You're a business leader who has dreamed of having your moment in the spotlight and you've done the work to make it happen. You're now the proverbial (person) in the arena and the pressure is on. Everyone is watching. Just like you had always hoped.

But now a new element enters the arena with you. It's pressure. The pressure to perform in your big moment.

It's not the kind of pressure that always motivated you to push yourself harder when everything didn't matter quite as much.

No, this time the pressure is different, it feels like a heavy vest and it's threatening to steal your focus, stifle your creativity, and make you look like a fool.

You have the skills. You have the experience. But that's not enough to guarantee success in this arena.

In this moment, everything you think and say and do matters immensely, because everyone is watching, wondering if you deserve the spotlight that's on you.

The opportunity is bigger than it's ever been before. What you do right now determines how hard or easy everything that happens next will be for you and the people who count on you.

Will you thrive through the pressure, delivering the dazzling performance you know you're capable of revealing? Or will everyone see a version of you that's limited by the negative impacts of high-pressure?

You will make a decision here, whether you do it consciously or not.

This is where most brilliant minds hit a ceiling and get stuck forever.

You will either learn how to thrive through high pressure, or you will retreat from the spotlight backwards, descending as your dreams deflate until you find a lower level of intensity where your former ability to handle pressure is just good enough.

Here's the cold hard fact. Your life will never rise higher than the amount of pressure you can handle. And bigger opportunities come with more pressure. It's that simple.

Holding your ground and moving forward means more intense moments in the spotlight and bigger and better opportunities. The kind of opportunities you've always dreamed of having right in front of you. The kind of opportunities you deserve because you work hard and have a vision for your future.

But pressure wants to undo all of that.

In this moment in the spotlight, your mind can be your biggest adversary. It's screaming at you to back up, to lower your dreams, to run from the pressure because it knows that with pressure comes risk. It's trying to save you from yourself.

High-achievers like us, and high-achievers only, contain a unique and dangerous flaw in our programming which allows us to push ourselves so hard that we crush ourselves along the way. We're able to rise until we hit our ceiling of suffering where we simply cannot proceed without more capacity for managing pressure.

Most people, people who don't strive for high achievement, will never know this challenge and will make sure they never get anywhere close to it because they're scared at even the idea of high pressure. They make sure to avoid it as a rule in their lives. And they're right, because pressure is scary.

But that's not you.

You're cut from a different cloth, built for a different path, and your dreams of building and discovering something bigger in your life have brought you right into the center of the arena.

Your dreams and goals are so big that they pushed you forward despite the fear of what might be hiding around the next corner. You know in your core that somewhere under all that pressure is where the big opportunities lay waiting.

Waiting for you to come and get them.

Thank goodness, because it's only people like you who solve the world's biggest problems and move humanity forward. Everyone else is necessary to turn the gears, but you're the kind of person that creates the gears that they will all turn. And you will be rewarded and respected for your special contributions.

So, here you are in the arena. And you're wondering if it was all a big mistake.

Maybe the people who were scared of high pressure were right. You're feeling a bit scared, and maybe a bit distracted, and likely half exhausted, or at least emotionally unstable. And you're trying to reconcile the feelings inside of you that tell you to charge into the challenge and run away at the same time.

Those feelings are valid, even if they seem to oppose each other, because they both have your best intentions in mind.

If you're feeling concerned about what's ahead while at the same time experiencing a strong resolve that the path ahead is the best path for you, you've come to the right place.

This is your call to mastering high performance under pressure. This is what we do here at Dory. You're ready.

Your conflicting emotions are telling you that in order to handle the path ahead, you must learn how to maintain high-performance while at the same time experiencing higher levels of pressure than you've ever thrived through before.

If you're having these two emotions right now, your mind is begging you to become a master of high performance under pressure right now. It will take courage to build the capacity you need to remain a high performer through the journey ahead, but it's far better than running away from your dreams, or proceeding unprepared and getting crushed.

And if you've arrived here without first developing pressure related impacts like panic attacks, exhaustion, or wild mood swings from manic energy to depressed energy and back again, wow, you are very very lucky.

Most high-achievers don't even begin to realize how far their performance has fallen until they observe their lives starting to crumble around them in result of these frustrating changes.

Many of us first begin to realize our performance has fallen when we find ourselves in the Emergency Room, having a panic attack, and it feels like we're actually dying.

Or when exhaustion literally prevents us from standing up, getting out of bed, or doing something simple like carrying groceries into our house from our car.

Or when a moment of manic energy causes us to take a huge risk without thinking, and we lose a painful amount of time and money to pay for the mistake.

Or when depressed energy shifts us away from creative problem solving and into rumination and shame.

Or when fear blinds us from the best solutions to our biggest problems and we choose a path that will be harder and longer that could have otherwise been avoided.

Or sometimes it's as subtle as realizing that we used to have all the answers but now all we're seeing is problems. We've lost our ability to find the path forward and inspire those around us to follow us into the fire so we can be successful together.

This is where everything starts to go wrong. The voice that's telling us to run away starts to gain a bit more credibility and the negative impacts we're seeing all around us become the hard proof.

And our social structure that's here to protect us jumps right in line with the argument to run away.

Your doctors will recommend that you step away from the thing that's causing you pressure. Avoid the pressure, reduce your dreams. Do less. Aim lower. Moving you farther away from your goals and the future only you can see in your head.

Your friends and loved ones, your professional and personal partners, and maybe even your clients all notice when you're showing signs of low performance under pressure. They don't have the skills to teach you how to thrive through anything, so with the best of intentions they will suggest you walk away from your dreams to save yourself, and ease their suffering too.

