by Kaushik Srinivasan, Managing Partner, KAN
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I have been through this. More than once. And if you are reading this, I suspect you have too.

 

It started with a negotiation I had prepared for obsessively. Every variable mapped. Every counterargument anticipated. I walked in with the kind of quiet confidence that comes from genuine preparation. And then, somewhere between the second round and the close, something changed inside me. My thinking went rigid. My instincts, which had been sharp all week, went silent. I tightened. And the deal slipped.

 

I did not lose it on merit. I lost it because something happened in my own head that I could not name at the time.

 

That experience sent me down a research path I have not come back from. I started reading everything I could find on the psychology of high-stakes performance  -  Kahneman’s work on loss aversion, Beckmann’s research on hemispheric activation, clinical studies on performance anxiety in surgeons, trial lawyers, and elite athletes. What I found was not comforting, but it was clarifying. Hence sharing this with all.

 

And the more I read, the more I recognized the pattern  -  not just in myself, but in every high-performing leader, founder, and executive I have worked with over two decades.

There is a moment most high performers refuse to discuss openly. It is not the stumble at the start, where failure is expected and even romanticized. It is not the confusion of the middle stretch, where resilience gets its applause.

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It is a collapse that arrives at the edge of victory. Right when it matters most. Right when you had it.

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The Brain Betrayal Nobody Prepares You For

 

Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory established something that should have reshaped how every organization thinks about performance under pressure.

 

We are not wired "to win". We are wired "not to lose".

 

The asymmetry is well documented. The psychological pain of a loss registers at roughly twice the intensity of the pleasure derived from an equivalent gain. This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable neurological reality.

 

So consider what happens when you stand on the threshold of winning.

Your brain performs a shift that is both counterintuitive and deeply destructive. It moves from what might be called Gain Mode  -  the forward-leaning, assertive state that brought you to the brink of success  - into Protect Mode, a defensive posture organized entirely around one thought: do not lose this.

 

The shift is subtle. It can happen in seconds. And it is catastrophic.

Because the moment you begin trying not to lose, you stop doing every single thing that was making you win.

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Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Earlier

 

Over the years  -  through my own experience, through coaching others, and through an increasingly obsessive reading habit on the neuroscience of pressure  -  I have arrived at five observations that I believe most people in high-performance roles never hear articulated clearly.

 

One: You Are Not Choking on Pressure. You Are Choking on Identity.

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This is the single most misunderstood aspect of performance collapse.

 

When I reflect on my own worst moments under pressure, the fear was never really about the outcome. It was about what the outcome would say about me.

 

I was not afraid of losing the deal. I was afraid of being the person who loses deals. I was not afraid of a poor presentation. I was afraid of being exposed as someone who gives poor presentations.

 

This distinction matters enormously.

 

Outcome fear is manageable. Identity threat is paralyzing.

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When your sense of who you are gets tangled up with what you are about to do, the psychological stakes multiply beyond anything the situation objectively warrants. A pitch meeting stops being a pitch meeting.

 

It becomes a referendum on your competence, your years of experience, your right to be in the room.

 

No human brain performs well under that kind of weight.

 

The leaders who handle pressure most effectively are those who have learned  -  often painfully  -  to separate what they do from who they are. Not as a philosophical exercise. As a practical, pre-performance discipline.

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Two: Being Almost There Is Neurologically More Dangerous Than Being Behind.

 

This one surprises people.

 

You would assume that being close to winning would produce confidence, momentum, energy. And for a brief window, it does. But then something else kicks in.

 

Your brain begins to treat a near-win not as a potential gain, but as a potential loss.

When you are trailing badly, there is nothing to protect. You play freely because the downside is already priced in. But when you are ahead  -  when you can see the finish line  -  your brain suddenly has something to defend. And defence, neurologically, is a very different operating mode from attack.

 

The 2019 Wimbledon Final is a case study that should be taught in every business school. Roger Federer held championship point. Serving at eight-seven. Forty-fifteen. Two points from the title. He lost. Djokovic came back and won thirteen-twelve in the fifth set.

