A pressure moment shrinks when you’ve practiced it a hundred times when it didn’t matter.

What makes a big moment feel enormous is usually novelty rather than stakes. If the physical act is familiar, the only new element is the attention, and attention is easier to carry than uncertainty. People who seem calm under pressure are often just people who have done that exact thing many more times, in empty rooms, at no cost.

Find the low-stakes version of whatever is coming and do it until it is boring: the speech to an empty room, the shot with nobody guarding you, the hard question with a friend asking it. Count the repetitions. By the time it matters you want it to be the hundredth.