Can we be confident in knowing that we don’t need to feel confident?

[I was recently speaking to a player, who had played a recent game and made a mistake, which resulted in the opposition scoring. As a result, they had lost some of their confidence as a player.

Does that story sound familiar?

This is a common experience for lots of athletes, where they make a mistake and as a result they suddenly lose their confidence. Within sport, there is a strong association between confidence and performance. Many athletes feel they must feel confident to perform well which sense as in the ecosystem of sport, this is all we hear.

• “Play with confidence”

  
  

• “They don’t look confident"

  
  

• “They’ve lost their confidence”

  
  

Therefore, we can start to think that we need to be confident first before performing well

This isn’t the case. While it can be helpful to feel confident, it might be unhelpful if we are continually chasing that feeling. When we start to chase it, we can end up placing more value in the feeling rather than what the feeling even means.

Ultimately, we can still act even if we do not feel exactly how we would like to feel. I asked the player if they could still the do all the things that makes them an elite player. They are playing at the top level of their sport. They responded that they could.

• They knew what they were capable of doing

• They knew how to do it

• They knew when to do it

They knew that they could go and do those things again if needed. They could still take action.

The importance of clarity

We touched in on how they had this clarity, they had built up almost a decade of performance at the elite level. The evidence of delivering was there and it far outweighed the times they had not delivered.

When we have evidence and clarity, we can give ourselves a brilliant platform to perform. We don’t need to chase a feeling of confidence. We can act with clarity, based on belief from our previous work and allow performances to flow after that.

And if confidence follows along - which it invariably does when we take action - happy days, but let's be confident in knowing that we don’t need to feel confident to perform well. Mentally Skilled Athletes, are those who are comfortable in knowing that they won't always feel perfect. They know that they won't always have a burst of confidence flowing through them, but they can have robust beliefs that underpin their performance.

These beliefs that are built on evidence and clarity.

Want to talk it through?

If you want to take the next step next year book a free 20-minute call and let's have a chat about how you can take your mental game to the next level.

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Eddy