Character > Confidence

What do I do when I'm not sure if I can do it?

In the recent Coach Your Brains Out with John O’Sullivan as the guest, they talk about confidence. To be quite honest with you, oh SmarterVolley reader, confidence is a trigger word for me. There’s few things I think are more overrated then confidence. And in annoying irony, there’s few things that youth players, and their parents, want more than to be confident.

“Hey my kid just doesn’t seem confident out there.”

“How can I get my kid to be more confident?”

“Last year on JV I was confident, but this year on Varsity, I’m not so confident. How do I get my confidence back?”

Confidence you ephemeral being, how do I capture you and hold you tightly so I never lose you?

The good thing about this podcast is that they don’t really talk about developing confidence. They touch on the topic briefly, but O’Sullivan essentially says something to the effect of, “confidence follows competence, so develop your competence (in skills/leadership/etc) and confidence will follow.”

Good advice, and I like it. Listen to the whole podcast; it’s good. And in an attempt to add to the discussion, I’ll share what I’ve said to quite a few players over the years in respect to confidence.

Confidence is overrated. Character is what matters.

The immature athlete (and often, parent of immature athlete) fixate on confidence because it feels good to be confident. And confidence is for sure correlated with success. But, as O’Sullivan notes, you feel confident when faced with a task that you have the competence for. If you studied your vocab words and were consistently getting them right when you quizzed yourself at home, you’ll be pretty confident when it comes time for the test. If you don’t know your vocab, you won’t be confident.

If you’re confident in the face of a task that you don’t have the skills to complete, congrats, you’re a psychopath.

Also, the immature athlete/parent tends to think that confidence is a thing that you get and keep. And if you could just get that elusive confidence, you’d be good. And that once you have that confidence, you’ll play good. And if you don’t have confidence, you can’t play good.

But we know this isn’t the truth. We know that confident athletes have bad games all the time. And great performances are put up by athletes who go into games not confident at all. The confidence of any individual athlete goes up and down. And even advanced athletes go through more and less confident times.

So again: Confidence is overrated. Character is what matters.

It’s pretty self-evident to anybody with life experience that constantly examining your own internal feelings is not the way to peak performance. In fact, if you want to screw yourself up, keep a continually-running meta-analysis going at all times. Try getting into Flow State that way.

(Side note: doesn’t it seem like there’s an Internal/External Focus thing going on there as well? Think about how you want to feel and you don’t feel good. Think about the effects of your actions and you start feeling better.)

I say this to players quite often:

Guess what? Right now there are players at all levels: high school, college, even professional who are feeling not confident. And some of them will have great matches. Right now there are people going to work at a job they don’t feel super-confident at, who will nonetheless do well at their job today. There are new parents who feel like they have no idea what to do with this little crying baby who will figure out a way to love and care for that baby.

This is part of being human. People do this all the time. Not everybody, mind you. Some people let their own worries and internal introspection overwhelm them and they sink under the pressure. But a big part of life is being good when you’re not at your best. Not even great, but at least good.

And that’s where character comes into play.

Do the right thing.

Don’t worry about whether you’re feeling confident or not. Do the right thing.

Don’t worry about what other people will think about your play. Do the right thing.

Don’t worry about where you stand relative to everybody else. Do the right thing.

Just… do the right thing.

And the good thing is, you usually know the right thing to do. Or at least, you know the wrong thing to do, so just try something else. Don’t worry about confidence, worry about your character. After all, in the great what-if-you-overheard-somebody-talking-about-you-test, would you rather hear:

“Oh yeah, her? She’s really confident.”
or
”Oh yeah, her? She’s just a good person.”

I know which one I’d choose.