Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Yesterday I made the case that you have no control over the confidence you have right now in this moment, but you do have control of your confidence in the future. However, there is a caveat to controlling your future confidence I left out of yesterday’s article.

It’s much easier to control your future confidence when your source of lacking confidence is due to things you control. When your source of lacking confidence is due to things you don’t control, this requires a completely different process.

In general, there are nine sources of confidence.

1. Preparation: Do you lack confidence in your preparation from training and practice?
2. Performance accomplishments: Do you lack confidence due to past failures in achieving goals?
3. Coaching:  Do you lack confidence in your coach having the ability to help you achieve your goals?
4. Innate factors:  Do you lack confidence in the innate abilities and talents you were born with?
5. Social support:  Do you lack confidence in the support you get from family, friends, and teammates?
6. Experience:  Do you lack confidence in your experience and the learned lessons from prior successes or failures?
7. Competitive advantage:  Do you lack confidence in how you compare to your competition?
8. Self-awareness: Do you lack confidence because you are unsure in what you want and how to go after it?
9. Trust:  Do you lack confidence because you don’t trust yourself, your preparation, teammates, or coaching?

Out of these nine sources, five are within your control: preparation, coaching, experience, self-awareness, and trust. This leaves four other sources that are not: performance accomplishments, innate factors, social support, and competitive advantage.

If your confidence comes from one of the four factors that are not under your control, then this means you must put more effort into developing your mental skills.

Mental Skills for Lacking Confidence Due to Things You Don’t Control

By and large, when things not under your control dictate your confidence, you are dealing with limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs are opinions you have that you treat as fact. However, the fact is that these opinions are just mental barriers preventing you from seeing the facts.

For example, if you lack confidence because of past failures, you’re limiting belief is that your past dictates your future. This then becomes a chicken and egg problem because your lack of confidence is preventing you from achieving your goals, but until you achieve your goals you won’t have confidence.

This same conundrum will play itself out when you let any of the four factors of confidence not under your control dictate your level of confidence. Therefore, other than working with a therapist, the only other way to deal with these types of limiting beliefs is through using mental skills training to remove those four factors as sources of confidence. To put this differently, the more confidence you can gain from preparation, coaching, experience, self-awareness, and trust the more control over your confidence you will have.

As a result, the mental skills you need to train to make this shift include:

1. Goal Orientation

• To change how you view past accomplishments from an ego focus to task focus.
• To focus how you prepare so that you better break down your goals into a progression.

2. Reframing

• To change how you view your competitive advantages and your competition.
• To change how you view the factors impacting how you trust yourself, your preparation, teammates, and coaching.

3. Self-Talk

• To change how you talk to yourself about your innate abilities and talents you were born with.
• To change how you talk to yourself about the social support you get from your family, friends, and teammates.

4. Emotional Intelligence

• To build self-awareness around what you want and how to go after it.
• To improve all aspects of how you control your emotions in public and in private.

5. Growth Mindset

• To change your mindset to believe that the innate abilities and talents you were born with are just the starting point, and that with hard work and effort you will get better.
• To put your experience in the context of growth so you can better learn from prior successes and failures.

6. Locus of Control

• To orient your mind to focus more on those things under your control.
• To allow you to view the cause and effect of your performances through the lens of effort, strategy, and resilience instead of fairness, luck, genetics, or chance.