If you dream of being successful in sport, do you believe it’s possible to be sure of achieving that success? Is it ever possible to be certain of anything in a sports career? One thing that is for certain is that achieving your dream only becomes possible when you believe that it is possible. To be successful, in sport or in any area of life, you must have an unshakeable inner belief that you can be successful. Without that inner belief, the only thing you can be certain of is that your dreams will remain just that, dreams!

Successful sportspeople are sure of themselves; they have self-belief. They know who they are, they know what they’re capable of, and they believe in themselves as that person. Their inner belief is effectively an inner power to become the master of their own destiny and it’s a power we all have within us. You already have the power within you to realise your dreams in sport and to generate your own success, but it’s possible that you just haven’t recognised it yet. Are you sure of who you are?

We are all who we believe ourselves to be, so who do you believe you are? Do you believe yourself to be capable of achieving sports success or are you carrying the hopes, dreams and beliefs of someone else? Successful sportspeople are passionate about their sport and it’s that passion that fuels their success. There may be no absolute certainties in sport but to achieve your dreams and ambitions, you must be sure that they are your dreams. To find your success, find your passion.

Related articles

• Positive Thinking -Positive Reflection-Positive Actions (sportspsychology2.com)
• Self – Confidence and Are Your Doubts Real? (zonedinperformance.com)
• The 12 Laws of Performance – Inspired Success (the12lawsofperformance.co)

Cover of The Greatest

Muhammad Ali is not only a champion boxer, he’s also a champion example of the power of positive thinking. Who can forget his famous “I am the greatest” chant? Certainly not those who faced him in the ring!  In sport, as in all areas of life, the way you see yourself inwardly influences the way you are seen by others outwardly and your inner thoughts about yourself have a direct impact on your outer world realities. Ali thought of himself as a champion and therefore he became a champion.

It’s a Universal Law that the way you think about your world affects your actual world. The way you see things in your mind becomes the way things actually are but unfortunately the same rule applies irrespective of how rational or irrational your thinking is. So, if you’re standing on a race start-line thinking, “I’m a real contender in this line up,” you’re going to put in a strong performance, but, if you’re standing there thinking, “I’m not in the same league as these guys,” you’ve lost the race already! Your physical abilities have not changed, only your thinking about your abilities. Without  positive thinking, it’s impossible to generate positive outcomes.

In effect, what you think about, you bring about; your thoughts about yourself and your abilities are self-fulfilling prophecies. The happenings in your outer world, or your reality, are simply a reflection of the happenings in your inner world, or your mind. If your mind is full of negative thoughts, the end result is that your reality will be full of negative happenings. However, with positive thinking, the end result is a positive reality. The bottom line is, if you want to be “the greatest,” you have to think of yourself and believe in yourself as the greatest.

Related articles

• The 12 Laws of Performance – Positive Attraction (donmacnaughton.org)
• Self – Confidence and Are Your Doubts Real? (zonedinperformance.com)
• “Coaching yourself through changing fortunes like a Pro” (the12lawsofperformance.co)

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“Just do it”

- Nike

Do you make highly detailed training plans? If you’re serious about sport, there’s every chance that your entire year is organised around a carefully crafted training plan designed to help you reach peak fitness for the big events on your competition calendar. In fact, plans are essential in sport. Without a training plan, it’s unlikely that your true potential would ever be realised, but, it’s not just having a detailed plan that leads to sporting success, it’s taking action on that plan.

A training plan provides focus, direction, and motivation but planning your training is not the same as actually doing that training! It’s important to create a plan that leads you from where you are now to where you want to be but you can’t get there without taking action. Successful athletes turn their dreams and ambitions into their realities by taking planned action. They formulate a step-by-step and goal-by-goal plan and then they take those steps and achieve those goals.

