“Fast is fine, but accuracy is final. You must learn to be slow in a hurry.” - Wyatt Earp

Time Pressure. Performance degradation under stress is a very real thing. And few stressors affect us more than time pressure. We have to incorporate time pressure into our training and inoculate ourselves against the stress it creates. We must learn how to be calm in a hurry, or as Wyatt Earp famously said, “Make haste slowly.”

The way to do this is by deliberately and purposefully practicing it. But how can we do that? Through several approaches, each working from a different direction to teach us to create a flow state, what some athletes call the zone, and Japanese martial artists call mushin, or “no-mind.”

The first approach is stress inoculation. The first time I jumped out of an airplane I was hardly in the zone. I remember standing in the door, my parachute opening, and hitting the ground. Everything between these three snapshots of time was an adrenaline soaked blur. By the hundredth jump, I was so inoculated to the stress that everything was as calmly done as walking down porch stairs and standing on the ground.

Stress inoculation requires some degree of specificity. There is a general carryover effect, if you’re excellent at handling one specific stressor, you’ll be somewhat better at all stressors. But for the maximum benefit, you should have as close a representation of the actual event in training to provide that inoculation. Force on force training, done right, is a fantastic “dress rehearsal” for a real use of force. For competitors, local matches are the best preparation for the stress of major matches.

For general carryover, the best and most readily available training modality for learning to shoot well under time pressure is competing in action shooting. No, it’s not tactics. But you are learning to shoot well and solve problems under a huge amount of time pressure. This has tremendous carryover to applying your shooting in a real situation.

So, we have the ability to expose ourselves to the stress of time pressure in training. This will create huge improvements over time. But simple exposure isn’t enough to reach our potential. We need to approach the development of this attribute in other ways as well.

This is an area where focused visualization works well. Run yourself through the processes of shooting or tactics in your mind, over and over. See it with clarity and detail. Under stress your subconscious will act out that mental movie you made. This helps keep the process subconscious.

Where we make mistakes under the stress of time pressure is when our conscious mind tries to speed up these processes. The time to build speed is in isolation training, not in application. If your mind is in the right place, the process will feel timeless, neither fast nor slow, but will actually be very fast.

The third way we can learn to enter the correct mental state is by developing that ability when we work skills in combination. This is where we develop the mental “transmission” we need, and learn to have one “gear” for pushing and another for application. Then when we perform under stress we can select the proper mental “gear” for optimum performance.

This brings us to our last tool for learning to enter a flow state. In training develop a simple cue that you do before every combination drill or test that helps put you in the zone. A simple calming breath combined with emptying the mind of conscious thought works well. This becomes associated by your subconscious with entering the proper mental state. Then, when you need that calmness under stress, giving yourself that cue helps you create it.

The time to learn this is in training. Lack of doing so is why people with high levels of technical skill fold under pressure. Explore these concepts in your training, and you will learn to excel under time pressure, not crumple under its weight.