Dr. Sian Beilock became the first woman president of Dartmouth College in 2023. Since stepping into that role, she has positioned the college as a global leader on some of the most pressing issues facing higher education and our society at large. One of her signature initiatives, Dartmouth Dialogues, is creating space for conversations that bridge political and personal divides with empathy and skill.

A distinguished cognitive scientist and leading expert in performance psychology, Dr. Beilock is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. She is the author of more than 120 peer-reviewed papers and two highly regarded books, “Choke” and “How the Body Knows Its Mind.” Her TED Talk has reached nearly 3 million viewers.

We recently spoke with Dr. Beilock about performance under pressure and her studies and work within that field.

Thank you for speaking with us, Dr. Beilock. Tell us about your background and how you ended up getting into this field.

I wanted to understand what happened in the brain and body when we didn’t perform up to our potential in situations where we wanted to do our best. This whole idea was codified for me in high school. I played soccer in the Olympic development program, and I had one of the worst games of my life in front of the national coach.

There are entire fields in psychology focused on how we learn and perform at our best, but less work has gone into looking at why – when we have the skills – we sometimes fail to perform at our potential. That sparked my interest, and from there, I went on to build an academic career trying to get at the heart of what makes us excel and what makes us fail to perform at our best when it matters most – and how we can fix it.

What does the research say about why people choke under pressure?

We’re not born chokers or thrivers. Performing our best under pressure is a skill that we can learn.

A lot of the research shows that when we are in stressful situations, we start worrying about the situation, its consequences, and what others will think of us. That essentially causes our brain to start operating in nonoptimal ways: Sometimes we pay too much attention to what we’re doing. We overthink. Sometimes we freeze.

If we can learn how to practice in the right way, if we can learn how to control those worries and ruminations, we’ll not only feel better, but we’ll perform better.

How do you control those worries?

It’s easier said than done. I always step back and think, the longest conversation you’re ever going to have is with yourself. We talk to ourselves constantly, and we tend to be hard on ourselves. Think about some of the things you say to yourself. You would never say that to a friend.

One way to reframe this is by learning to have a conversation with yourself that’s similar to how you would have it with your friend. If you are in the middle of negative self-talk, step back and say, “Would I say this to my good friend if I was trying to prop them up?” If the answer is no, don’t say it to yourself.

Another way to reframe is to accept that those ruminations and worries will occur. We know from psychology that trying not to think about something is going to make you think about it more. But we also know that we have the ability to reframe the narrative around what’s going on. Instead of saying, “I’m doing so poorly; I’m going to fail at this,” focus on a time when you’ve succeeded, or think about the fact that oftentimes, people are not paying as much attention to us as we’re paying to ourselves.

This is a phenomenon known as spotlighting, and the whole idea is that everyone is paying attention to themselves. They’re not paying attention to you. Knowing that gives you permission to step back and not be so hard on yourself.

Another tool is getting things out of your mind and writing them down. I’m a big fan, for example, of power worrying, where you give yourself 10 minutes to write down your worries and then close whatever you’re writing on and be done with it. This helps download it from your mind so it’s less likely to pop up and distract you.

The whole idea is to equip yourself with the tools to be OK when you don’t get everything right and to be ready for next time. Part of this is about performing at our best and making sure we can put our best foot forward, but part of this is about being at peace with ourselves and that we are not going to get everything right.

One of the scenarios that most people feel stressed by is public speaking. What are some techniques you can use in these moments to stay calm and focused?

First, we need to step back to before the moment itself, because it doesn’t start then. It starts with how you practice. Oftentimes, we practice by looking over our notes or making sure we have the information. However, I’m a big fan of practicing under stress and getting used to the kind of situation you’re going to perform in. How you practice matters: Are you standing up in front of your team, giving a practice talk? Are you taping yourself, even doing it in front of the mirror? This closes the gap between what you do in practice and what you’re going to do when you actually perform.

Athletes do it. There’s a reason people have practice matches or play in a stadium with the music blaring. The whole idea is to close the gap.

Practicing like this raises self-consciousness. When you get in the real situation, you’ve already had that feeling of sweaty palms and racing heart. And once you’re in the moment, it becomes about understanding what key themes you want to get across. It doesn’t have to be perfect – people aren’t listening to every word, so what are your three or four key points?

