Wall Street Journal, A Psychologist Spent Five Years Studying World Cup Penalty Shootouts:

Every job requires performance under pressure. Here’s what everybody can learn from the most tense few minutes in sports.

There are more people who have traveled to space than soccer players who have taken a penalty kick in a World Cup shootout, and there is nobody on this planet who has done more to understand the minds of those athletes than a psychologist named Geir Jordet. 

He spent five years of his life watching footage of every shootout of every major international men’s tournament for the past half-century. … His goal was to learn as much as he possibly could about the complexities of performance under pressure—which is how the lessons from a soccer field in Qatar apply to every line of work. …

Most of us don’t have to worry about the mental anguish of taking penalties in front of a few billion people. But the challenges of performance under pressure are universal. We all have career moments that can feel like World Cup shootouts—job interviews, pitch meetings, unpleasant conversations we’ve been avoiding for weeks—and there are two especially valuable takeaways from Dr. Jordet’s analysis of penalties.

The first is that a shootout is not a showdown between two people but a collective effort involving everyone on the field. The second is that psychology plays a massive role in determining who wins and why. It’s both a mind game and team sport. …

He found that anxiety was the emotion most associated with penalty shootouts, and the amount of pressure that a player felt was the most reliable predictor of success. Some rush their penalty kicks to get them over with. … Players who hurried through penalties missed more than players who took enough time to compose themselves, according to his research. His recommendation: Slow down. Taking deep breaths and trusting in routine is a good way to exert agency, which is important, since players who feel like they’re in control outperform those crippled by the unpredictability of chance. But this kind of mental work must begin long before a World Cup, said Dr. Jordet, who suggests practicing every detail of the process down to placing the ball on the penalty mark. “You want to have an almost machine-like, robotic approach,” he said.

The most counterintuitive of his findings may be that penalty shootouts reward teamwork. This sounds a bit like Europeans calling football soccer.

But shootouts are team sports disguised as individual confrontations. There is an emotional contagion in which the mere reactions of players can shape the events on the field—for good and bad. Dr. Jordet said that lab and field experiments show that a player simply celebrating a goal increases the entire team’s chances of winning a shootout.