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The way that I’ve always been able to maintain my calm, my steely nerves, if I can say that, is to pre-visualize success. If you can’t visualize ultimately being successful, it’s tough to sometimes get there because you can be distracted by everything coming at you all at once. So it’s channeling your vision towards seeing a pathway to success. One example that I’d give you I learned early in my life as a luge athlete, believe it or not. I used to do this crazy sport called luge – it’s a Winter Olympic sport on a sled about the size of a cafeteria tray, and you’re laying on your back and careening down this icy track at speeds of up to 85 mph and feeling forces up to 6 g’s pushing you back in your sled. So it’s really exciting, it’s high-adrenaline, but the way you really excel at that sport is by relaxing. You have to have an explosive start off the start handles, but then you have to get back into position, and it’s all about carving that perfect line. And the way that we would prepare to do that is a method called pre-visualization. We would be in the start house, we’d lay down on a bench up in the start house, and we’d close our eyes and move our body exactly as we would on the track. And it was amazing, we would actually time ourselves and we would finish the run in our mind at the exact same time within a second of what it would take on the real track. So we were actually going down the track in our minds with physical inputs and pre-visualizing our success.
I’ve done that in so many different aspects of my life, from spacewalks to my summit climb on Mount Everest. It’s really important to be able to see your pathway to success, and then also of course to have thought through what is my Plan B and my Plan C when things will inevitably go wrong.