The archer’s paradox: Why trying harder makes you perform worse

At 18, one of us—Juan Carlos—arrived at the Spanish indoor archery championship expecting to win. He was shooting better than he ever had. But he was an outsider in the Spanish archery community and was training with unorthodox methods at the time. He and his coach, who came from handball and gymnastics, had been the subject of much criticism.

So he competed to prove a point. From the first arrow he tried to achieve perfection. When he didn’t, it rattled him. By the halfway mark he was thinking about the rankings, about what the critics would say, about everything except the next shot. He finished near last and took the public bus home alone and devastated.

After some reflection, he understood what happened: The harder he had tried, the worse he had shot.

Archers use the phrase “archer’s paradox” for a quirk of arrow flight. We have adopted it for something archers know and rarely say out loud: The more you want to hit the center, the more likely you are to miss. In archery, the mechanism is physical. Pressure creates tension, tension degrades fine motor control, and the archer who is trying too hard grips the bow too tightly, holds their breath, forces the release, and watches the arrow go wide. Elite archers describe their best shots as the ones where they did nothing special. They executed the sequence they had trained and let the arrow go.

If you lead people, the same thing can happen to you, and it shows up in ways you may not recognize as trying harder. You overprepare the answer and stop hearing the question. You fill every silence in a tense meeting because the silence feels like losing control. Or you push for the decision today because leaving without one feels like failure. And when you notice yourself getting tense, you try to fix that too. You tell yourself to stay calm, which is just one more thing to strive for, and your judgment narrows a little further.

You struggle for the same reasons archers do. Under pressure your thinking is part of what is stressed, so instructing yourself to think differently is asking the compromised system to repair itself.

We have helped business leaders recognize and learn how to deal with this problem. Over seven years, more than 400 executives in Michael’s leadership program at IMD [the Switzerland-based business school] have shot arrows in an archery experience led by Juan Carlos. The pattern often shows up. As the desire to win increases and as more people watch, stress increases and performance degrades.

Effort is the wrong lever

Here is what happens to an archer who gets overwhelmed mid-competition. They don’t know what’s wrong or how to fix it, so they try harder, which means second-guessing every element of the shot, which further increases stress. Leaders can end up in a similar spiral. One bad exchange creates doubt, doubt creates tension, tension degrades the next exchange, and the cycle accelerates until you are performing well below what you are capable of.

The instinct to apply more effort under pressure is the most reliable way we know to make your performance worse. Juan Carlos relearned this as both an archer and later as coach. The harder he pushed his own knowledge at the athletes he worked with, the less able they were to find their own, and the dependence he was trying to prevent was the result.

Reframing what you need to do

What works is reframing what you are doing. Archers have three strategies you can adopt.

The first is prioritizing process over outcome. During practice, an archer thinks about the specific elements of the process they want to work on and improve: “This arrow, I’m working on back tension through the release.” Do the same before your next difficult meeting. “I must close this deal” puts your attention on something you can’t control. “I’ll ask questions until I understand their concerns” puts it on something you can. Pick one and write it down before you walk in.

The second is to reset your body. One cycle of a four-second inhale, two-second hold, and six-second exhale slows your heart rate through the vagus nerve. Pulling your shoulders back and down for three seconds does something similar through your posture. Both work because they bypass the thinking that is under stress.

The third is an override for the moments when effort is all you can feel. When Juan Carlos’s whole system was failing under pressure, he had one word, push, which meant commit to the shot and keep moving, because analysis at that point only feeds the freeze. Yours should be the simplest version of your leadership in five words or fewer. Some leaders use “ask the next question,” which shifts you from frozen to active and buys time. Write yours down before you need it, because you won’t compose it in the moment.

Archers learn one more thing over years of competition. Execute your process with full commitment and then accept where the arrow lands. If it misses, notice what happened, let it go, and start over.

Try it once this week. Pick the hardest meeting on your calendar, write one process intention on a card, and take one breath cycle at the door. Afterward, judge yourself on whether you executed your intention. How the meeting went is a separate question, and for now it is the less useful one.

Adapted from The Archer’s Edge: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Practice for Business Leaders, by Michael Watkins and Juan Carlos Holgado (Wiley)