When you’re not playing with confidence during games, this leads to hesitation and timid play. It is one of the main causes of underperforming in sports.
As an athlete, you must have trust in yourself and your skills. You need to have a high level of belief that you can play well. That is the only way to let go and play freely.
In this article, you will learn why you’re not playing with confidence and two tips you can apply to build trust in yourself during games.
Why You’re Not Playing With Confidence
Confidence is all about having trust and belief that you can play well. When this trust is gone or the belief is overshadowed, you will be playing with less confidence. Playing with less confidence leads to poor performances.
Here is a list of the main causes of low confidence in sports:
- Being afraid to fail
- Self-doubt
- Negative self-talk
- Worrying about the outcome
- Bad games or practices
Being afraid to fail is a major cause of low confidence. The fear of failure overshadows your belief and results in you thinking a lot about negative outcomes.
The more you think about negative outcomes, the more you will worry about them, leading to sports anxiety and a further drop in your confidence.
Negative self-talk is another cause of low confidence. Self-talk involves how you think and talk to yourself. When your thoughts turn negative, doubt will form.
Doubt that eats away at any trust you have.
Bad games and bad practices are triggers for fear, negative self-talk, and doubt. When players have poor performances, the poor performances stick with them and lead them to question their abilities.
This results in a negative cycle of more worry, doubt, and fear, leading to worse and worse games. Which is why working to build your confidence, even after bad games, is critical to your success as an athlete.
Two Tips to Apply if You’re Not Confident During Games
Confidence is never something you should hope for. It is something you should work for. Action needs to be taken to increase trust and belief in yourself and your skills.
Action that is often overlooked.
As a mental performance coach, I encourage the athletes I work with to view mental training in a similar way to physical training. This means taking consistent action to build mental skills.
Self-confidence is one of the most important mental skills for you to build. And one, just like all the rest, that requires action.
There are two tips I have for you that will help you take the correct action to build confidence: train confident thinking and use visualization to build the memory of success.
Training Confident Thinking
When you are not playing with confidence, your thinking will be negative and full of doubt. To regain your confidence, changing your thinking is the first step.
The way we think equals the way we feel. When we think positively, we feel good. When we think negatively, we feel bad.
In the same way, when we doubt ourselves and think, “I have been playing terribly lately,” or, “I suck and I can’t score,” we will be less confident.
Now, you very well may be playing badly. You may have had a string of poor performances and you just can’t seem to find any success. But that doesn’t mean you have to think negatively about yourself.
As an athlete, you must be able to think greater than your circumstances. Do not allow your thoughts to mirror what has happened and what is happening. Otherwise your confidence will be out of your control.
To take back control of your confidence, you must reclaim control of your thinking. This means thinking in a way that will build confidence instead of kill it.
A great way to do so if you are not playing with confidence right now is by using a self-talk routine.
A self-talk routine builds more confident and positive thought patterns.
What you can do is make a list of ten or so confident statements, such as…
- I am confident in my skills
- I believe in myself
- I am a great athlete
- I am improving every day
- I am a great shooter
- I am a great passer
Those types of present-tense statements focused on your sport and your skills.
Then, read the list out loud a few times a day. This repetition is what trains more confident thinking.
A self-talk routine won’t do much overnight, but if you stay consistent, it will have a tremendous impact on your confidence.
Visualization to Build the Memory of Success
Nothing builds confidence faster than seeing yourself succeed. Unfortunately, if you are not playing with confidence right now, it’s likely your recent games haven’t gone so well.
If that’s the case, you must use visualization to give yourself the memory of success, since you cannot rely on your recent performances.
Visualization is a powerful tool for anyone to use. As an athlete, it is a great way to mentally rehearse your skills and, most importantly, see yourself play well if you haven’t been playing well recently.
What you can do is spend time each day visualizing yourself playing well. It does not need to be complicated. Simply close your eyes, take some deep breaths to relax, and then imagine yourself performing.
Go into different scenarios, feel good about how you play, and most importantly…have fun with it!
Visualization is not meant to add stress. It is meant to be a way for you to fill your mind with images and scenes of you succeeding.
Scenes that will help add to the belief that you can go out there and play well in your next game.
Mental Coaching to Build Confidence
The two exercises I outlined above are a great way for you to begin rebuilding your confidence if you aren’t playing with confidence during games.
But if you’re interested in a more in-depth approach, I offer a 12-week one-on-one mental coaching program that will help you gain confidence in yourself and build the mental skills you need to take your game to the next level.
If you’re interested in one-on-one coaching, click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call, or fill out the form below for more information.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
