GMAT Ninja students, all using the same core techniques. Here’s what she’s learned about why test-takers choke, how to build routines that prevent it, and when coaching can close the gap between practice scores and the real thing.

Why Caring So Much Can Hurt Your Performance

When you care intensely about a performance, you tend to put a lot of pressure on yourself. Pressure can be a good thing. Many of us have experienced the thrill and excitement that comes with performing when the stakes are high. But at a certain point, that pressure causes you to worry about the future: what could go wrong, what happens if you fail, and what others will think. When you focus on the future, you pull your attention away from the present moment, and performance happens in the here and now.

Some people think the antidote is to “care less,” but Jen says that would only diminish the passion and commitment you have to your MBA. Instead, you need to work on ways to reinterpret the pressure you put on yourself and learn skills to manage your experience of that pressure.

Why People Choke Under Pressure

Choking under pressure happens when the physical manifestation of that pressure exceeds your capabilities of handling the situation. Pressure often causes feelings of anxiety, tension in the body, increased heart rate, perspiration, faster breathing, higher blood pressure, and a flood of adrenaline, all the physical changes we associate with threat.

When this physical activation reaches a tipping point, you start to assume the situation is threatening rather than an opportunity to perform. Once that happens, you can begin to panic and evaluate the situation negatively, forgetting everything you’ve trained yourself to do. You might have experienced this during a test: simple concepts you know suddenly become confusing, and you find yourself rereading the same question over and over.

Jen’s in-the-moment protocol for this: stop, acknowledge the physical sensations you’re experiencing, remind yourself that you feel this way because you care, and then take three slow, diaphragmatic breaths before you proceed. The time you spend doing this will pay you back in more accurate responses on the test.

Building a Pre-Performance Routine

Elite athletes have been using mental skills like self-talk, breathing strategies, imagery, and pre-performance routines for decades. These same tools can help test-takers gain more consistency and control over their performance.

Jen practices what she preaches. Before each open water training swim (she successfully completed the English Channel crossing), she follows the same pre-performance routine: swing her arms a few times while reminding herself of all the training she’s done (increasing self-confidence), take three deep breaths (increasing composure), and as she puts on her goggles, envision herself completing a successful swim (increasing focus).

She follows the same process before speaking engagements, just on land. And the key point: she does this before every preparation session, not just the big event. Whatever your pre-performance routine is, practice it every time you practice. Just like content knowledge, mental skills need to be rehearsed and refined in order for them to show up on test day.

This approach worked equally well when Jen helped lawyers prepare for the bar exam. The foundation is building confidence through reflecting on what you’ve done to prepare, rather than focusing on the unknown. That process begins well before the exam, along with rehearsing your pre-exam routine every time you sit down for a practice test. When you inevitably experience pressure (everyone will, so you might as well have a plan), you’ll have breathing and relaxation strategies ready to bring you back to the next question.

The Foundation: Sleep, Exercise, and Nutrition

Jen views sleep as the foundation supporting the “house” of performance. Without adequate sleep (7 to 9 hours per night for most healthy adults), most other areas of performance, learning, memory, transfer of knowledge, emotional control, focus, mood, impulse control, are diminished.

Staying healthy through regular exercise and sound nutrition also supports mental performance so you can be your best consistently. When you’re performing well, you tend to sleep, exercise, and eat better, so it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

You don’t have to be perfect at all times. If you’re working from a baseline level of good wellness habits, you’re more resilient in times of challenge. One restless night of sleep before the GMAT won’t break the bank if you’ve been sleeping well for weeks, but it will debilitate performance if your baseline is less than 7 hours per night.

As Jen puts it: if you want to get back on the path, step on the path.

Signs You’d Benefit From a Mental Performance Coach

Jen believes everyone can benefit from working with a mental performance coach (she still does herself), but certain patterns suggest more structured training would be especially useful:

• Your scores on practice tests are higher than on the actual exam, or you know the material outside a testing scenario but struggle to execute under pressure
• You experience a high degree of anxiety or stress before a test
• You struggle to get started, constantly putting off the work until you have no choice but to cram
• You feel overwhelmed when you sit down to study and have a difficult time staying focused
• You constantly worry about your score or what others might think
• You put in the work but have low confidence and belief in yourself
• You beat yourself up over mistakes and hold on to them, affecting performance on subsequent questions

If you’re interested in pursuing performance coaching, get in touch. We’ll connect you with one of our performance coaches.