I have noticed that many terms that get associated with the “mental” side of sport are hard to conceptualize. Despite our human capacity for rationalization, our lazy frontal lobe loves to make everything binary. In practice that means that often concepts are discussed as if they exist, or do not.
For example, someone “has” confidence, or they don’t. Another person might “have” motivation, or not. When I coached in Denmark, I noted several swimmers when quitting or contemplating quitting would say they had “lost” their motivation. It was almost as if it were a set of keys they had left under a couch cushion and had given up on finding.
One of the challenges of my work is therefore getting people to conceptualize these things not in black or white but as capacities and spectrums. On the speaking circuit I’ve been on recently I’ve been talking a lot about motivation as a capacity, but today I want to talk about confidence.
I conceive of confidence as self-directed optimism. That is, you are projecting into the future and manifesting hoping, perhaps bordering on certainty, that you will do something great. That is something I often refer to as self-efficacy, or your perception of how capable you are.
But confidence also touches on self-esteem. Because the optimism is often highly personalized. You don’t just believe that you are capable of something, but you believe that because you think you are good and capable, that there is some sort of intrinsic quality within you.
That is all to set up a marked phenomenon I have noticed across all of the coaches and athletes I have worked with: many of them have periods of higher confidence and lower confidence. There is an ebb and flow to confidence within each person.
As a coach, I try to bring each person I work with to a smaller range, more in line with where they actually are. If your realistic capability is the average of where your confidence is, I don’t believe that average can be changed. What you can train is to stay closer to the mean and avoid violent swings in each direction.
IN every Egotist There is excessive modesty
Let me give you an example, or perhaps multiple examples of how this plays out in reality. I’ll use myself first as an example and then someone else (anonymous) that I know.
When I am at my most confident, my internal narrative is something like this:
“You’re brilliant, you know exactly how to solve all the worlds problems”
When I am down, it sounds more like this:
“Nobody understands what you’re talking about, potentially because you’re actually full of shit”.
The two narratives are mostly opposite and cannot coexist. What is useful about putting them out is understand that they are both over corrections for each other. When these are the two dominant narratives, you will have volatile swings from completely egotistical mannerisms to fatalism.
Let’s use my second anonymous example. This individual, when they are at their most confident:
“I’m tough as nails and no one messes with me”
and then on the flipside
”Someone was mean to me and I’m destroyed”
Again, oppositional and unable to coexist. Each of the two feed each other. You see, if you follow a delusional optimistic narrative like “I’m the toughest” or “I’m brilliant and omniscient”, that false narrative easily gets shattered by real world events.
All that is necessary is for someone to be unimpressed by your reasoning in the first case. The second only requires you to be a typical human who feels bad when other people are upset with you. In the moment of shattering your mind will seek to overcorrect that narrative with a drastic swing to the other side of your actual belief about yourself.
This is one of the primary reasons I coach people to come up with authentic and honest positivity about themselves is to avoid this polar swing. Coming up with fake (and dishonest) narratives in order to be “positive” often has a contradictory effect. The mind will naturally self-correct.
You may have noticed that many people you view as brashly confident often exhibit this violent swing. Likewise, you probably have noticed that many “down in the dumps” people often show occasional contradictory overconfidence.
Much like in any training, the actual goal is not to achieve maximum confidence in the moment. The goal is to calibrate closer to the mean of your actual capabilities. Because within range of your honest self-perception, you have the ability to broaden and change where that center is.