What is Mental Toughness – Confidence

posted on: March 23, 2013
author: Brian Lomax, Ed.D.

A vitally important ingredient to mental toughness and performing your best is confidence.  I know that isn’t exactly a profound revelation, but where many athletes struggle is in developing confidence so that they can compete at a high level consistently.  We want to develop the kind of confidence that is unshakeable no matter the circumstances.  In order to do this, let’s focus on two high level concepts that factor into your confidence:

• Faith in yourself
• Trust in your abilities

If you look up the word faith in the dictionary, one of the definitions you’ll find is “belief that is not based on proof”, which is exactly the point I want to make.  The greatest athletes, the greatest leaders, the greatest achievers in mankind have all had an unwavering faith in their ability to succeed, whether there was reason to believe or not.  That’s the key concept here as past performance does NOT have to be a predictor of future performance if you don’t want it to be.  A good friend of mine recently shared the following quote and I think it is apropos in this case.

 Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

The beginning of any journey toward a new goal requires you to get started without really knowing if you can do it, but you must believe that you can.  You must believe that you can compete with anyone.  You must believe that you can win against any opponent even if you’ve never defeated them before.  Does this mean you’ll always succeed or always win?  No, of course it doesn’t, but even if you don’t succeed you will have learned and improved along the way.  However, if you don’t have this kind of faith, you’ll never reach your potential, you’ll never achieve the level of success you desire, and you’ll never conquer those opponents who represent a challenge for you because you will have defeated yourself before you have even started.

Trust is different from faith in that it is evidence based and is more specific to your abilities.  A concept I emphasize in my coaching practice is competing through your strengths because your best performances flow through your strengths.  These are the parts of your game that define who you are as an athlete and competitor, and when under pressure it is these strengths in which you place your trust so that you come through in the clutch.  Great free throw shooters make free throws at the end of a close basketball game.  Great quarterbacks make the sideline throw in the two minute drill.  Great tennis players go for their best shots in a third set tiebreaker.  These athletes have worked on these skills so much that they are automatic.  Under pressure, they go to these skills and they trust them.  There is no doubt.  There is only evidence based trust.  Again, similar to faith, having trust in your skills doesn’t mean that you will always succeed, but it is better to go for it through your strengths than it is to doubt your abilities and play it safe.

Work on building faith in yourself and trusting your abilities, and you will begin to know confidence as your good friend in competition.