What holds you back is not fear, but your attitude towards it.
- Russ Harriss
It's not surprising that self-doubt and a lack of confidence can present considerable challenges to performance. Within this blog post, we'll try to break down this big topic and offer some tips on tackling it. We will divide this post into two parts: first, we'll lay the foundation of confidence and introduce a new approach to it. We'll also refer to a helpful book called "The Confidence Gap" by Russ Harris that challenges the idea of confidence as a prerequisite for success.
But before we dive into the book and our perceptions of the importance of confidence, what exactly is confidence? It's a belief in your ability to successfully perform a particular task or achieve a specific goal. Various factors influence this psychological state, including past experiences, personal traits, and external factors like social support and feedback. Confidence is closely linked to self-esteem, which is a more general sense of your worth or value as a person. While confidence is focused on specific abilities or goals, self-esteem is a broader evaluation of yourself as a whole. From a psychological perspective, confidence is related to the concept of self-efficacy, which is the belief in your ability to complete a task or achieve a goal successfully. Factors like past experiences, social support, and personal traits like optimism and resilience can influence your self-efficacy.
It's important to note that experiencing low confidence or self-doubt is completely normal. Nevertheless, this very 'normal' process can greatly impact our performance and life. When the mental noise of self-doubt increases, it often distracts us from taking action and focusing on things within our control. Therefore, we might focus on outcomes and variables we can't control, or we may try to convince ourselves that 'we'll be fine,' but these positive affirmations can sometimes lead to our own internal argument, further distracting us!
Therefore, the advice we're discussing might feel counterintuitive, but hopefully, it'll help you build your focus skills and allow you to follow one of the key themes of Harris's book: "What holds you back is not fear, but your attitude towards it. The tighter you hold on to the attitude that fear is something 'bad' and you can't do the things you want until it goes away, the more stuck you will be." This approach is particularly relevant for athletes as they often perform in challenging environments with large amounts of feedback. Nonetheless, this provides many opportunities for athletes to practice their skills of acceptance and understanding that self-doubt is a natural by-product of how we think.
Harris also emphasizes within the book the importance of embracing discomfort and failure. He encourages readers to connect to their values and build a willingness to experience uncomfortable thoughts, seeing failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. For athletes, this means accepting that they will make mistakes and experience setbacks but being able to connect back to their values. By developing this willingness, athletes can reduce their anxiety surrounding low confidence and self-doubt. Harris argues that aligning our actions with our values allows us to feel a sense of purpose and fulfilment even when we're uncertain and doubtful. After consciously acknowledging these values, athletes can develop clear actions that help move their focus from the outcome to controllable actions.
Overall, within sport performance and life confidence can be overrated, and sometimes we think of it as an essential ingredient to success. But, we want to challenge this idea and "The Confidence Gap" offers a refreshing perspective on it. Harris reinforces the fact that society often compels us to believe that we must have confidence to perform well, but research doesn't necessarily support this idea. Additionally, try and reflect yourself, and you will probably recall situations when you've felt strong feelings of self-doubt but still succeeded. So, the next time you experience this noise of self-doubt, acknowledge it, connect to the present moment, and take action. Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we'll explore some specific tools to help you build your acceptance and focusing skills!
References
The Confidence Gap - Russ Harris (https://www.thenile.co.nz/books/russ-harris/the-confidence-gap/9781921518966?gclid=Cj0KCQiApKagBhC1ARIsAFc7Mc7cd4O_YOmUR3EriqoqyyCxhqKn0AlZjpPNV15to2_4Q9r4Y0-exYIaAgwsEALw_wcB)