The book Performing Under Pressure  found people who perform under pressure harness what they call COTE: Confidence, Optimism, Tenacity and Enthusiasm.

Confidence
Confidence for most of us is believing we have what it takes to succeed. It’s not ground-breaking to say that having confidence that you can perform is critical to performing under pressure. However, the people who do it best practice at building their confidence levels so that when the time comes, they have it.

One of the keys to building your confidence is having the view that high pressure situations are challenges to be overcome rather than crises to be confronted. This will cause you to work harder, longer, and with more enthusiasm, and thus make you much more likely to overcome the challenge.

There is no magic pill for instant confidence, but there are things you can do to consciously build it over time. Get better at the things you struggle to do when under pressure, visualise what success would look like and remember previous successes (learn lessons from).

Optimism
Optimism has plenty of proven benefits over pessimism. You’ll be in better physical and mental health, have a better marriage, get better grades in school, and have a much higher level of resilience. And every profession other than the law, optimists outperform their pessimistic peers by a long shot.

As the authors point out, optimism has two parts. Expectations – which is how we think the future will go, explanations – which is how we explain the way a past event went.

If we expect good things to happen to us in the future (as optimists do), we feel less anxiety and dread in the moment, and are willing to work harder in order to accomplish our goals.

When we look back on our successes and setbacks, we tend to come up with explanations about why things happened the way they did. If our explanation is optimistic – even in the face of obstacles – we continue to persevere and not give up as we face more pressure in the future.

Optimists believe that good times will persist and that bad times are temporary. So, they try harder in difficult times, and their good times help them believe that they can repeat the success in the future, and they don’t let setbacks in one are of their life impact another.

Which one do you need to work on confidence or optimism?