Learn How To Assess Your Self-Judgment System And Determine How To Improve Your Confidence

If you don’t have confidence, you’ll always find a reason not to win.

Carl Lewis

Carl Lewis knew that confidence didn’t come once he had found success, but before it.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

If I could give an athlete twelve weeks of the best performance training we could provide, or a pill to illicit self-confidence in sport, I’d choose the pill every time. That’s not to discredit our system for performance training, it is as good as we say it is, but confidence is a wonder drug; it reduces anxiety, helps you embrace adversity and hardship; allows you to set more audacious goals, work harder, tolerate more pain, maintain a sense of control and autonomy, heightens your sense of optimism, and perform better under pressure. If that didn’t persuade you enough, those are just the characteristics that have been researched, extensively.  There are many more benefits that have been demonstrated anecdotally.

The belief you can succeed has been demonstrated as the single-most-important mental skill an athlete can possess. Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Steph Curry, Christiano Ronaldo, Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, and many more, have ALL attested to an unwavering belief in their ability to succeed, way before they actually achieved it. They have all exuded confidence.

Confidence expedites the speed of progress, helps you pursue the performance, and protects against the downside of sport; impacting every aspect of your identity and behavior as an athlete. It’s so fundamental, that it dwarfs absolutely every other element of mental skills. To feel confident is to have the game already won in your head.

With that said, most athletes don’t have it. They either feel ashamed in desiring it because we’ve been told from an early age to be humble and not be a narcissistic moron or, they don’t believe they deserve it, because of previous failures and limiting beliefs they’ve established over their lifetime. But, our culture of conflating confidence to arrogance and narcissism is a mistake; it could be the difference between avoiding success all together and being able to face criticism, take risks, stay calm under pressure and enjoy the challenge and adversity that comes with elite sport. In this article, we’re going to deploy some strategies that will help you re-align your judgment system and start feeling like a winner. As a preliminary disclaimer, it’s quite possible that during your exploration of some of these concepts, you realize that you might need professional help. If you do, you should get it. While these strategies are good and adapted by some of the best sports psychologists on the planet; even they say that if your problems run deep, that a therapist is an answer. With that said, let’s get back to it.

The Pursuit Of Confidence

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Stephen Curry exudes confidence. Photo Credit: Ezra Shaw | Getty Images

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

I’ve met more athletes than I can remember who lacked confidence and self-belief. I was one of them, myself. As a cyclist early on, I was dominant. I won races easily, riding off solo into the distance and crossing the finish line well before my competitors. I had a large aerobic capacity that easily exceeded my competition, so I was fast-tracked to higher grades in the local circuits; before long, I was racing with the best that Sydney had to offer. But when I got there, I wasn’t lighter than anyone else, faster than anyone else, or fitter than anyone else. In fact, most people were lighter than me, faster than me, and fitter than me. My confidence was being propped up by a false sense of security and when I started racing against the pro’s, it was obliterated. My self-talk went from being confident (bordering on arrogance) during races, to feeling like cannon fodder over the course of a few months. My cycling career ended a few years later. If my time at the top would be described, I would have been spoken about as the capable cyclist who had a lot going for him, but never realized any of it..  Not a feel-good story, but a valuable one.

At the extreme, athletes who lack confidence may engage in self-talk centered around self-criticism especially when faced with setbacks. A percentage of these athletes will consider themselves outright failures. This category of athletes usually has flawed perceptions around failure – they criticize their feelings of weakness and doubt, wishing they could just feel more confident, which reinforces the feeling of not being confident, which they then criticize even further. And so on it goes.

Here is an example, we’ll call her Tara. During her teens, Tara a national open water swimmer. She was talented, sacrificed her childhood in the pool, and gave up everything to be the best. On paper, she was a talented athlete But when it counted, she couldn’t perform. Her hard work in training wasn’t getting realized in competition.

