“Choking is a performance phenomenon where pressure leads to a significant decrease in performance, even for skilled individuals. It occurs when high-stakes situations cause increased anxiety, self-consciousness, and distraction, which interfere with cognitive functions like working memory and attention.”
At the core, choking happens when someone who’s already learned the skill stops trusting the system, their own mind-body system, to do its job. Instead, they try to control what should be automatic. They bring in System 2, the slow, deliberate thinking, to a game that demands the speed and grace of System 1 (instinctual, habitual responses).
It’s like trying to consciously think through how to tie your shoes or drive a car during a high-speed chase. You freeze. You fall apart. You lose access to what you already know.
You see it everywhere. Someone over-prepares a speech, then stumbles through every word because they can’t stop thinking about themselves.
Or a tennis player, like in The Inner Game of Tennis, who hits perfectly in practice but falls apart under pressure because they stop trusting their body memory.
I find many leaders do the same. I call the problem "leadership choke"
They hire brilliant people, then don't let it go, having troubles "delegating" - which in reality the fear of not being in control.
They overcontrol, overplan, overmonitor.
They don’t trust the system, their people, enough to let them do what they do best.
Leadership choke — when leaders with great teams end up performing like rookies because they can’t stop thinking for others, can’t stop over-managing, can’t stop tightening the grip.
The paradox is, just like in sports:
When you’ve done the work, when you’ve built the system, when you’ve trained the people — the highest performance doesn’t come from control. It comes from release.
The best leaders, like the best athletes, trust the process they’ve built.
They create conditions for flow, not for fear.
They know when to step back so the system can step up.
Over to you, dear reader,
Where in your life, your leadership, your work, have you already built something solid but still can’t let go?
What might happen if you stopped tightening the reins and simply trusted the system you’ve worked so hard to create?