There is something curious, (or maybe just different), about the way we talk about confidence.
I don’t always notice how differently I think about it until I’m talking to someone outside sport, and that isn’t about one version being right and the other wrong. It’s just how it is when you’ve spent a long time inside elite performance.
We treat confidence like a substance you need to acquire before you’re allowed to do difficult things. Find your confidence. Build your confidence. Wait until you feel more confident. And whatever you do, apparently, don’t start until you’ve got enough of it.
Working closely with professional sport, I don’t think I ever really watched someone and thought, they aren’t confident, at least not in the way we usually mean when we use that word. I know self doubt exists in sport, of course it does, and plenty of it.
Somewhere around the professional or elite level, though, it seems to work differently, and it stops looking the way you might expect it to from the outside.
What I saw instead was ritual. Players would run out, drop to a knee and pray. Others would always pick up a piece of grass. One player always sat in the same seat in the team bus. These were small, repeated, (maybe slightly odd to the outside) behaviours that had nothing to do with confidence and everything to do with control and familiarity.
I can only think of one time that I wonder whether this was different. I was stood in the tunnel watching Toulouse (rugby) run out and these boys were all built like mountains. I can still see it today. They were all seriously vast. I know the backroom staff around me all had exactly the same reaction as me. Oh shit. That reaction belonged to us, though, not to the players. I have no idea what the players themselves were thinking as that team ran out. If I had to guess, it was closer to oh shit, my body is about to take a battering, than anything to do with confidence. That’s a physical thought, not a psychological one, and it’s a different thing entirely from thinking I’m not confident playing these guys. It was another day at the office, that might just give them a few more bruises and pains.
So when I look at it properly, even for me, it wasn’t really about confidence at all. It was about scale, about the very real prospect of getting hurt.
Which makes me think that the longer you spend close to elite performance, the less useful confident and not confident become as categories. It stops being a real distinction, a bit like what Kobe Bryant used to say about failure, that it isn’t really a fixed thing, only a story we tell about a single moment.
Confidence, I’ve come to think, only becomes a thing the moment you force it into a shape it was never in to begin with. Have or have not. Present or absent.
I opened the floor to questions on here a few days ago, and a striking number of you asked about exactly this kind of thing, the surprising parts, the bits of elite sport that don’t match the tidy version we’re usually sold. This is one of them.
Elite athletes are incredibly confident
I understand why we assume they are. We’re watching the finished product. We see someone walk into a stadium full of people, take the kick, make the shot, give the interview, put themselves in a position where failure is going to be very public indeed. It looks like confidence.
What we’re really doing is looking at the action and assuming the feeling must have come first, and that’s the bit I’m not convinced about.
I never once watched someone doubt themselves, and I don’t think that’s because they were hiding it from me. I think it simply didn’t come into the equation. Whether they felt capable of doing the thing was never really the question being asked. They’d trained, they knew the job, they had the reps, and so they did it, regardless of what was or wasn’t going on underneath.
Confidence is data
I said this in reply to someone on this subject and I’ve been mulling over my thoughts on this since:
The older and wiser I get, the more I believe the way we commonly talk about confidence is largely a myth. At its simplest, confidence is your prediction about your own ability to handle something. And that belief that you can actually do something comes from data.
I’ve realised I’m more of a data nerd than I ever thought I was. I’m definitely not the spreadsheet kind (I leave my Performance Analyst husband to do that). But I mean Life data. What you’ve survived, what you’ve already done a smaller version of, what you know because you’ve done it before and it didn’t finish you.
We talk about confidence as though it is something you need in order to act, when really, most of the time, action is how you get it. You do something. You survive it. You do it again, and you get slightly better. You discover that the thing you thought might finish you did not, in fact, finish you, which is always useful information, and slowly you accumulate evidence. I can do this.
That evidence doesn’t come from being told you could, or from repeating it to yourself in the mirror before breakfast, or from managing to manufacture precisely the right frame of mind before you started. It comes from having receipts.
Professional sport runs on this, whether anyone in it calls it that or not. Nobody waits for a player to wake up on Tuesday morning feeling sufficiently sure of themselves before training. Nobody says, shall we perhaps leave tackling today because Dave isn’t quite believing in himself? You train, you repeat, you review, you correct, and you go again, and over time you build a body of evidence you can draw on when the stakes are much higher.
