If you're involved in a team sport it is often possible to shirk the huge pressure cooker moments that can define an entire season. But sooner or later and definitely as you climb up the levels, chances are that your ability to cope with pressure cooker moments will be tested.

As we head towards the season finale, imagine you're playing this weekend in the Cup final for your Sunday morning team. It's 0-0 with two minutes to go and your team has just been awarded a penalty. There's a pressure cooker moment happening in an instant. How would you feel if it were you who had to take the kick? Many players would say that their stomach would be 'doing cartwheels' or churning just at the thought of it.

A Sunday morning recreational pitch in the North-East is one thing, now imagine how you would feel if, like Lionel Messi for Barcelona on Wednesday night, 100,000 people in a stadium were expecting that you put the spot kick away?

Most people would feel pretty horrendous. That moment in time when you realise that you're now in a situation that most people would class as stressful is for many something they simply can't cope with. The pressure intensifies as the interest from your teammates and the crowd heightens as you hear them begin to discuss the fact they would not like to be the one taking this next kick. And inevitably the consequences of missing are now racing through your head.

Here's why people don't like these situations. The minute you choose to see this situation as stressful, you begin to get nervous at the prospect of messing up and a physical shift begins to happen. You probably recognise this by your stomach churning or 'doing cartwheels' or even the butterflies that so quickly appear. But what's really happening now is that adrenaline is being released, your blood is carrying more oxygen and it begins to be redirected to the places that your body thinks you need it most - which doesn't happen to be in your stomach.

So that feeling that you're getting in your stomach, is actually your digestive system shutting down so that energy can be diverted to your brain.

As you're about to take a match winning penalty, you don't need your digestive system or energy in that part of your body, but your brain recognises the situation and wants to be more alert to help you make the right choice. Your body is helping you out by trying to make you quicker, faster, stronger and even more alert to help you cope with the next big task.

The problem with this feeling is that when you're a child you are taught a miss association. This can happen way back when you stand up in front of your classmates to read aloud for the very first time and you feel these biological changes (butterflies) and you don't know what's happening. But the message is that this stuff happening to you isn't good. If you then perform poorly, as is likely to happen aged 6-7-years-old because your skill sets aren't learned, you will connect the two thinking that you must be making a mistake because of these strange physical things happening to you.

By the time you reach 20, you have a connection between the nerves and the butterflies and the next outcome, which you're now used to be being failure.

This is because your brain actually learns what to expect next whether it eventually happens that way or not.

These physical shifts are what some stars thrive on yet others simply can't cope with. But however you look at it, the exact same physical process will be happening to you on a Sunday morning, as it was Lionel Messi on Wednesday night. Only the consequences of the penalty miss change. Messi doesn't have any better physical way of coping, it's just that at some point his coaches and parents have taught him that it's a positive thing and to embrace it. It's probably what he thrives on. You should too.