When we play with confidence, we play with trust in ourselves to go out there and perform well. This leads to free play. It leads to natural play. And this is where you’ll find yourself performing well during games—just like you do during practice.
However, when there is a lack of confidence, this is where we find ourselves underperforming.
These habits are also known as mental blocks or mental challenges that athletes experience that work against confidence.
Habit #1: Negative Self-Talk
When you think negatively about yourself or you think negatively about the environment you’re in—your teammates, your coaches, or anyone else—that will lead to lower levels of confidence.
There are two types of self-talk that we want to examine when it comes to low confidence: direct self-talk and indirect self-talk.
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Direct self-talk refers to thoughts directly about yourself. These are the “I” statements: I am a bad player. I suck today. I just can’t do this.
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Indirect self-talk is self-talk about the environment. This can equally hurt your confidence: The other team is really good. I never play well at this field. These refs suck.
These kinds of statements can lower your confidence as the game starts because the way we think going into games has a direct impact on our emotional state.
Confidence is ultimately a belief you have in yourself to play well. Beliefs are formed through our thinking. And so if you have negative self-talk over an extended period of time, this will lead to a lack of belief in yourself—because it builds the belief that you’re just not good enough.
Habit #2: Overfocusing on Mistakes
This can occur during games, after games, or even during practices.
When we give too much attention to mistakes, even if we’re doing so thinking that we want to fix them, if we’re not careful, this will lower our confidence.
If every single day—whether it’s a practice or a game—you’re thinking about the mistakes you made, analyzing them, and worse, criticizing yourself because of them, this builds the belief that you’re not good enough.
And when you go into a game with the belief that you’re not good enough, you won’t have much confidence.
It is helpful and valuable to think about mistakes in order to improve. But you must be careful. You don’t want to criticize yourself, beat yourself up, or get down on yourself.
Instead, take a more objective approach: “Okay, I made that mistake. What do I learn from that? How do I work on that?” Then move on.
Focusing too much on mistakes and dwelling on them is where we really see confidence drop.
Habit #3: Comparing Yourself to Others
This is such a common one that I see within my one-on-one coaching.
So many athletes compare themselves to others. And it’s completely natural—we all do it. But comparing yourself to others is even easier in a competitive environment, especially when you’re fighting for a starting role.
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Example 1: A quarterback I’m working with has been struggling to fight for the starting position. It’s natural for him to compare himself to the other quarterback.
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Example 2: A college soccer player I’m working with isn’t the starter. She goes into games comparing herself to the other player. When she does that, her confidence drops. Naturally, she thinks, “I can’t play as good as she plays. I can’t do all those moves she’s doing.” So she’s starting from a point of not feeling good enough—simply because of comparison.
If you already struggle with confidence, when you compare yourself to others, you’re not likely to think, “I’m as good as that person.” More likely, you’ll think, “I’m not as good. I can’t do what they can do.”
And those thoughts do nothing but lower your confidence.
Habit #4: Needing to Play Perfectly to Feel Confident
An example of this comes from a conversation I had yesterday with an athlete. She told me she wanted to feel confident, feel good, and have fun this season.
When I asked her how she could do that, her answer was: playing well.
That’s the easiest and most normal answer to give: If I see myself play well, I’ll have confidence. If everything goes right, I’ll enjoy myself.
But here’s the paradox: we need confidence in order to play well, yet we think we’ll get confidence only by playing well.
If we rely too much on results—or on perfect performances—to have confidence, we’ll be waiting forever. And in the meantime, we won’t have the confidence needed to even perform decently.
Instead of basing confidence on perfect play, build it on small successes. These can come from practice or games.
Because if you feel you need to play perfectly to be confident, you’ll not only be waiting forever (since perfection never comes), but you’ll also place tremendous pressure on yourself. That pressure usually leads to underperforming.
Habit #5: Playing Scared
There are many reasons athletes play scared. But most of the time, it comes from the belief that the consequence of a mistake or a bad game is something we desperately want to avoid.
So we end up holding ourselves back.
Playing scared is the opposite of playing with confidence.
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Confidence means trusting yourself, playing freely, taking risks, and going all out.
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Fear means holding back, hesitating, and playing timidly.
If you’re going into a game scared of making mistakes, lowering your stats, or whatever the case may be, you must work on letting go of this fear. Otherwise, it will overshadow any trust and confidence you’ve built.
How to Work Past These Habits
Now, how can you work past these bad habits that are lowering your confidence?
There are many different ways. One is a video I’ve made on building confidence as an athlete.
Another way to work on developing confidence is through one-on-one coaching. If you’re interested in learning more about my mental coaching program, click here to schedule a free introductory coaching call.
I also have two online courses depending on your age:
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The Confident Competitor Academy – great for older athletes, focused on building confidence and overcoming anxiety and fear.
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The Mentally Tough Kid – for youth athletes, designed to build confidence along with other key mental skills.
The main point is this: to build confidence, we must first examine the habits that are currently lowering it, while at the same time using mental skills and preparation to strengthen it.
The more confidence you build, the more consistently you’ll play—and the more fun you’ll have on the field or court.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
