Whether or not having a baby has a positive or negative effect on an athletes career is a controversial subject. On the one hand, one could argue that anything that takes away from your focus on the task at hand and especially a commitment as challenging as a newborn would be a huge obstacle that would probably hinder an athlete. However, it is my belief that having a child is actually a positive thing in the life of an athlete.
One reason for my belief is Continue Reading…
I am convinced confidence is important when it comes to training for competition but how do you build this confidence? In many sports, there are multiple competitions which happen within a period of time. For example, in my sport Taekwon – Do, there are at least four tournaments I compete per year. This requires an athlete’s performance to peak multiple times per year and not always with the same amount of time in between competitions. One way to build confidence in sports like this is to win every competition, but this doesn’t always happen. So how do I do it?
I have created a system that has worked for me. I call it phasing. You may have read something like this and every athlete needs to figure what out what works for them.
In preparation for each event a number of factors fluctuate. Of course your physical abilities, weight, calorie intake and physical output change but one of the most important and most overlooked change is in an athletes mentality.
There are many factors which fall under the label “mentality,” confidence being one of them. In diagram 1.0 you can see how confidence increases through the preparation phase of training. This simply means that as you train and prepare physically you become more comfortable with your ability and more confident that you can perform what you practice.
Diagram 1.0
What you would like to do is really understand when it is that your confidence is at its peak. If it takes you four weeks to train and feel you are confident in your ability then you need to plan four weeks in advance of the event to begin training so that when you attend the event you are ready to go. Simple right? That part should be.
You may ask, “How do I know when I feel confident and when I am ready?”
For me personally, I keep a training journal and I write weekly or daily how I feel about my training to keep track of where I am from a mental perspective. When I am feeling lack of confidence at a point in my training, I may look back at my journal just to discover that I have only trained for 5 weeks. Then I can adjust for next time and start my training a week earlier. Of course there is more to it than time spent training but for the sake of simplicity we will stick to that one factor.
If you do take part in a sport like Taekwon – Do where there are multiple events strung together you need to make sure you phase your training correctly. Diagram 1.1 shows what happens to confidence when there are two events. It goes up as you train and then you get the result of your first event. After a win you ride out that level of confidence and it eventually comes down especially as you slack back training. In preparation for the next event it would again peak, assuming you planned your training properly.
Diagram 1.1
One thing that you may notice if you compete, is that after a while of training and keeping confidence at its peak you experience a bit of what we call “Burnout.” This happens for a number of reasons relating to physical exhaustion but for myself it is always mental exhaustion. This happens when you are pushing your mental ability to the max for extended periods of time and not giving your brain and body a chance to understand what you are putting it though. Change is good and pushing your body and mind is how you grow, but at some point you need to plateau to start the process again.
Mental exhaustion or “Burnout” may feel like this:
Diagram 1.2
There is an ideal level of confidence. You do not want to be over-confident and you do not want to lack confidence during training. You need to be somewhere in-between. The majority of athletes would like to be here for their training. Keeping this ideal level will allow you to peak in confidence when a competition rolls around. I find that keeping this level of confidence throughout my training allows me to focus more on future goals.
One may argue that you wouldn’t want confidence to reach its maximum even during competition. It is healthy to believe in yourself and your abilities but I believe that every good athlete realizes that losing is not impossible. Believing that your opponent or challenger can get the better of you that day keeps you in a state of flow. It keeps you sharp and aware.
Diagram 1.3
Equally important is what happens to an athletes confidence after the event. Depending on the result, the rate at which confidence will decline changes. As in diagram 1.4 you can see how if you win the event your confidence will stay at the same level longer and will decrease more slowly than if you lose. Of course, we all want to win but in a sport where you have a string of events to train for I argue that it is more important to react to a decision than the actual decision.
What this means is that you need to analyze and adjust. If you win you need to realize the trajectory of your confidence. You don’t want it to ride to high for too long. Being over-confident can cause you to develop false confidence. A lot of people who do this become successful at an event and let it get to their head, they stop training because they feel they have been there done that then when they go to compete again they lose.
