The Confident Athlete

4 Easy Steps to Build and Maintain Confidence

Tami Matheny

• Publisher: Author Academy Elite
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781640851726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Sports Psychology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Many athletes have roller coaster confidence. Their confidence is up when performing well and its down when performing poorly. Matheny gives 4 basic building blocks to ensure you start and end each performance with a tank full of confidence.
Coaches, athletes, teams and even parents will discover simple yet powerful ways to build and maintain confidence. The book will give you the tools to start each competition with a high level of confidence and be able to maintain confidence in the face of adversity. Confidence is a skill that can be cultivated through repetitions.
Are you ready to take responsibility for your confidence and ensure that your confidence stays consistent?

1
Confidence is Talking the Talk

Every time you speak, you are either increasing
or decreasing confidence.

Talking the Talk is simply your self-talk, which is the first step to confidence. Anytime you think about something, you are “talking to yourself.” Your self-talk (thoughts) directly impacts the other 3 steps to confidence. Before taking the next steps, you need to first make sure your self-talk lays a strong foundation. How you talk to yourself is a determining factor of your confidence level. What you say to yourself affects what you think and how you feel. If your self- talk is positive, your thoughts and feelings will also be positive. It is almost impossible to think and feel negatively, when you’re talking positively to yourself.

It is unrealistic to think that all self-talk has to be positive, but if your inner thoughts are not positive, they should at least be productive. Studies show that we have around 50,000 thoughts a day. Most of us do not even realize how much time we spend talking to ourselves. For the majority of people, 90% of those are unproductive thoughts. That is a lot of unproductive self-talk out there! What would happen if we cut that in half? We would be on our way to releasing our confidence emergency brake.

Talking the talk plants the seeds for how you feel which directly correlates to your confidence. Our lives generally move in the direction of our most dominant thoughts. Therefore, the more you engage your mind on productive, positive, and successful thoughts, the more confident you will become.

Our Lives Generally Move in the Direction of Our Most Dominant Thoughts

Think about what you say to yourself after a mistake? Is it positive and/or productive or is it negative and/or unproductive?

Your body will often follow the strongest impression in your mind. If I say, “don’t think about the pink elephant in the room,” most likely your mind thinks of a pink elephant. If you walk up to the plate thinking “Don’t strike out, don’t strike out”, you’re probably going to strike out! Branch Rickey, a member of the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame once said that, “A full mind is an empty a bat”. However, I think “a negative mind is an empty at bat” is more appropriate.

Instead of saying, “Don’t strikeout”, say something along the lines of, “I am going to make good contact with the ball.” What you say to yourself influences your body, therefore your actions. Start being proactive by choosing the thoughts you want to give power to. We cannot always control a thought from entering our minds, but we can control the energy we give that thought.

By talking the talk, you are also being your own best ally. When you don’t talk the talk, you are then playing against your opponent and yourself. As the famous surfer, Laird Hamilton said, “Make sure your own worst enemy is not living between your own two ears.”

Below are some tips for using Talking the Talk. They might not all work for you, but find one or two that will help you become more positive and/or productive with your self-talk.

1. Rubber Band Pop

When I was in high school, I had a short fuse with myself when it came to making mistakes or losing. Luckily, I had a coach that had just the cure for it. He handed me a rubber band and told me to wear it on my wrist. Every time I got frustrated or down on myself, I was to pop the rubber band. After numerous pops, it quickly became a reminder to me to have positive or productive thoughts. Now, when working with athletes this is one of the first techniques I give them.

EXERCISE: For the first week, wear a rubber band and pop yourself for every negative or unproductive thought. Most people are amazed at the amount of unproductive thoughts they have. In week 2, pop yourself but then change the dialogue. Replace the unproductive thought with a productive one.

2. “I am...” Statements

This is also referred to as affirmations, which are repeated positive statements designed to bring about a desired result. The idea is that, by saying something over and over, you will actually start to believe it.

A Latin proverb states, “Repetitio est mater studiorum” which means, repetition is the mother of all learning. The more we repeat a thought, or action, the more familiar and comfortable we become with it because we are learning through repetition. Repetition triggers our subconscious mind into positive action.

“It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”

-Muhammad Ali

Our brain often believes what we tell it. As a result, many of us have developed self-beliefs that do not help us. On a daily basis we get into habits of saying negative statements about ourselves that act like self-fulfilling prophesies.

Think of an elephant at a circus. All the other animals are placed in cages. The elephant, the largest and strongest animal, is only held in place by a single chain around one leg. What prevents this creature from breaking free? Nothing but the chains in its mind. You see, when an elephant is a baby and not nearly as strong, it physically cannot break free from the chain. After many attempts, it slowly believes it isn’t strong enough to break the chain. The elephant becomes conditioned to this limiting belief.

We are often like elephants in a circus. We cling to limiting beliefs because we’ve been criticized or told something negative by someone else (or ourselves), and we hang onto that chain. Or, we haven’t had the success we desire, so we have conditioned ourselves to believe we can’t do something.

However, just as our negative proclamations become self-fulfilling prophesies, the opposite can be true as well. “I am…” statements help us break these mental chains and increase our chances of more favorable results.

***

In my 30s, I started running competitively. I had always despised running up hills. However, it finally dawned on me during a 10k in Asheville, NC, as I was running up a lot of hills, that I needed to apply my own teaching. As I approached each hill, I started telling myself, “I am a hill runner. I am a hill runner…” I continued saying this until I realized I was on the downhill side. Before I knew it, running up hills was easier.

Our brains cannot have 2 separate thoughts at the exact same time. By telling myself I was a hill runner, I prevented negative thoughts from draining my energy and confidence. It is not that I was bad at running hills, it was my self-talk that needed to change. I started applying positive self-talk to all my hill runs and before I knew it I was seeking them out on training runs and looked forward to them during races. What had once been a weakness became a strength just by changing my internal dialogue.

***

I once worked with a collegiate softball catcher. She reached out to me after her batting average fell below 100. We tried several strategies before applying the “I am…” statement. She chose to say, “I am the greatest hitter out here” and would repeat this throughout practices, before games, while on deck, and in the batter’s box. She credits the change in her self-talk to improving her batting average by almost 100 points.

***

“I am…” statements should be strong and positive. They should focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want and should never focus on failure. For example, “I am calm” is stronger than “I am not stressed” or “I will get a hit” is more effective than “I will not strike out”. Avoid such words as “maybe,” “not,” “won’t”, etc.

EXERCISE: List 2-3 things you are not very confident about in your sport. This can range from physical, technical, leadership, tactical, to mental skills. Once you have listed these, create an “I am” statement for each skill. For example, if you aren’t as confident with dribbling with your left hand in basketball say, “I am strong with my left”. Or if you struggle with late game situations, “I am great when the game is on the line”.

• Say your “I am...” statements throughout the day, and especially when practicing or competing.
• Make sure they are in your own words.
• Write them down and place them where you will see them frequently.

3. Vocabulary

Simply changing your vocabulary slightly can make significant improvements in your confidence. Here are some small but powerful words to incorporate into your vocabulary.

1. a. “Yet”

Too often we start to believe things that haven’t happened. For example, “I haven’t hit a first serve in,” or “we have never beat that team.” Placing a “yet” at the end of such phrases sends a message to your brain that there is still hope, still a chance. “I haven’t hit my first serve i...