This might sound trivial, but for me it was disastrous—there I’d be, eleven years old, facing down a wily old chess master, and the theme song from Ghostbusters would be hammering away in my brain. The more I tried to block out the distraction, the louder it would get in my head. As a young boy I felt alone with this problem, but in recent years while lecturing on performance psychology, I have found that many high-stress performers have similar symptoms.