When we first met, her dialogue and self-talk definitely demonstrated unresolved and negative framing of her experiences as a swimmer. Now a triathlete, she was worried that her hard work and early success would all be for nothing. She was worried that again, she wouldn’t be able to perform, even though her results, bar one race, told us all otherwise.

These conversations gave us a sneak peek into her self-judgment system, and we knew if we didn’t address this, no amount of great training would ever make up for it. But before we share the strategies on how you can make that happen, we need to take a step back and understand the basic mechanisms in which the brain operates.

The Feedback  System Of Smack-n-Love

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Homer Simpson | Self Criticism & Self Congratulation

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

The brain has an effective system for self-criticism and self-congratulation. It smacks and then it loves. That’s for good reason. If you didn’t, you’d have no reason for getting out of bed to train, or continuously choosing cookies over a real meal. This is an evolutionary imperative – laziness and complacency can’t be celebrated. While our neurochemicals that govern our moods are primarily influenced by our genetics (nature), our judgments, worldview, and perceptions around failure and success are influenced by our environment (nurture). This is why two athletes can have the same experience – coming second in a race for example — but attach very different meaning to it. One athlete can be ecstatic, because they came 20th the year before, and the other can be devastated because they happen to be defending their title. Same experience, different meaning. That comes down to the experiences.

So how do you optimize your smack n love feedback system to maximize your athletic ability and sense of achievement? The first thing to recognize, and what we touched on in our previous article, is that you aren’t your thoughts and feelings; they are simply a bug in your larger system for self-judgment. Conversely, standing in front of a mirror and telling yourself ‘you can’ repeatedly won’t work either; you can’t lie to your chimp brain, it’s unruly, but it’s not entirely stupid.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Athletes Authority | Brain Model

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

So what do I mean when I say chimp brain?

Simply, we can think of our wildly complex brain as having three distinct parts: the chimp, the scientist, and the computer.

The chimp is your limbic brain, the autonomic brain, and your that ensures you stay alive, evaluate and respond to threats, and put you in the best chance to have your most primitive needs, met. This includes conservation of energy AND, threat management. It does what it wants, when it wants, how it wants. The Scientist, on the other hand, is rational; it likes to plan, seeks the truth, and likes to tell itself it’s in control of the experiments. And then you have your operating system – your computer – which calls upon your memories, experiences and value system to create your ‘schema’, which we spoke about in one of our article titled ‘Developing A Mature Athlete Identity’.

What’s important to understand is that self-affirmation, or simply telling yourself happy thoughts, assumes you have a well-domesticated chimp, an in-control Scientist, and a computer that is running bug-free. In reality, your operating system, through a lifetime of experiences,  your self-talk, and what you acknowledge and pay attention to, likely is littered with outdated software and maybe even a serious bug or virus; your chimp is an unruly, loud and resistant to any challenge that might expose you to a threat (like failure) and your poor Scientist brain is left trying to clean up the mess. The only way to truly work through this is to realize that your experiences, failures, and adversities – no matter how difficult – can only be overcome when you get back up, clean up the mess, distract your chimp, and run effective anti-virus scans. To do that, you need a system for understanding, categorizing, and tackling your self-judgment problems so you can feel the confidence you’ll need to have to achieve in sport.

Categorically, you can break up your self-judgment system into four layers. From deep to surface level, it would start with your self-worth; the deeply held beliefs about your value and worth as a person. Statements like, ‘I’m a good person worthy of success’ would fit into this category. In the same manner, ‘I’m a terrible person and not deserving of anything’, would also fall into this category.

The next layer up toward the surface is your self-esteem. These are more generalized comments about your competence as a person; developed over a lifetime of experiences either achieving or not achieving. A statement like I’m a capable person who can achieve great things when I put my mind to it’ would be categorized as esteem, in the same way, that ‘I’m a useless person who fails at everything’ would also fit here. Notice how these statements relate less about you as a person and more about your competency? That’s an easy way to distinguish between the two.

