One of the main questions I am getting at the moment is can you help my child to be more confident?
As a result, what we are noticing is that Confidence is typically talked about the most when it’s gone missing, low or been knocked by a particular experience so our effort is put in to restoring it.
What is confidence?
Confidence is - a belief a person has about their ability to execute a specific task successfully in order to obtain a certain outcome.
Full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing: (“We have every confidence in their ability to succeed”)
Belief in oneself and one's powers or abilities; self-confidence; self-reliance; assurance: (“His lack of confidence defeated him”)
Be more proactive with your confidence...
If you build your confidence systematically (and proactively) through your training you can aim for optimal confidence at the times when you most need it.
It’s worth considering the challenge of getting your confidence to peak at the right times in exactly the same way as you look to get your physiology to peak.
To start, take a look at the list below and think about where you source your confidence from...
Parental support
Team spirit
Positive self-talk
New experiences
Good warm up
Physical training
Effort put into training
Feeling good physically
Enjoyment
Positive Coach Feedback
Video evidence
Visualising a match / skill
Performing well in training / match
Check your self-talk...
The way in which you talk to yourself will give you a pretty good insight into how you’re influencing your own confidence.
A useful check for your self-talk is to tune into it and then imagine that the words you’re saying to yourself are coming out of a coaches mouth.
What would the impact be on your confidence if a coach was speaking to you in the way that you speak to yourself?
If you’re not happy with what you hear, then work out what you would want to hear and fuel your own confidence by ensuring that you’re talking to yourself in that way as consistently as possible.
Some final thoughts...
There is very little reference to getting confidence simply from winning or beating other people. Winning is obviously critical and having confidence that you know “how to win” is the kind of winning confidence you should be striving for.
In terms of the well coined “control the controllables”, your quest should be to make as much of your confidence as possible all about you.
The more that you take steps to ensure that your confidence is defined and refined by factors that are directly under your control, the stronger your confidence base will become.
Your confidence is such a valuable commodity that it’s worth making sure that you’re putting as much of it in place a possible, so that you can draw on it whenever you most need it.