Take some time off. Delegate a critical project. Work fewer hours, they all say.

But here's the problem. This will ease your suffering in one way, while at the same time increasing your suffering as you realize you're extinguishing your flame and moving farther away from your dreams.

It hurts to realize you have no real plan for getting back into the arena again. This is particularly painful to admit as a high-achiever with big goals for yourself. You can feel your vision slipping away.

You're presented with the terrible decision of choosing your dreams, or choosing your health and happiness and the health and happiness of the people around you. You feel guilty if you proceed and like a failure if you stop.

As a hard charging entrepreneur myself, I built a company to $50 million in annual revenue before my thirtieth birthday, and ended up in the Emergency Room with my first panic attack that I didn't understand and that terrified me to my bones at age twenty-five, and I experienced this frustrating choice time and time again.

I was never satisfied with the standard options. I could never rationalize walking away from my dreams, so I always chose to go back into the arena unprepared for the pressure, only to get crushed again. Hurting myself and those around me.

One panic attack became weekly panic attacks. Mood swings and temper became daily ordeals and started damaging key relationships and creating more things to repair when I was finally cool again. The deeper I went the more I felt alone. Exhaustion caused me to make mistakes that erased my chances of seeing more big opportunities.

I was stuck in a vicious cycle where high pressure was limiting my performance capacity, and my limited performance capacity was creating damage and more work for myself and limiting my opportunities, which was increasing the pressure I was experiencing which further reduced my performance capacity. And down and down I went.

I thought I was chasing my dreams but I was actually chasing my tail, more and more miserable and unsuccessful and alone every step I walked.

The problem wasn't that I didn't know how to do my work as a founder and leader. I actually had all the professional skills I needed. The problem was that I wasn't able to do my work as a founder and leader at a high level of quality while constantly experiencing high pressure situations, because the pressure itself kept breaking me.

I was like a highly trained master carpenter who couldn't focus long enough to cut the boards to the correct length, even though I new exactly how long they needed to be. Skills weren't the problem. Delivering those skills was the problem.

The great irony being that I had chosen to remain in the arena because walking away from it all looked like giving up on my dreams.

So instead of giving up on my dreams I remained in the arena, unprepared to handle the pressure, and actively destroyed my dreams through foolish actions and poor performance. I was the master carpenter, now just waving the saw wildly in the air cutting everything to shreds around me.

So if running away is giving up, and running forward unprepared is self-sabotage, then how do we get ourselves out of this mess?

What we need is a way to learn how to handle the pressure of the arena while at the same time performing in the arena.

Because nothing outside of the arena is potent enough to allow us to develop the capacity we will need to handle the pressure inside of the arena. And trying to handle a level of pressure in the arena that we're not yet able to handle will crush us.

The reason why everyone around you is telling you to run away from pressure is because all of the traditional tools and techniques for teaching performance rely on the luxury of low pressure learning situations.

That doesn't work for people like us.

Instead, what we need is a framework that protects our performance and allows us to avoid burnout while at the same time staying in the arena. Learning while under pressure. In the real situations we're experiencing. The real situations we need to learn to thrive within to make our wildest dreams come true.

So, we set out to build it, by studying people like us.

Starting with the most experienced psychologists and psychiatrists who work with high-pressure high-achieving business leaders and then expanding to high-pressure high-achievers from disciplines outside of business leadership including Navy SEALs, Army Special Operators, NFL running backs, ultra athletes, keynote speakers and touring musicians.

These people literally work in arenas every day. Down range, deep in the wilderness, and in front of audiences of millions, their performance is observed and evaluated by the millimeter and the millisecond. Pressure is always on.

Then we opened the study up to entrepreneurs and executives and enrolled thousands of business leaders to discover what works, and what doesn't work, for people who need to learn how to thrive through pressure while they're experiencing high pressure.

The average participant held an executive position in a company (often their own company), and experienced high pressure nearly every single day during the five year study period.

These are the people we needed to learn from.

Not the founder on a silent yoga retreat. Not the executive on a six-month sabbatical. Not the business leader on walkabout in the desert trying to find themselves. And definitely not the retired entrepreneur thinking back on their life from a beach chair.

We studied 10,000+ entrepreneurs and executives in the arena, all experiencing high pressure, for a total of sixty-eight months.

We watched to see which participants were thriving, and which ones were suffering, as they pressed the gas pedals in their lives.

A few strong patterns emerged:

High-pressure high-achievers can learn to thrive through pressure while also experiencing pressure. We observed participants who increased their performance while pressure remained consistent or increased.

Most techniques that increase performance in low-pressure situations are useless for people experiencing high-pressure situations.

We discovered seven factors that enable or disable high performance for high-achievers when they're constantly subjected to high-pressure situations over long periods of time.

We observed that high-pressure high-achievers have different optimal zones than each other and we discovered how to determine the correct zone for each individual performer.

From these learnings, we developed a protocol that high-pressure high-achievers use to optimize their performance and prevent burnout while at the same time experiencing high-pressure.

We named the framework the Optimal Pace Protocol, and it's the heartbeat of our community of high-pressure high-achievers here at Dory. The Optimal Pace Protocol has now been scientifically proven to increase the performance of high-pressure high-achievers by 10x while at the same time prevent burnout.

Dory members run their lives on the Optimal Pace Protocol and watch their performance stabilize and then rise in just weeks, even as pressure surges around them.