driver who no longer even thinks about their actions as they move
the steering wheel and manipulate the pedals. Such a person is no
longer conscious of their competence or skill, they do it, as it were,
on automatic pilot. It seems that your basal ganglia in your mam-
malian or middle brain is probably partly responsible for the devel-
opment of this kind of unconscious or tacit learning.
It is the same with tennis or any activity demanding high lev-
els of performance. If you are too stressed, it is possible that you
will stop functioning at an unconscious level and revert to the much
more mechanical, conscious one that you displayed as you were
learning the skill. In this type of situation, you are simply thinking
too much. If you are able to do so, the cure for your stress is to
think less, to seek to recapture the instinctive version of your
performance.
A good example that I have experienced is public speaking. I
do a lot of this and am generally told that I am pretty good at it.
But just occasionally, for no obviously scientific reason, I have a
choking experience. Somebody in the audience says something that
niggles me, or perhaps I am already feeling stressed from a bad jour-
ney, and I choke. Suddenly, I try too hard, my stories become
labored, and my delivery becomes stilted. I have gone back a stage
in the learning process and am now operating as if my competence
in public speaking had only just been acquired and was very much
at the conscious level. I know now that the way out of this is not to
try even harder; quite the reverse. I need to create a short space for
myself, by having a drink of water or asking the audience to do
something, so that I can catch my breath. In this way, I find that I
can recapture the more natural, unconscious level of operation.
Panicking is different. To continue with the example of pub-
lic speaking, if you panic in situations like this, although it may still
be a kind of failure as far as your audience is concerned, what is
going on inside your head is quite different. I can remember the
feelings of panic when I was just starting to learn the craft of speak-
ing a decade ago. In this situation, your mind goes blank. You can-
not remember what it was that you were going to say. The stressful
nature of the situation is effectively removing your short-term
memory. The problem is that you have stopped thinking and areBalancing Your Life 227