Stress, pressure, performance, and activation level: Jérôme Bouteiller’s experience, TOP practitioner, to understand how to learn to manage stress through the Potential Optimization Techniques.
How to manage stress: the Potential Optimization Techniques (TOP)
Do you want to manage a state of stress caused by something that worries you, a professional or sporting performance? Do you have to face a major life change, a demanding exam, or difficult decisions you keep putting off?
Stress. Normal, positive, negative situations. Let’s learn to tell them apart.
These situations often generate a state of stress. “Stress” generally refers to the psychophysical response to tasks — sometimes very different from one another, of an emotional, cognitive, and social nature — that a person perceives as excessive. Stress can stem from work situations, but not only. Relationships with the people around us, sporting or intellectual performances ahead of exams or particular trials, anything that puts pressure on our normal way of life. But the term “stress” doesn’t necessarily carry a negative meaning.
- There is a positive side to stress, which activates our level of concentration and problem-solving.
- There is a negative side which, once this limit is crossed, makes it difficult for a person to produce an adequate response to the pressure coming from the internal and external environment, and which, over the long run, can become a chronic state and degenerate into illness.
Why manage stress
Managing stress means being in control of the situation that puts the body under pressure, avoiding periods of decline and the chronicisation of stress, and maintaining a peaceful life with good, even excellent, performance in the face of everyday demands or longer periods.
What does managing stress mean?
Managing stress doesn’t necessarily mean learning to relax. It means, rather, understanding how activated we are and asking ourselves whether our state is appropriate to what we’re facing. How do we do that? There are countless techniques; here we want to tell you about a method that brings together many of them and lets you make immediate, effective use of your resources and abilities, and express your potential.
TOP: managing stress with the Potential Optimization Techniques
This is the starting point of TOP, the Potential Optimization Techniques, a system of techniques born in the world of sport and the military, developed to regulate one’s emotions and reactions, gain self-awareness, relax when needed, but also raise one’s activation level when the situation calls for it.
“The goal is to reach an optimal activation state, always in line with the situation you need to face,” explains Jérôme Bouteiller, a TOP practitioner trained in France at Optimiser Mon Potentiel, a student of André Pisani — trainer and spokesperson for the French army on TOP — and a direct collaborator of the founder of the TOP method, Edith Perreaut-Pierre.
Let’s find out with Jérôme Bouteiller what characterises this method, when it should be used and who it’s suited for, and why he chose Sardinia as the setting for his next TOP training in November 2026.
Why TOP techniques are well suited to managing stress
Once you’ve had a bit of training, you realise that TOP should be part of our everyday life.
A cycle can last as little as thirty seconds and, if needed, can be repeated three or four times a day.
From time to time, you need to take a moment to ask yourself: is this activation state appropriate to the situation in front of me? For example, if I’m stuck in traffic, maybe I don’t need to be on the verge of a heart attack. Maybe it’s too much: I breathe, I become aware, I bring my activation level down a little, and I carry on without being overly stressed. We’re often unconsciously drawn into an exaggerated stress cycle by performance anxiety, and we tend to lose self-control.
Optimal activation state: what it means
TOP are tools suited to managing stress and let us rise to the occasion. Managing stress then becomes managing your own activation state — being equal to what the day demands while also lasting as long as the required effort takes. If you’re too relaxed, you won’t meet the demands; and if you’re too keyed up, you won’t hold that pace, for example, over several days.
Potential optimization techniques: prevention and performance optimisation
Mastering TOP techniques allows a person to act autonomously on their own state and steer it. This means it’s possible to step in:
- during the stress phase itself. In the moment, they help manage the current phase while optimising the person’s performance.
- to recover from a period of intense stress. TOP speed up the recovery process, strengthening the person.
- preventively, managing or preventing symptoms, preparing the psychophysical response even before the stress phase arrives. This strengthens the person and considerably improves their quality of life.
TOP, yoga, and autogenic training: what’s the difference?
TOP aren’t new techniques — they’re fragments of existing techniques. “Breathing isn’t a TOP technique,” Jérôme Bouteiller points out, “autogenic training, by definition, was invented by Dr. Schultz. Some yoga postures are part of TOP techniques.”
Characteristics of TOP techniques
TOP are a selection of techniques originally created to meet military needs. Because of this, they have the distinctive feature of being doable in ten to fifteen minutes, even in very degraded settings, and you can do them on your own. That makes all the difference.
Why prefer TOP to a yoga exercise in certain circumstances
If, to relax, you need your yoga mat, to be facing the sea, in the lotus position — that’s wonderful, it works, do it whenever you like. But once you’re, say, on the starting line of a competition, or about to sit down for an exam, it’s hard to roll out your mat. If you’re about to step on stage to speak in public, or you have a few minutes to make an important decision for the team you lead, you may not be able to roll out your mat.