For me, personally, I love compliments. I know it makes me feel good when I am recognized for hard work. In fact other people’s compliments go a lot further than they should in my world. I have recognized that from journaling how they make me feel. So I adapt. After winning at a tournament you will never see me at the Dojang. I stay away for a day, or two, or how ever long it takes for me to come down off my high and for the students excitement to subside. Some people I explain this to think I’m crazy but I get pleasure and satisfaction from the process of preparation and then the performance not necessarily if I win. I still have the goal of winning but sometimes you may win but perform terribly and this doesn’t satisfy me. I want to win easily and then get right back to training. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, I don’t think it’s really a good thing. I wish I could celebrate with others but I know myself and that’s how I am.
On the other hand, if you lose you need to realize that your confidence may have taken a hefty blow depending on things like your perceived confidence going into an event, your belief in the probability of a win, and any strange things that may have happened during. As with most people your confidence will probably fade away more quickly assuming you do nothing to reverse this erosion.
After a loss, my thinking is that I am actually in the perfect level of confidence to be training. I call the loss a reality check. My latest example of that would be losing to a competitor at the 2012 Nova Scotia Provincial Championships. What I realized after that loss was that I needed to hit the gym… and hard. A short time after my loss, I captured the Eastern Canadian Championship. If you adjust quickly the previous result doesn’t matter in fact I would argue that a loss, if managed mentally, will increase motivation and allow you to reach a higher level of confidence than what you had before the loss.
After I explained that to someone they asked me why you wouldn’t want to lose every event and then win the most important event when the time came, so that along the way you can increase the trajectory of your confidence. The problem lies in your thinking. Just like how exhausting it is to keep your confidence and physical conditioning peaked for extended periods of time it is equally hard and mentally draining to restructure your belief in your self to over come a loss. You can’t do it time and time again, you need a win at some point to assure yourself that you worked this hard for something.
I have a high tolerance for losing. That doesn’t mean I am a good loser. Anyone who has played golf with me can attest to that. In Taekwon – Do I instantly start thinking about my next plan of action. I remember losing and on my way to the other side of the ring to shake the other coaches hand immediately after a match I was thinking about being in the gym and what I would do to correct my performance.
The thing about confidence is that it is always fleeting. We build it up but it continually wants to come down. Don’t let confidence appearing people fool you. If someones confidence is just bursting out of the their body, in my experience, they are over compensating for a lack of confidence or they are riding on false confidence. False confidence is believing in skills that you don’t posses and belief in ability you don’t have.
As your sills increase and your challenges become more familiar it takes more and more for you to get the same increase in confidence. What do we do to continually increase our confidence the same amount or the maximum amount? Evaluate your skills versus your challenges before, after and during event and make sure your goals are leading you to a place where you are testing and pushing yourself each time.
The Art Of Adaptation: Confidence is continually fleeting. Monitoring your mentality and adjusting your game plan is the best way to make sure you are on track to increase performance and to win events.
How I monitor my mentality:
You may also like:
Performance Plateau: How To Increase Performance In Anything
The Art Of Adaptation: Make sure you balance skills and challenges regularly.
I just finished reading a book called Flow In Sports. Its authors are Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Yes, this is spelled correctly). Mr. C’s theory about Flow or what some athletes/writers/business people/what ever you are, call being in the zone. It is that mind-set where optimal performance takes place. Flow can mean something different to everyone and has nine fundamental dimensions or components which best describe the mind-set in this state. They are:
For more detail on flow I suggest you read up on Mr. C’s theory.
They speak to a number of keys to optimal performance but to be honest unless you’re a sports fanatic I wouldn’t recommend it. Half way through it gets quite repetitive. So I’ll help you skip all that. The main two take aways from the book are goal setting (refer to my earlier post about goals titled Performance Plateau if you need help with that) and the Challenge/Skills (CS) Balance.
