Edge Under Pressure
Book Release for High Performance Humans
My new book is out, hooray!
As an author who writes both fiction and non-fiction, it’s always a thrill to share my insights, heart and soul with readers. (I recently found all my old journals from my teens and twenties, and it’s full of the whimsical yearnings of a girl writing poetry, stories, and sorting her unrequited loves while asking… will I ever be a writer? Yes, girrrl, you made it! Book #5.)
Edge Under Pressure was born from my systems thinking, as I’ve coached high performers for over 3 decades: Emmy and Oscar winners, the San Francisco 49ers, and even a few Fortune 500 companies like Sony and Apple.
You know what? Here’s a theme you might not expect:
They all choke, every one of them.
They’ve all had a moment where they just fumbled… the ball, the pitch, the presentation.
Can you relate? I sure can.
What I teach:
It’s not a training issue, or a mindset problem. It’s not even in your conscious control. It’s a nervous system hijack.
I was a champion equestrian show-jumper as a teenager with my horse Tony (Fine Line). He was such a sweet horse, a bay with a heart of gold. And in our good events? We won silver cups and fancy ribbons. But sometimes I would just choke. Get scared. Overwhelmed by crowds, by heat, by too much noise. Or he would spook at an umbrella. My brain would blank and I’d have a tough time even remembering the course. And it was embarrassing.
And my coach would yell at me. Which made it so much worse. (I’m AuDHD, and my RSD kicks in, iykyk.)
Which is why I developed this system, to support your own nervous system to help you reset under pressure, fast. And help coaches learn a system that empower their athletes for immediate reset.
But you can use it anytime you’re under pressure: public speaking, pitching, facing a major deadline, out on the field.
Here’s a preview for you, the book is available on Amazon worldwide now.
To wit:
Pages From The Introduction of Edge Under Pressure
Elite athletes access supreme flow. They have a command of their bodies, minds, skill and their sport that’s awe-inspiring. Catlike strength, grace, and power. Resilience in spades. Clutch performances.
As much as we love to see them win... we hate to see them choke.
For all our human striving in sport worldwide from ancient times to our modern instrumentation with every app imaginable measuring, tracking and optimizing, even at the highest levels of elite sport the most talented athletes fumble.
Many can’t tell you why. They might say: Off day. Blew it. In my head.
Or just: Locked out.
Up until now, the way we train athletes has been:
Training + Mindset = Win
There are extensive well-studied, well-funded factors and science that go into training, automated skill, performance, recovery, and into the champions themselves.
Choke is a part of every game, every sport, and no athlete is immune. No matter how much preparation in training and mindset an athlete puts in, even the most clutch athletes will at some point choke mid-competition.
That choke isn’t if, it’s when.
What if we could take an athlete who chokes and gets “locked out” of their skill access during a play or a game, and give them one tool that flips it all back online?
This guide in your hands is a new performance approach to sport training, for both individuals and teams.
The philosophy in these pages isn’t to prevent choke, it’s giving the athlete a tool to reset, fast, under pressure, mid-competition. Easy enough to remember in the heat of the moment.
I’ve been an athlete my entire life: runner, surfer, champion equestrian. Growing up I ran track and field and played basketball, and trained hunter-jumpers. I’ve never met a sport I didn’t love. But I was that athlete who performs in practice and chokes under pressure. I had my share of pissed off coaches who thought yelling at me would help shift me (always made it worse). In the end, I walked away from competing altogether, my takeaway: I wasn’t cut out for it. But I still train every day, now in my fifties, my passion still strong.
A top performer who chokes in competitions? That profile is hardly unusual. But I turned it into a verdict. My goal is to prevent that outcome in other top athletes.
The rest of my life has been spent in R&D designing the system I needed but didn’t have.
I think the clutch GOATs might already be naturals at what’s in this manual, but for the rest of us coaches and athletes who want edge under pressure more consistently, this is for you.
This manual is about how to deal with choke in the moment, how to make sure it doesn’t become a failure cascade.
Let me explain how I see choke.
If body is the first pillar of training, and mind is the second, what we’re working on here is the third pillar.
Science and practices on training and mindset are well-established and documented. Mindset work is proven, imperative, and a massive advantage to mental health and reset between events. Performance coaches excel at supporting athletes and are more normalized now than even a decade ago. On the tech side, there are a wearable and an app for every single physiological function we can track, and from the time of my yoga career in the aughts, there’s now a significant body of research and science on meditation and mind-body health.
The third, less explored third pillar is the nervous system. It’s really emotions + nervous system, so in these pages you’ll see me refer to it by: the emotional nervous system. From a pit of dread in your stomach, to flutters of excitement before a big game, emotions and the nervous system power sport.
