Counterpoint: Don’t Be Humble Because Being Humble is Overrated
Growing up as an athlete I was socialized to believe that being humble is a preferred virtue. For the vast majority of my life, I viewed being humble as a character trait that all great athletes must have. But now that I am a mental skills coach, I now know that being humble is not only overrated, it’s actually counterproductive.
Most times coaches and parents tell athletes to stay humble after success. Moreover, people never tell a struggling athlete to stay humble. Why is this?
Intuitively, we know that athletes who are struggling need a confidence boost. Therefore, it’s better to pump them up with motivation to feed positive self-talk than to do the opposite. On the other hand, telling athletes with an upward success trajectory to be humble is the opposite approach. The thought is that if a successful athlete gets cocky then they will debilitate their performance.
Cocky Athletes Need to Be Humble, Confident Athletes Don’t Need to be Humble
The problem with this is that people confuse confidence and cockiness. Confidence is something you earn, and cockiness is something you make up. Confidence comes from preparation and putting effort into developing tangible skills. Cockiness comes from believing in yourself even when you haven’t put in the effort to earn that belief. Achieving difficult goals and showing resilience give you confidence. Easy wins and luck give you cockiness.
Cocky athletes need a serving of humble pie. Confident athletes don’t. If you force feed the humble “virtue” to a confident athlete you’re doing the equivalent of putting a weighted rucksack on the back of a mountain climber.
Remember, the definition of being humble is to lower oneself. Why would you want someone who is working their ass off putting in the effort to go to the top to do this? A better suggestion is to tell confident athletes to keep their ego out of the process.
Furthermore, you don’t have to be humble to remove your ego from the process. All you must do is to keep reminding confident athletes to focus on the process that got them to where they are now. It’s the process that drives progress, and it’s an athlete’s confidence in that process that will help them continue to make progress.
Simply stated, let a confident athlete celebrate their success with positive self-talk, positive body language, and positive perceptions. No need to tell them to be humble to slow this behavior down. As the saying goes, success breeds success. What’s more, positive self-talk, positive body language and positive perceptions are behaviors that breed success.