The Neuroscience of High Stakes Moments

From Pro Mindset^® Podcast with Craig Domann, featuring Stephen Baker, former courtroom barrister, professional poker player, and now hypnotherapist, and high-performance mindset coach.

You already know what you should do. You've been told a hundred times. Stay calm. Trust your process. Don't overthink it. Take the shot. Hold the trade. Make the pitch. The advice is not the problem. You've heard the advice. You know the advice. And then the moment arrives — the one that actually matters — and something takes over that has nothing to do with what you know.

That something is your subconscious. And until you understand how it works, no amount of coaching, willpower, or self-talk will change what happens when the pressure is real.

Stephen Baker, former courtroom barrister, former professional poker player, and now one of the most compelling performance coaches working at the intersection of subconscious psychology and high-stakes execution — joined Pro Mindset^® Podcast host Craig Domann for a conversation that reframes everything most people think they know about the mental game. He's based in England, he's worked with athletes, traders, entrepreneurs, and poker players across the globe, and his message is both urgent and deeply practical.

You can change the way your brain works. But not the way most people are trying to do it.

"The gap between knowing what to do and doing it — that is what mindset coaching is all about. We normally know what we should be doing, but that gap is a subconscious issue… and logic alone will not close it." — Mindset Coach & Performance Analyst, Stephen Baker

Why "Stop It" Never Works

Stephen opened with a reference that landed immediately: a classic comedy sketch featuring Bob Newhart as a therapist. A patient describes their problem — claustrophobia, fear of boxes — and Newhart listens carefully before delivering his professional prescription: "Stop it."

It's funny because it's absurd. Yet, Stephen argued, it's essentially what a vast majority of conventional coaching does. It identifies the problem the client already knows they have, then tells them — in more sophisticated language — to stop doing it. Think differently. Reframe the situation. Be more confident. Stay calm.

If it were that simple, they'd already be doing it.

The reason "stop it" fails as a strategy isn't a lack of effort or intelligence. It's because the response being targeted isn't coming from the conscious, logical mind. It's coming from a fast-acting subconscious system that operates far below the reach of rational thought — and it operates that way by design.

System 1 — Fast Thinking

The Subconscious

• Automatic, instinctive, emotionally driven

• Operates in milliseconds — before logic kicks in

• Default software: fear-based and loss-averse

• Shaped by past experiences, often from childhood

• Where choking, freezing, and impulsive decisions live

• The target of hypnotherapy and subconscious coaching

System 2 — Slow Thinking

The Conscious Mind

• Deliberate, analytical, and logical

• Knows what should be done in any given situation

• Engaged in planning, strategy, and reflection

• Slow to activate — too slow for pressure moments

• Where conventional coaching operates

• Insufficient on its own for real-time performance

Daniel Kahneman — Nobel Prize-winning psychologist and author of Thinking Fast and Slow — gave the world the language for this distinction. Stephen has built his entire practice around its performance implications. In a high-pressure moment, System 1 takes the wheel. And if the programming in System 1 is fear-based, loss-averse, and shaped by outdated experiences, no amount of System 2 thinking will override it in real time.

The Science Behind Hypnotherapy

Stephen is evidence-based to his core — a product of a legal career that demanded rigorous reasoning. When he first encountered hypnotherapy as a tool for changing his own subconscious patterns as a professional poker player, he was deeply skeptical. He researched it – what he found changed everything.

The Stanford Research: Dr. David Spiegel, an MD and academic at Stanford University, has conducted studies using functional MRI scans that demonstrate the neurological impact of hypnotherapy on the brain. For anyone who associates hypnotherapy with stage shows and swinging pendulums — the science is compelling and the mechanism is real. It works because it speaks directly to the subconscious, bypassing the logical filter that conventional coaching never gets past.

Stephen's own breakthrough came during his first year as a professional poker player. As an amateur, he had made money playing recreationally — no pressure, no consequences, just skill applied freely. When he turned professional and the stakes became real, something changed. He found himself making decisions he knew were wrong. Calling hands he should fold. Impulsive moves driven by the need to end an anxiety-inducing situation as quickly as possible.

Through hypnotherapy sessions with his mentor, they uncovered the root pattern: a deep-seated tendency to escape anxiety by forcing quick resolutions. Once that program was identified and replaced, his poker game transformed. He went on to build another decade of profitable professional play.

The Faulty Wiring Metaphor — and How to Fix It

When Stephen explains what hypnotherapy actually does inside the brain, he reaches for an analogy that makes it immediately concrete: an electrician coming to a house with faulty wiring.

01

Identify the Fault

Trace the subconscious program causing the problem. Often leads back to a specific early experience — a moment where the brain learned a lesson that no longer serves.

02

Remove the Old Wiring

Through hypnotherapy, access and neutralize the outdated mental program. Stories like "failure means I am a failure" or "bad outcomes mean life is unfair" get examined and released.

03

Install New Wiring

Visualize the desired behavior and emotional response. Program the automatic fast-thinking system with what you actually want to do — not just what you consciously intend to do.

The case study that illustrated this most powerfully was a poker player Stephen had coached technically for years — smart, capable, consistently mediocre results. When they finally did the subconscious work, they uncovered a deep pattern of perceived unfairness: when things went wrong, his brain got so consumed by the injustice of it that clear thinking became impossible. In sport, that's the athlete who loses composure after a bad referee call and never recovers. Once they resolved that pattern, he went on to win the poker equivalent of an Olympic gold medal.

"If I could give anybody a superpower, it would be the ability to recover from difficult moments. The ability to suffer well. Because in sport, in business, in the courtroom, in trading — it is never a cakewalk. The question is always: how do you perform when you're under the pressure?" — Mindset Coach & Performance Analyst, Stephen Baker

Fear Is the Default Software — and It's Outdated

One of the most clarifying frameworks Stephen offered was his explanation of why fear dominates so many high-performance situations and why it makes no rational sense that it does.