Now, to boil this down to what I’m sure Mr. C would consider an insultingly simple version of his theory. We can only achieve Flow or that mind set which allows for optimal performance (in any task) if we have the proper balance of challenges and skills.
As an example I will use my sport, Taekwon – Do. When I was a green belt obviously my skills were not as good as they are now that I am a fourth degree black belt. An appropriate challenge for me at that time would have been something as simple as a regular class. I probably would have experienced some level of anxiety at the thought of a provincial tournament and definitely if I had participated in one. In order for me to enter Flow I would have just needed something as simple as a hard class to get me there or if I had improved my skills a little I could deal with the anxiety of a provincial competition to get there.
Now that my skills are much higher I cannot enter flow with the same level of challenges. If I were to continue to develop my skills but never go above the provincial competition environment I would probably experience relaxation and eventually boredom. It did happen to me at one point. That is when you make a decision. You either decide to quit and look for some brand new challenge in places where you have few skills or you progress. In my case, the next level would be the National and World level competitions. I decided on the latter.
Once I began to compete nationally and in some international competitions that uncomfortable feeling came back. I stepped out of my comfort zone. The place where skills and challenges are equal and you are forced to improve. You must improve because although it is good to reach a place where you feel uncomfortable, this indicates you are where you need to be to learn, this isn’t natural for us. We as people want to ease that feeling of borderline anxiety.
This theory does not just apply to sport, it can be applied to any situation that presents a challenge and that also requires a skill to over come and achieve a goal.
Knowing this theory and applying this concept has been a huge factor in any progress I have made as a student, an athlete, a professional and a person.
Look at a particular situation in your life. Ask yourself how do I feel when I perform (Insert Task)? The answer to the problem is to always adjust the level of skills and challenges in that situation so that you are in a place which allows you to reach flow.
Recently back from the Eastern Canadian Championships for my sport has made me come to think about and analyze my performance. Not always do I end up with two gold medals but this time I did. Is there really anything to analyze from this performance. Absolutely.
Winning is a goal of mine but it isn’t the only goal. I think… what happens if I do win? What happens if I lose? If you are 100 per cent caught up on the outcome you may over analyze loses or miss the opportunity to learn how to improve upon a win thinking you did enough.
If you are breaking down your process and outcome after a win then you are on the right track. This post is for those people who did not compete as planned.
In the book Flow In Sports by Jackson & Csikszentmihalyi it says,
Some individuals learn to equate failure at a skill or activity with their own failure as a competent people. This is particularly evident in sport, where athletes are continually being evaluated on performance outcomes. When this becomes the main, or even only, source of feedback an athlete receives, he can come to view himself as “athlete” rather than as a person who take part in athletics. The consequences of failing in athletics then take on greater proportions, being intimately tied up with a sense of self-worth as a person.
This is exactly the case in my sport and indeed in many sports. It is one of the greatest challenges, overcoming a negative performance outcome. By overcome I don’t mean coming out unscathed because you shouldn’t. You should learn from each experience.
I know from experience though that it is hard to hold all of those thoughts inside. It is also very unproductive if you have no one to give you feedback on your performance and thoughts about it.
There is an answer and this is the Art Of Adaptation:
You must change your primary focus from achieving certain outcomes to creating opportunities for optimal performance. Basically, rather than focusing on the win you must be focused on doing your best. In short if you do your best that day that is all you can do.
Selecting goals and basing your performance against your earlier performance is one way to do this and it is much more realistic. This will also produce an improvement in your level of skill and have a better impact of your confidence.
To all those people coming back from the competition who understand. I feel yea!
Tell me about a recent performance in anything, your thought process before, during and after. What did you conclude? How do you focus on creating optimal performance and not focusing on outcomes? How do you stay in the moment?
Tenacious marketer trying to make a difference while pursuing mental and physical enlightenment. Obsessed with self-improvement.
Just The Posts
