Why Confidence is So Important to Increasing an Athlete’s Performance
Peak performance comes from balancing challenge and skill. In the classic mindset book Flow in Sports: The keys to optimal experiences and performances, the research of the authors Susan Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows that the challenge-skill balance is one of 9 dimensions an athlete needs for flow in sports.
In addition, Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi also make two additional important points about the challenge-skill balance. 1) If a challenge is so difficult that success is not achievable with one’s current skills, performance will suffer. 2) If a challenge is too easy, performance will also suffer.
Therefore, if you want to raise an athlete’s peak performance level you must consistently work on increasing three variables, not just the two obvious variables of skill and challenge.
Increased Skill + Difficult Challenge + Success = Increased Performance
You can reach peak performance in failure, but you may or may not be increasing your performance. What’s more, if an athlete consistently fails in the face of difficult challenges, eventually performance will suffer. Even if there were increases in performances in past failures.
This is why confidence is so important to increasing performance. This is also why I believe so strongly in the saying that success breeds success. No matter how much an athlete increases their skill level, it will never be enough without confidence. Moreover, success against progressively more difficult challenges is the only way to build the confidence an athlete needs to increase performance.