Do You Panic Under Pressure? You're Missing This Skill.

"Most of us grew up hearing the same phrase over and over again: Practice makes perfect. You heard it in sports, music lessons, school and any activity that required repetition. You weren't expected to be good the first time. Or even the tenth. The assumption was simple: The more you practiced, the more familiar it became - and the better you performed under pressure."

"What's interesting is how that lesson completely disappears when we become entrepreneurs. Suddenly, we expect ourselves to know how to handle things we've never experienced before. We judge ourselves harshly for emotional reactions to situations we've never rehearsed. And we mistake discomfort for incompetence. But the truth is this: Most entrepreneurial struggle isn't about skill. It's about unfamiliar emotions. Experience isn't just knowledge - it's emotional memory When people say someone is "seasoned," they're rarely talking about intelligence. They're talking about exposure."

Practice improves performance under pressure through familiarity gained by repetition. That lesson often vanishes in entrepreneurship, where founders expect immediate mastery of novel situations and interpret unfamiliar emotional reactions as failure. Most entrepreneurial struggle stems from unfamiliar emotions rather than lack of skill. Experience supplies emotional memory by exposing founders to failures, cash-flow stress, public misunderstanding, flopped launches, poor decisions and sustained responsibility. Confidence manifests as recognition when the nervous system knows the terrain. Mental rehearsal and visualization of difficult emotional moments build real confidence. Endurance arises from practiced familiarity with discomfort, not avoidance of hard feelings.

Read at Entrepreneur