 

Federer’s own reflection was blunt. He called it an incredible opportunity missed. He could not believe it himself.

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This was not a skill failure. This was his brain switching into protect mode at the worst possible moment.

 

And if it can happen to Roger Federer  -  arguably the most mentally composed athlete of his generation  -  it can happen to anyone.

 

The practical lesson: the moment you catch yourself thinking “almost there,” treat it as a warning signal, not a comfort.

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Three: Your Body Chokes Before Your Mind Does.

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Most people think choking begins with a thought. A moment of doubt. A flash of anxiety.

It does not.

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It begins in your body. And it starts earlier than you realize.

 

Thirty to ninety seconds before cognitive disruption sets in, your body is already betraying you. Micro-tensions appear in your jaw, your shoulders, your hands. Your breathing pattern shifts  -  shorter, shallower, higher in the chest. Your posture subtly closes. Your vocal pitch rises by a fraction that you will not consciously notice but that everyone in the room will instinctively register.

 

By the time the anxious thought arrives  -  “do not mess this up”  -  your physiology has already been compromised. The thought is not the cause. It is the symptom.

 

This is why purely cognitive interventions  -  affirmations, reframing, positive self-talk  -  so often fail in the critical moment. They address the symptom while the cause sits unattended in your nervous system.

 

The people who get real results under pressure almost always work body-first. Not because they dismiss the mind. Because they understand the sequence.

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Four: Experience Makes You More Susceptible, Not Less.

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This is the cruelest observation on the list, and the one most leaders resist hearing.

Conventional wisdom says that experience inoculates you against pressure. That the more times you have been in high-stakes situations, the more comfortable you become.

 

There is a narrow sense in which this is true. Familiarity does reduce novelty-related anxiety. You learn the rhythms. You know what to expect.

 

But experience also creates a larger gap between your conscious and automatic processing systems. The more expert you become, the more your performance relies on trained automaticity  -  on doing things without thinking about them. And the more you rely on automaticity, the more catastrophic the disruption is when your conscious mind suddenly intervenes and tries to take over.

 

A junior professional giving their first board presentation is nervous, certainly. But they are also consciously effortful in everything they do. There is no autopilot to hijack.

 

A senior executive who has given hundreds of presentations operates almost entirely on autopilot. Their rhythm, pacing, word choice, and body language are all automated. Which means that when pressure triggers conscious override  -  when they suddenly start monitoring their own performance  -  the disruption is total.

 

I have seen this in myself. The situations where I choked hardest were never the unfamiliar ones. They were the ones I had handled effortlessly a hundred times before.

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Five: You Cannot Think Your Way Out Mid-Choke. You Need a Physiological Interrupt.

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Once the choking sequence has begun  -  once your left hemisphere has surged into dominance and your internal monologue is running at full volume  -  no amount of mental discipline will restore your performance state. Not in real time. Not under pressure.

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I have tried. I have watched others try. They tell themselves to relax. They try to focus harder. They attempt to reason their way back to composure. Every single one of these strategies makes the problem worse, because every single one of them is a left-hemisphere activity. You are trying to solve an overthinking problem with more thinking.

 

Research by Jürgen Beckmann and Hiroaki Masaki identified something that works on an entirely different principle. Squeezing your non-dominant hand  -  your left hand, for most people  -  for approximately fifteen seconds activates the contralateral right hemisphere. This suppresses the overactive left hemisphere and restores access to your trained, automatic execution mode.

 

It sounds almost absurdly simple. And that is precisely why it works. It bypasses the cognitive system entirely and operates at the level of neurophysiology.

 

Before a high-stakes moment: clench your non-dominant fist for fifteen seconds.

 

During a break or natural pause: increase to sixty or ninety seconds.

 

No affirmations. No visualization. No elaborate mental choreography. A physical reset that interrupts the neural pattern causing the breakdown.

 

I have used this myself. It works. Not because I believe in it. Because the neurophysiology does not require belief.

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