Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,931. And this episode is dedicated to those of you who are under a lot of stress and a lot of pressure because of an upcoming test, an upcoming presentation, an upcoming season that you have going on. I want to read to you a little study

that I found from the book, Performing Under Pressure by Hendry Wessinger and J.P. Pauline Fry.

The book, the subtitle is The Science of Doing Your Best when it Matters Most.

And they go on to talk about this research that was done by Jeremy Jameson

at the University of Rochester, New York, and he took 800 high school students who were doing a

practice, mind you, a practice GRE test. Now, this is a standardized test to help get you into graduate

school. And what they did is to one group,

they read to them a simple little statement right before the test or test. And here's the statement.

The statement was this, quote, people who feel anxious during a test might actually do better.

In other words, if the students felt anxious during the practice test, they were told

you shouldn't feel concerned.

Simply remind yourself that your arousal could be helping you do well.

In other words, just interpret your stress and your anxiety is helping you, not hurting you.

And so they told that to a small group,

and then everyone else, they did not share that. Wouldn't you know that the answers or the results

came back and those who received that statement before they took the test scored 50 points

higher in the quantitative section than the control group.

So a couple of months later, when they actually took the actual GRE and they got the scores,

they ended up noticing that the intervention had a long-term staying power.

And they said that the group that was taught to see pressure and anxiety as beneficial

in the lab experiment scored 65 points higher than a control group on the actual test.

In other words, those students who were told to believe that, those students who were

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