The next level up is the realm of confidence. These are the beliefs that surround specific areas of your life; in this case, you as an athlete. ‘I’m a good athlete’ would be an example of someone talking about their level of self-confidence in their ability.

Finally, there is self-efficacy. This the most surface-level judgment system, and it relates to specific tasks. For example, I’m great with my catch and pass game and am really reliable with the ball, but sometimes, I don’t read what’s going on in front of me when I’m defending. This would be self-efficacy as it pertains to the two tasks of ball-handling and defense positioning. Notice you can have high levels of self-efficacy in one area, and low self-efficacy in another. The aggregate of all the tasks feeds back into your self-confidence.

These four levels of judgments are sometimes hard to conceptualize by themselves, so we’re going to use the same analogy that Simon Marshall uses in his book “Brave Athlete”.

Simon refers to this judgment system as ‘The Me Tree’, with your sense of self-worth the roots beneath the ground, your self-esteem the stable trunk, the branches reflecting your confidence across the different areas/demands of your life, and your self-efficacy within each area represented by the leaves on the branch.

Simple, but it works.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

As you can imagine, the deeper you go, the more fundamental and wider-reaching the impact it has. For example, if the bugs in your operating system occur at the self-efficacy level (a specific area of your game for example), the strategies to deploy are very much practical; you may practice that specific component of the game during extras; if it’s at the level of your self-worth, you’re going to have to see a professional, period.

In the same way, you can’t deal with rotting roots by pruning the leaves, you can’t deal with fundamental and deeply held beliefs about your self-worth by doing some extras or watching your peers and learning vicariously. Certain strategies are effective at one level, and ineffective at another.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Fixing Self-Judgment Problems

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

It is not easy to accurately diagnose and pinpoint causes of a faulty self-judgment system; especially given we neither have the expertise or, the medium (this is an article, after all). If an accurate diagnosis can take extensively experienced and skilled psychologist’s hours to get there in person, the words of this article have little chance of hitting the mark. With that said, given that you’re reading this because, for whatever reason, you’re not ready to see a psychologist yet (and you genuinely may not need to), this will certainly be more valuable than the garbage you get on Instagram telling you that you should love yourself.

Even though we can’t diagnose your self-judgment problem (sorry), we can certainly give you some direction. In the first exercise, you’ll go through some example questions of what are often used by sports psychologists to determine where you might be heading. Remember, if the root cause of the problem is deep, it’s more an indication that you need professional help.  You’ll find this exercise in your resource book, which if you haven’t already got, can be accessed when you join our Free Master Your Mental Game Mini-Course.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Dealing with low self-worth or esteem.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

After that assessment, if you find that the answers to your questions extend into your self-worth and self-esteem, you need to go see a professional. Nothing here will be as effective as seeing a professional who can unpack this for you and resolve your deeper, internal conflicts. That’s not to say none of this will be beneficial, but it’s definitely to say that this is only beneficial to a point. If you have stuff deeply embedded into your psyche, then surface-level solutions won’t cut the mustard.

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

Dealing with low self-confidence & self-efficacy

Athletes Authority | Building Confidence And Self-Belief

If you find that your hurdles arise at the level of self-confidence or above, however, you’re in luck. These strategies can help. While non-descript, working on self-efficacy tasks will feedback to improved perceptions of you as an athlete, and, vice versa. That means that the strategies that work at the self-efficacy level, directly improve your self-confidence, and once your self-confidence improves, so does your self-efficacy.

Here are five strategies to improve that will have an immediate impact on your self-efficacy:

Strategy 1: Learn through observation.

Learn vicariously through your peers. Finding your equals is important – watching a world champion might be awesome and motivating, but it’s unlikely to give you a lot of return. Rather, watching someone like you achieve something (or at least, give something a go) that you’re also trying to achieve will have a great transfer. When you learn through observation, the software in your nervous system that improves motor control upgrades itself, simply by watching. Watch, then do is the mantra here.