We’ll only be focusing on the third pillar in this manual: the emotional nervous system. That’s your success wedge during competition. The part of you where feelings become physiology.
In these pages to help it all make sense, we’ll borrow a bit of language from my ancestors: the Dutch. (My maiden name is Van Zandt.) The Dutch didn’t build the most sophisticated water management system in the world by crossing their fingers the water would never breach the dikes. They didn’t expect water to be trainable or behave.
Their engineering assumption is that water will get in. (As around 60% of the Netherlands is below sea level, there have been deadly consequences from floods in the past.) They anticipate breach. They engineer for storm surge. They built primary gates and secondary gates. Pressure equalization chambers. Manual crank systems. Storm barriers and spillways that sit dormant for years and deploy immediately when amplitude exceeds prediction.
Dutch engineers didn’t eliminate breaches or floods. They engineered the systems response to them. They built manual overrides to prevent catastrophe. Renowned for efficiency and engineering marvels like bridges of water where ships can sail over highways, this analogy of hydraulics to the nervous system is where we get the lexicon for the KAIAFORM system in sport that you’ll learn in these pages.
When an athlete chokes, we call that breach. The unexpected shock of an event mid-play that takes an athlete’s skill offline. They get locked out. Left unaddressed, a breach can become a flood of overwhelm that leads to a failure cascade.
Under normal load, flow state runs the show. Athletes and team are in rhythm. Trained skill stays on tap and executes. The gate between mind and body stays open. Performances deliver and exceed expectations. This is what practice builds — a beautifully automated and integrated high-performance machine.
Then the playoffs come. Or the championship game. Or the moment that’s bigger than anything the athlete has ever stood inside of like the panopticon of recruiters in the stands watching. Or a surprise misstep on the field. Or a crackle from the loudspeaker. And the athlete’s system encounters an amplitude it was never calibrated for or was sudden and unexpected.
Eyes go wide. What is this? Surprise, shock. Oops! Mistake... Breach.
Now the nervous system is flooded, and the athlete can’t access their skill.
Our system says that breach isn’t a mindset problem (although it can become one later in rumination and mood). That’s not something you fix with confidence training or visualization or telling an athlete to reframe. You can’t yell at an athlete to “get it together” and expect them to. The athlete themselves may feel confused about why their best skills just went offline.
A choke is a breach.
A bad breach can overwhelm and impact the entire play, team, game, season, and mindset of the athlete. Athletes blame themselves, they feel bad for letting down the team, the coaches, the fans. That’s why any system needs to work fast, to prevent all that downstream damage.
When water breaches a storm surge barrier, the back-up systems kick in. Breach requires something skill automation can’t provide — a manual override.
Spot-Drop-Unlock is that override. It’s your edge under pressure.
This is a way to improve your likelihood of a clutch performance, after a breach. Especially if you’re finely tuned, you’re going to get in the arena and just feel more. This is the toolkit to keep you locked in.
You can learn it and put it to use today. Practice it, and you’ll get better and faster at it.
This manual will also show coaches what breach looks like from the sideline, why your best athletes fall apart on the biggest stages, and the methods to train and track getting your athletes’ skills and form back online.
Fast.
Speed matters. When an athlete can come out of choke quickly, those are seconds on the clock that can make or break a championship.
This manual is for both coaches and athletes. I’ll refer to both in these pages. Your athletes already have the talent. You have the talent! This is the system that keeps it on tap when the pressure amps up.
It’s my personal goal to never hear a coach yell “Get it together!” at a player ever again.
Instead, the new cue is: “Flip the gate!”
And the athlete will run Spot-Drop-Unlock under pressure, and hit reset.
I’m Kaia. The system is KAIAFORM. I’ve coached the foundations of this system for three decades to my clients like the San Francisco 49ers, Emmy and Oscar winners, and Fortune 500 Teams. And now to you. Let’s go!
»»»»»Grab Your Copy of Edge Under Pressure on Amazon««««
Try the newest Mood O.S. tool for high performance:
KAIAFORM GPT
https://chatgpt.com/g/g-69a9fcbbe3108191b22960999000ff90-kaiaform
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About the Creator:
Kaia Alexander is a mood cartographer, award-winning author, inventor, and creator of Mood O.S.™ Her work bridges story and systems.
She’s a UN speaker and AuDHD entrepreneur who has trained the San Francisco 49ers, Emmy and Oscar winning talent.
She is the founder of KAIAFORM, a sport tech startup, and her work for athletes and coaches is featured in her book: Edge Under Pressure.
A former Hollywood development executive, she greenlit five major motion pictures and later founded the Entertainment Business School.
She collects cats, surfboards, and bossa nova records.
Love all this! Thanks, Kaia! I'm playing with your GPT and loving it. As a creative entrepreneur, I'm playing with it in that "sport."