The human brain's threat detection system was calibrated for a world where existential danger was a daily reality. A hunter-gatherer who underestimated a physical threat didn't survive long enough to pass on their genes. So evolution built a system that is deeply, structurally biased toward loss aversion, that overestimates risk, catastrophizes outcomes, and defaults to fight, flight, or freeze when arousal spikes.

The Public Speaking Paradox: Research shows that more people fear public speaking than fear death. Stephen's response: "How irrational is that? No matter how badly a speech goes, it cannot be worse than death." Yet the brain registers the threat of social embarrassment — of being cast out from the tribe — with the same alarm bells it would use for physical danger. That is not a character flaw. That is an evolutionary system running software that hasn't been updated in tens of thousands of years.

The moment that should be exciting — the championship game, the final table, the high-stakes pitch — gets processed as a threat because the evolutionary brain doesn't distinguish between being eaten by a predator and being judged by an audience. The arousal spike feels the same. Because it feels the same, the response it triggers is the same: panic, avoidance, impulsive decisions designed to end the discomfort as quickly as possible.

This is also why the opening seconds of a flow state can feel identical to the opening seconds of a choke. Stephen pointed out that the neurological arousal preceding flow is physiologically the same as what we label as nerves or fear. The difference is interpretation. Train yourself to read that spike as readiness — as the system coming online — and the exact same physiological state that used to trigger panic becomes the runway for your best performance.

Belief vs. Confidence — They Are Not the Same Thing

One of the sharpest distinctions in the entire conversation came from Craig, and Stephen endorsed it completely: belief and confidence are not interchangeable. Confusing them creates problems that can't be solved because they're being addressed in the wrong category.

Belief

About Who You Are

A daily choice. A commitment to your own worth, independent of performance. You buy stock in yourself every morning — not because of what you did yesterday but because of who you are as a person.

Belief is not earned through results. It is decided. It is the foundation that stays constant when confidence in a specific skill fluctuates.

Craig's framing: "I'm going all in on me." That's belief — not a hand.

Confidence

About What You Do

Earned through preparation, repetition, and experience. Specific to a skill, a situation, a domain. A striker can have high confidence going far post and low confidence going near post — simultaneously.

Confidence is variable. It can be high in one area and low in another. The goal is not to have uniform confidence — it's to build it deliberately where it's needed.

You can't have confidence in a bad poker hand — but you can still believe in yourself.

The practical implication is significant. When an athlete says "I've lost my confidence," the question to ask is: lost confidence in what specifically? Is it a belief issue — do they doubt their fundamental worth and capability as a competitor — or is it a skill gap in a particular area that can be addressed through training and visualization? The two require completely different interventions.

"We can change the way our brain works in pressure situations. We can change the way our brain works in terms of consistency. The old school idea that you're born with certain mental attributes and you're stuck with them — we now know is untrue. Neuroplasticity is a thing." — Mindset Coach & Performance Analyst, Stephen Baker

Visualization Done Right

The conversation closed with one of the most nuanced takes on visualization that Pro Mindset has produced. Most people understand visualization as mental rehearsal of success — see the ball going in, see the trade going right, see the pitch landing perfectly. Stephen's approach goes further in both directions.

The Complete Visualization Framework

Technical

Visualize the specific execution you want to develop. The near-post shot. The precise trade entry point. The opening line of the pitch. Make it as specific and sensory as possible — this is new wiring going in.

Successful

See it working. Feel it working. The ball in the net, the sound of the swish, the score board clicking, and the crowd responding.  The trade closing in profit at the bell, the room responding. Build the neural pathway for the outcome you're working toward.

At Peace

This is the critical addition most people miss. Visualize it not working — and being completely at peace with the decision you made. Your brain then cannot learn the lesson "I missed, never try that again."

Process

Focus on the freedom to execute the action, not the guarantee of the result. No shot at the near post is a guaranteed goal. But it may still be the highest expected-value decision. Trust the process, accept the outcome.

The expected value framing Stephen brought from his poker career is particularly powerful here. A decision can be correct and still produce a bad outcome. A shot can be the right call and still miss. A trade can be well-reasoned and still go against you. Visualization that only prepares you for success leaves you psychologically unprepared for the moments when a good process produces a disappointing result. Those moments will come. Every time.

"You are not defined by your performance. You are a human being — not a human doer. When you realize that, and when you separate who you are from what you do, that is the first step toward true recovery. That is the superpower."

— Host Craig Domann

The Bottom Line

Stephen Baker has lived every environment he coaches in — the courtroom, the poker table, the high-stakes pitch, the pressure moment where everything you know abandons you and something older and faster takes over. His path from barrister to professional poker player to performance coach is not a series of disconnected chapters. It is one long inquiry into the same fundamental question: why do capable, intelligent, prepared people fail to perform when it matters most?

The answer is always the same. Not technique. Not preparation. Not the absence of desire. The subconscious programs running underneath everything — inherited from childhood experiences, shaped by evolutionary fears, reinforced by every moment of avoidance — are the variable that determines what actually happens under pressure.

You can change them. The science is clear. The tools are available. But you have to go below the surface to do it. And you have to stop telling yourself to stop it.

Listen to the full conversation with Stephen Baker here or here. Connect with Craig for coaching opportunities on how to build your Pro Mindset® Performance Bubble™ at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com. Find Stephen at https://www.stephenbaker.coach/ and follow along for resources built for athletes, coaches, and the parents who support them. 

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For more information about Craig and his keynote speaking, coaching, or NIL athlete representation, go to www.CraigDomann.com or contact him at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com.