Six Mental Skills Athletes Must Train to Build their Confidence
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.
One of the biggest mistakes parents and coaches make when trying to help an athlete build their confidence is to treat confidence as the skill. However, confidence is not a single skill, it’s the culmination of skills.
Specifically, there are six mental skills the athletes must train to build their confidence.
1. Goal Orientation: The skill of focusing on your own personal improvement instead of comparisons to others.
- To change how the athlete views past accomplishments from an ego focus to task focus.
- To focus how the athlete prepares by breaking down their goals into a progression.
2. Reframing: The skill of changing one’s perception of a situation so it doesn’t debilitate performance.
- To change how the athlete views their competitive advantages and their competition.
- To change how the athlete views the factors impacting their physical skills, preparation, teammates, and coaching.
3. Self-Talk: The skill of controlling one’s thoughts so those thoughts are not negative or hurtful.
- To change how the athlete talks to themselves about their innate abilities and talents they were born with.
- To change how the athlete talks to themselves about the social support they get from family, friends, and teammates.
4. Emotional Intelligence: The skill of using self-awareness to enhance performance and life satisfaction.
- To build self-awareness around what the athlete wants and how to best go after it using their personality strengths.
- To improve all aspects of how the athlete controls their emotions in public and in private.
5. Growth Mindset: The skill of giving one’s best effort to improve when they are not good at something or when others are far better.
- To change the athlete’s mindset to believe that the innate abilities and talents they were born with are just the starting point, and that with hard work and effort they will get better.
- To put the athlete’s experience in the context of growth so they can better learn from prior successes and failures.
6. Locus of Control: The skill of using cause and effect to enhance performance.
- To orient the athlete’s mind to focus more on those things under their control.
- To allow the athlete to view the cause and effect of performances through the lens of effort, strategy, and resilience instead of fairness, luck, genetics, or chance.