Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Confidence is the primary building block for every aspect of mental toughness and resilience in sports. Without confidence, an athlete is just a shell of their true self.  Moreover, confidence is not something a young athlete just has naturally.

Instead, confidence is something an athlete earns by developing skills in specific areas. Therefore, it’s perfectly normal for a young athlete to lack confidence.

In addition, if you were to evaluate the confidence of a young athlete over time you will quickly realize that confidence is a variable emotion. This means that on any given day an athlete can be tremendously confident, and on another given day lack confidence completely.

With this in mind, the underlying question a sports parent needs to answer is how do I help my child consistently increase their confidence over time?

Confidence is Not Being Cocky

Before I answer this question, I first must clarify that having a high level of confidence is not the same as being cocky.

Yes, there is a fine line between confidence and cockiness as they are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, confidence makes you feel good in the long-term. On the other hand, cockiness makes you feel good in the short-term. So, it’s easy to confuse the two in the moment. Therefore, it’s easy for an athlete to substitute cockiness for confidence when they know they lack confidence and also know they need confidence to win.

Therefore, it’s important to develop a confident athlete. Not just tell the athlete they need to be confident without helping them do it. Young athletes must learn to believe that any time effort is invested to develop a tangible skill in a specific area they are also earning the right to be confident. When an athlete is not putting in the effort, it’s cocky to think they are better than someone who has.

Simply stated, confidence is something you earn, and cockiness is something you take without deserving it. Confidence is graceful, while cockiness is rude. Confidence helps you grow, while cockiness stunts growth.

The 13 Sources of Confidence for Young Athletes

There is a fantastic research paper I reference often when I write about confidence The role of confidence in world-class sport performance. This research breaks down nine sources where athletes get their confidence. Through my work with high school and youth athletes, I then took those 9 sources and broke a few down further to get 13 sources of confidence for young athletes.

1. Belief in a home-field advantage
2. Belief in other environmental advantages (weather, time of day, etc.)
3. Preparation
4. Coaching
5. Experience
6. Belief in a process
7. Past success
8. Self-Awareness
9. Support network
10. Encouragement
11. Seeing someone similar or close achieve success
12. Recently seeing your opponent fail
13. Belief in having a natural talent that provides an advantage

How Parents Can Influence Confidence

With this in mind, the best thing a parent can do to help their child develop confidence in sports is to focus on the 5 of these 13 sources that they can influence.

1. Preparation
2. Coaching
3. Experience
4. Encouragement
5. Self-Awareness

Preparation: Influence your child by providing them the means to prepare in a similar manner to one of their role models or a successful teammate.

Coaching: Influence your child by providing them with a coach with a proven track record of working with athletes similar to your child and one who is good at getting buy-in from young athletes.

Experience: Influence your child by developing a routine of reviewing video after competitions. Furthermore, these sessions must allow them to break down their performance and the performance of others as well as write down their lessons learned.

Encouragement: Influence your child by facilitating and environment that provides consistent encouragement and positive support from family, friends, teammates and coaches. As a side note, a study done at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania proved that verbal encouragement also has profound effects on improving performance.

Self-awareness: Influence your child’s self-awareness by having them participate in the virtual coaching program I describe here. This program is specifically designed to help young athletes in 6th grade through high school know themselves and know what they want. In addition, the program will help them create a plan to go after it using the strengths and motivations that come natural to them. If you are interested in finding out more about this coaching program, contact me here.