Thanks to Mark Cotgrove for dropping his thoughts in the chatbox:

2 points on psychology of performance

• There is a famous theory (Yerkes-Dodson for those interested) which plots Arousal on the Y axis and Performance on the X. The curve is an inverted U which tells you that if you are either not aroused enough or too aroused there is a performance drop. The optimal level of Arousal obviously is personal, But Anne-Marie is using various techniques to try to replicate that all the time. The challenge is getting to that level despite all the external stuff going on! Simply: nervousness is good, too much or too little is bad!
• As A-M mentions, the idea of managing emotions is really useful. The driver/passenger bus metaphor works well. The idea is that emotions are created by you in response to an external situation. Not everybody creates the same emotions in response to the same situations, think Alex Honnold for e.g! The key thing to understand is that every emotion will drive an instinctive behaviour BUT you are not required to actually act that way! They key is to not to try to remove the emotion (you can’t), but to understand that you are not required to act in the way the emotion is driving you. Another way to think about this is you can give an emotion a name, so for my daughter, frustration is called George. She knows when George is going to show up and tell her to do stuff, but she also knows that she’s not required to do what he says! You can train yourself on the emotions that are problems for you by giving them names and, as A-M says, tell them to sit quietly at the back of the bus