Strategy 2: Put yourself in a position to succeed.

It might be obvious, but the most obvious strategy to improve self-efficacy is to put yourself in a position where you can succeed. Have you ever jumped off a cliff into the water? Which time was the most confronting? The first time, I guarantee you. Once you’ve established that you can succeed, you update your schema and you have an experience that reinforces that you can do it. Remember how we spoke about spank n love? This is where you can choose a task that provides the right amount of challenge; if your perception of it is easy, you deserve a smack; if it’s too hard, you might need some love. Find that middle ground where you don’t feel like you need either; that’ll be just right. It’s important to realize here though, that if you continuously avoid the difficult tasks; it doesn’t improve self-efficacy, it makes it way worse. You can’t avoid the stuff that scares you.

Strategy 3: Change your body language.

Changing your body language is a simple but surprisingly effective strategy for improving self-confidence and self-efficacy, and its basis is in evolutionary biology. Notice that when an animal asserts its dominance, it stands tall with its belly exposed? There is a good reason for that – it is exposing its most vulnerable area, with confidence. Conversely, when an animal cowers due to fear, it rounds it back, turns to face away, and protects its belly, hunching over. That’s to protect its most vulnerable parts. As clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson puts it in his book, 12 rules for life, ‘Stand Up Tall With Your Shoulders Back’; it works.

Strategy 4: Complete mental reps.

Complete mental reps, commonly what is called visualization. If you’ve already felt like you’re rejecting the idea, suspend your judgment for a moment, and consider this. Most of your coordination of a movement, otherwise known as your motor skills, occurs subconsciously by the nervous system. You don’t think about twisting your hips, pivoting off the front foot, loading the trunk, and then forcefully bringing the bat through to hit the ball; you just swing. Most of your fundamental skills in your sport occur subconsciously. These fundamental skills can be trained, in your head, over and over, without any fatigue. For mental reps to work however, it needs to be detailed; you need to include the sights, sounds, touch and smells of the experience. The more detailed, the more the subconscious associates the visualization to reality. If you don’t think this is possible; consider a nightmare. It’s occurring completely in your subconscious mind, so presumably, there should be no somatic response, right? Except in reality, when you wake up, you’re startled, your heart is racing, and your alert. Your brain believed that you were actually experiencing what you were having a nightmare about. Visualization works in the exact same way. During your visualization sessions, it’s important to not simply visualize a task being completed (like a serve, or a transition in a triathlon race), but adversity, and setbacks, too. The more you experience it worst-case scenarios in your mind, the less effect they have on you during the day. You can’t avoid adversity, you can only prepare for it.

Strategy 5: Dedicate some extras to the task.

Allocate extra time to the task-specific skills you’re lacking confidence in. It might be your bunker shots as a golfer, your volley as a tennis player, or stealing bases as a baseballer. Invest extra time into these areas; not trying to pursue perfection, but allowing repetition to create enough opportunities where you can show yourself you are succeeding. Take this quote from Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers to have ever lived:

“In 1946, my attitude suddenly changed,” he once wrote. “I honestly began to feel that I could play fairly well each time I went out, that there was no practical reason for me to feel that I might suddenly lose it all. I guess that what lay behind my new confidence was this: I had stopped trying to do a great many things perfectly because it had become clear in my mind that this ambitious over-thoroughness, my perfectionism, was neither possible, nor advisable, nor even necessary. All you needed to groove were the fundamental movements, and there weren’t so many of them. . . . My shot-making started to take on a new and more stable consistency.”

In sport, you only have two choices. Either you can feel confident, or you can find a reason not to win every time. In reality, you don’t need to have wild success first before you have confidence and you don’t need to be granted the gift from God. Creating confidence is a miracle for sure, but it’s already within you, in your brain. You need to take responsibility for using it and giving yourself permission to embrace it.

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