Sleep management and stress management: a very close link
Sleep, along with back pain, is the affliction of our time. The first thing to check in a stress-management approach is the quality of the person’s sleep. Sleeping well is very important for recovering your potential — without sleep, we’re a shadow of ourselves.
TOP first explain how sleep works. We need to understand the mechanisms of sleep and look after the person’s overall safety. I don’t teach how to be ultra high-performing if my students haven’t become aware of how important sleep is for quality of life. You also learn to sleep well, and that’s a prerequisite, a foundation for expressing your potential.
Who the Potential Optimization Techniques are suited for, and when
Concentration and developing one’s potential are at the heart of TOP techniques. Let’s go back to the initial definition.
Potential isn’t created: you can learn to express it better.
These are techniques for optimising an existing potential — they don’t give you superpowers. If you need to swim across the English Channel but don’t know how to swim, there’s nothing I can do for you. If you don’t have the resources or basic abilities suited to that task, TOP won’t create them. The promise of TOP is that if you have potential — and every one of us does — you’ll learn to express it at its best.
Jérôme, let’s take some concrete examples.
How can we help a manager?
We can help a manager hold the course, maintain leadership and keep the goal in view for others too, and be a source of motivation. Here, TOP can produce other knock-on effects — for example through the mirror-neuron mechanism. We’ve observed on several occasions that when a manager is doing well and is motivated, through neurological mimicry, the people around them pick up on that state of mind, and the whole team works better.
You’re about to speak in public — a TEDx talk, a very important conference.
In this case, you can’t get into the lotus position, but you’ll certainly be given five minutes to prepare. Having learned the TOP techniques suited to expressing your potential, you learn to independently move quickly through a series of steps: you carry out a moment of awareness (the TOP weather check), you define your intention, what the situation requires (what you need to do), what your personal resources are, you check your activation level in that moment, and you try to bring yourself into the range that matches the demands of that specific performance.
Sporting performance
Athletes were, after the military, the first to adopt TOP, because they face this time pressure where sometimes there’s little time to find their activation range. Conversely, they often have to face training sessions or competitions that stretch out over time, and they need to sustain that drive for a long while. Here, too, TOP have something to say about determination and motivation. Determination is something that needs to stay constant — you don’t lose sight of the goal, of where you want to go — whereas with motivation, you have to accept that it fluctuates: one day you’re a bit less into it, another day you’ve got more drive.
TOP help you manage fluctuations in motivation, attention, and mental presence, and never lose sight of the goal.
People with a routine lifestyle and repetitive tasks. Is it useful for them to know TOP techniques?
There are no useless jobs, no “A-list” and “B-list” of professions.
Even an “ordinary” person, who has to face the same reality of life, can be under the same kinds of pressure.
Often, sources of stress aren’t tied to anything heroic.
Work or lifestyle, the coffee I drink to get through the whole day, the mortgage on the house, the repetitiveness of tasks, the relationship with your boss, the repetitiveness of routine, productivity. The Potential Optimization Techniques build attention and mental presence, self-awareness and well-being, even in these situations which, over time, can generate stress and frustration.
Deciding on a change in life, work, or relationships
We are the authors of our own lives, but if I want to change state, I have to increase entropy — I have to increase the effort needed to reach another state.
There are changes that require effort, energy. Here, TOP can help a great deal, because there are, for example, mental preparation techniques for success, where you teach your brain not to lose sight of the goal, and that can help everyone.
Let’s talk about PMR, Mental Projection of Success.
This is probably one of the most powerful things about TOP. We need to trust our subconscious, which knows us very well. We’re always afraid to use it. It’s a part of us that protects us, that never sleeps, sometimes called intuition. We know when something is right for us, or when it’s risky, and once we manage to release the power of this subconscious, we manage to handle performance-related stress and reach truly incredible goals. In short, it consists of building the chain toward the goal, projecting yourself immediately after success: I imagine I’ve already arrived — what do I like about it? How did I get there? And then, strangely, our subconscious is able to map out the path, to anticipate potential obstacles, just from the mental projection of having already reached the goal. This avoids hesitation.
The benefits of TOP training
TOP is, ultimately, a powerful stress-management tool. The fact that it has been studied and tested in the sporting and military world, in extreme, high-stress contexts, gives those who practice it both effective results and, above all, autonomy in applying them. I always say that after my courses, my students need to fly with their own wings — and that’s exactly what happens. That’s the greatest satisfaction there is.
Upcoming TOP courses with Jérôme Bouteiller
I’ll be running the next stress-management course in Sardinia, through the application of TOP techniques. I want to use as a backdrop some very special places on the island where I’ve lived for many years. Sardinia has a very intense soul, between its landscapes, nature, and the everyday life of its villages. The idea is to step outside the usual settings and, in doing so, deepen awareness, emotional management, and mental presence — fundamental aspects that TOP work on.
- Interview by Daniela Meloni