Dr. Jesse McGuire has been playing the national anthem on the trumpet before professional sports games for decades. He has played it sick, in pain, and with a nosebleed. But he’s never experienced what happened on September 19, 2026, when he got halfway through the anthem before an Arizona Diamondbacks game and his trumpet suddenly hit a sour note.
He stopped and tapped the instrument. Then he tried the note again with the same result. Uh oh. There he was, standing in the middle of a hushed baseball stadium, thousands of eyes on him, his trumpet gone kaput. Nightmare fuel for anyone.
From panic to poise
But McGuire didn’t panic, or at least not for long. When it became clear the trumpet wasn’t working, he immediately grabbed the mic and picked up right where his trumpet left off, singing, “…through the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched…” The crowd, momentarily confused, soon joined him for the rest of the anthem. The whole performance ended in cheers.
“In 40 years of playing, I have never missed that high note,” McGuire told NBC News. “My entire reputation was at stake. So I couldn’t quit. I had to keep going.”
It’s one thing to keep going when something goes wrong mid-performance. It’s another to do what McGuire did. The U.S. national anthem is a notoriously difficult song to sing, especially the soaring notes in the second half. It’s a feat even if you’ve trained and prepared for it. To improvise in a moment of unexpected disruption by pivoting to singing in front of a crowd of thousands—and on live television, no less—marks a seasoned professional and a pretty darn impressive human.
The key to grace under pressure
Many people don’t choose to be performers for a reason, and it’s not just because of the talent and technical skill involved. It’s the potential for something like this to happen.
Being in the spotlight in front of a crowd is nerve-racking for most people, even under the best of circumstances. (Public speaking isn’t listed as people’s number one fear for nothing.) Even if you’re well prepared and have your nerves under control, there’s always a possibility something could go awry. The thought of having to figure out what to do in the moment, with all eyes on you, is enough to keep people comfortably in the spectator seat.
What, then, makes people like Jesse McGuire perform well under pressure? According to sports psychologist Josephine Perry, it’s all about cultivating mental flexibility.
“Mental flexibility is vital for coping well with pressure because, if you want to perform brilliantly, you need the skills to handle whatever is thrown at you, especially the unexpected,” she writes. “In sport, this might be a last-minute course change or finding out a scout will be watching your match that night. On the stage, it could be the understudy having to step in during the interval. In office work, it could be a last-minute request to join the team for a new business pitch. Cultivating your mental flexibility will allow you to better manage these kinds of moments.”
Five steps to gaining the mental flexibility to perform under pressure
Jesse McGuire has spent decades building the mental flexibility and confidence that let him shine in an unexpected moment of pressure. But Dr. Perry, who has written multiple books on performance, offers five tips for developing the ability to perform well under pressure.
1. Separate yourself from your thoughts
When we feel pressure, negative self-talk often creeps in. “It is essential to remember that the thoughts you might have when feeling under pressure are often not actually true,” Perry writes. She suggests noticing your unhelpful thoughts, not to dwell on them, but to be aware of them. Imagine they are like passengers in the back of a bus you’re driving. You can hear them, but they won’t influence how you drive or where you are going.
You can also create distance from your thoughts by adding “I am thinking” before the thought. So instead of “I always flub my words,” you would change that thought to “I am thinking that I always flub my words.” That helps keep the thought from feeling like a fact.
2. Practice labeling your feelings more accurately
Perry points out that those passengers on our mental bus use emotive language to get our attention. But the language we use to name the emotions we’re actually feeling matters. Most of us have a pretty limited list of words for feelings, so she suggests using this list of 135 emotion words to be more specific.
For instance, you might label a feeling as “anger” and respond accordingly. But you might actually be feeling frustration or exasperation, and naming it more accurately might lead to a different response.
3. Replace forms of self-talk that increase the pressure
When we feel pressure, we tend to “should” all over ourselves. “I should be able to,” or “I must do ABC,” or “I have to be XYZ.” Such harsh expectations only add to the pressure, so Perry suggests replacing those words with “notice,” “awareness,” and “opportunity.” Tell yourself you have the opportunity to do something instead of saying you should or must do something.
“In moving towards this gentler language, you can adjust to the demands of a situation without allowing emotion to take over,” she writes. “It will help you focus more on process (the way you perform) over outcome (in terms of success or failure) and allow you to look at what you can do to live in line with your values, rather than fearing or avoiding potential failure.”
4. Break some of your own rules
“Overly rigid thinking and routines can all increase feelings of pressure,” Perry points out. “Increasing your mental flexibility is the antidote, and one way to do that is by deliberately challenging your usual way of doing things.”
That might look like something as simple as taking a different route to work or something silly like dancing to the music in a grocery aisle. It can also mean not doing something you normally do, like leaving your phone at home when you go for a walk or not wearing your watch for a week.
5. Identify and remember your values
“The final and most fundamental step to performing well under pressure is to know why the performance matters in the first place – this is where your values come into play,” writes Perry.
For McGuire, playing the national anthem may matter to him as a performer, a sports fan, and an American. If it were only about showing how well he plays the trumpet, the malfunction he experienced could have thrown him off completely. Knowing it was about more than that and tapping into other values surely helped him pivot quickly once the trumpet was removed from the equation.
How wonderful to see such an example on display.