Finally, I always like to remind myself that my sweaty palms and racing heart are not signs I’m about to fail. They’re signs that I’m ready to go. If my palms weren’t sweaty or my heart wasn’t racing, it would be a sign that I’m not motivated to be where I am.

Can you talk about the idea of anxiety being contagious?

People pick up on what you’re doing, and this is especially true for people in leadership roles.

Some of my earlier work showed that when elementary teachers were worried about math, the students picked up on that in the classroom and became worried as well. The same goes for leaders: If you’re stressed out, people can pick up on that, and suddenly they’re thinking about how to appease you rather than how to get the job done. How we present ourselves and what we’re doing matters.

It’s also OK to call it out – you’re not going to be calm all the time. Telling your team that you are stressed about X, Y, and Z and what you’re doing to deal with it is better than just being frazzled and letting other people pick up on that.

Do you see a difference in how pressure affects performance in individuals vs. teams?

There is a lot of research in sports about individual confidence and team confidence, and it turns out that the confidence and efficacy of the team is often most important. It’s not just having the best players; it’s how the players come together as a team.

There’s a term called collective intelligence, which is a way to measure the intelligence of a team. Collective intelligence is not about having teams made up of people who know the most; it’s how those teams work together. One of the biggest predictors of success of teams is how teams interact and how they take turns in feeding information.

A team is a place where leaders can normalize failure. You don’t have to be perfect for your colleagues or your teammates. I make it a point on my team to talk a lot about when I messed up, when I failed, and when I called a shot that was wrong. That takes the focus off the outcome and more on the process.

What was your highest-pressure moment, and what did you do in that situation?

I don’t know if I could pick just one, but I will talk about a decision we made at the beginning of last year – during my first year at Dartmouth – which I think was consequential.

It was about bringing back the SAT as part of our admissions process. Most Ivy League schools had gotten rid of it or made it optional during COVID-19 because students couldn’t get to testing centers. I asked a group of my faculty to look at the data. It turned out that test scores were predictive of performance at Dartmouth and after graduation. It also turned out that when we didn’t require the test, we were missing students who were from lower-income families and excelling in their high school but not giving us their scores because they thought they were too low. We knew standardized testing was an important predictor, and the data showed that it should help us as part of a holistic admissions process.

It was stressful because we were putting ourselves out there – and I was putting myself out there as a new president. But it also underscored for me that when you have a set of values, you live by them and accept the consequences.

For me, those are the situations that are most stressful – not when I’m reacting, but when I’m making a proactive decision to do one thing or another. I always fall back: What are my principles? What’s the north star?

At Dartmouth, our north star is to find the best and brightest students wherever they are. If a tool can help us find students we couldn’t otherwise find, I’m going to look hard at it.

How have you personally handled pushback?

It’s not easy! Great leaders are not going to make everyone happy. Again, I come back to my values that drive what I do.

I know what the purpose of our institution is, and I know not everyone’s going to agree with that, but I think the proof is in the pudding. Dartmouth has launched a great program around dialogue, and we had 15,000 attendees in our dialogue programs last year.

If you have a culture of wanting to have conversations rather than shout each other down, just like if you have a culture on teams where failure is OK rather than going after each other, that matters.

How do you diffuse a difficult conversation but allow it to remain uncomfortable and reach a consensus?

I think the question is, does it have to get to consensus? My goal as a leader is to make sure that everyone has voiced their opinion. It’s not that there’s consensus – sometimes you’re going to have to make decisions that some people on your team don’t agree with, but it’s important that once you make the decision, everyone’s on board.

Where you want that healthy disagreement is at the leadership table, so that whatever outcome you reach hopefully will be a better one. This is exactly a place where I might come back after the fact and say, “We decided to do X, but this person was saying Y, and I didn’t listen. In retrospect that wasn’t the right thing to do.”

If there’s an understanding that you’re not always going to pick the right outcome and then you’re going to learn and move on, each of those situations becomes less of a make or break.

Any closing advice?

Going back to the beginning here, there’s no question that stressful situations can often get the best of us. I think the goal is to find those techniques that work for you and your team and stop spending so much time beating yourself up afterward. One of my favorites is calling out spotlighting and understanding that we tend to be harsh on ourselves. If we can just lighten up a bit on ourselves, it can be helpful as we move forward.

Dr. Beilock, thank you for your time and insights.