{
  "id": 11444959,
  "title": "The archer’s paradox: Why trying harder makes you perform worse",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/02/the-archers-paradox-why-trying-harder-makes-you-perform-worse",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-10-02T12:39:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91596618/archery-leadership-performance"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Juan Carlos, an archer, arrived at a Spanish championship expecting to win. He was a standout performer, but was unorthodox in his training methods. On the first shot, he tried for perfection, which rattled him. By halfway through, he was preoccupied with rankings and critics, not the next shot. He finished near the bottom and returned home alone, devastated. He realized that the harder he tried, the worse he shot. This experience inspired the term “archer’s paradox”: the more one wants to hit the center, the more likely they are to miss. The physical mechanism involves pressure creating tension, which degrades fine motor control. Elite archers describe their best shots as the ones where they let go and executed the trained sequence. The same phenomenon can affect leaders in business settings. When under pressure, they overprepare answers, overfill silences, and push for quick decisions, leading to stress and degraded performance. Seven years of experiments with Michael Watkins' leadership program at IMD showed that as the desire to win and audience increases, stress and performance degrade. The instinct to apply more effort under pressure is the most reliable way to make performance worse. Archers use three strategies to combat this: prioritize process over outcome, reset the body through breathing and posture, and use an override word or phrase to avoid analysis in high-pressure moments. Leaders can apply these same strategies by focusing on controllable actions instead of uncontrollable outcomes, resetting their body through simple breathing exercises, and having a simple leadership mantra to switch from frozen to active mode. The key is to execute the process with full commitment and accept the outcome, whether it's a success or failure, and start anew.",
  "summary": "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…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}