All good sports players have the potential to become great sports players and to realise their sporting dreams but it takes an action plan and planned action. Are you planning or are you doing? To realise your dreams, you need to do both, but that’s the key right there, it’s all about doing. A training plan is an action plan; take time to plan and then take action on those plans. It’s planned action that keeps you on track to actually achieving what you plan to achieve!

If you have self-confidence, you know who you are and you know what you’re capable of achieving. You know because you have challenged yourself and you have successfully met those challenges. In sport, challenges take the form of training goals and targets that continue to develop your skills and drive you forwards in pursuit of excellence. The skills that get you to the top of your game are both physical and mental and it takes dedicated practice to master them.

If you lack self-confidence, the biggest challenge you face in training and in competition is silencing the negative voice of self-doubt that creeps to the forefront of your mind when the pressure is on. The voice of doubt will tell you, “You’re not ready for this; you‘re not prepared; you‘ll fail if you attempt this.” Without inner confidence, you begin to believe what that negative voice is telling you and the more you hear it, the more you believe it. To be able to build your confidence, you must learn how to silence that voice by replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts. The first step is to question your doubts. You don’t have to blindly accept what the negative voice of self-doubt is telling you. Ask why; why does it believe you’re not ready and why will you fail? Are any of the statements you’re creating in your head based on anything that holds any water in reality?

Self-confidence grows as you learn to identify what’s real and what’s imagined and each time you successfully challenge your doubts, your inner confidence is given another boost, allowing you to keep moving forwards in pursuit of your true potential. When you silence the negative voice of doubt, the positive voice of confidence within you can finally be heard.

© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved

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If you’re a team sports player, would you describe yourself as a confident team player? As a player, you no doubt have confidence in your sporting abilities but do you have confidence in yourself? Are you a player with self confidence?
When you have self-confidence, you are someone who is comfortable in their own skin: you know who you are and you know what you stand for, not just in sport but in your life in general. In team sports, it’s vital that team spirit develops and that players adopt an ‘all for one’ attitude but to be successful as a team, each player must also have self-belief and have confidence in themselves in their role within the team.

A team is only ever as strong as its weakest link and if a player lacks self-confidence, they will also lack confidence in their role within the team. A strong team is made up of individual players who all believe in themselves and their abilities but they also believe that they are stronger because they are playing as a team, and not as individuals. Unfortunately, when you lack self-confidence, your thoughts and actions are greatly influenced by the people around you and by those you believe to be more confident than you. This means that in team sports, the thoughts and actions of less confident players are potentially being led by those of more confident players.

To be successful, it’s essential that each player develops self-confidence. Each player must believe in themselves and in their abilities so that the thoughts and actions of others can never have a negative effect on their performance. Self-confidence can be described as a positive mix of self-efficacy and self-esteem, and the good news is that it’s a learned mental skill, therefore it can acquired by everyone.

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Prolific and successful writer Hermann Hesse once said, “Faith and doubt go hand-in-hand, they are complementaries. One who never doubts will never truly believe.” Hesse may not have been a champion athlete but his story of success despite experiencing doubt is as relevant to anyone experience a lack of confidence in the sports world as it is in the world of literature.

It seems almost unimaginable that someone as successful as Hesse, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, could ever have experienced self-doubt. However, his belief that ‘faith and doubt go hand-in-hand’ demonstrates that he did know what it felt like to doubt himself and because of that very experience, he also knew what it felt like to have faith in himself and to believe in himself.

What we can all learn, athletes included, from Hesse’s story of success is that self-doubt does not need to hold you back from achieving your sporting dreams and ambitions. In fact, by learning how to get doubt to hold hands with faith, you can effectively use self-doubt to generate self-confidence.

All athletes, at every level of competition, face moments of doubt in their competitive careers. You might imagine that the key to sporting success is to reach a point where you are beyond doubt but success is not the result of never doubting yourself, it’s the result of never letting your doubts go unquestioned. For example, if you’re doubting your readiness to compete at a major event, you must question why you feel that way. You must identify what your ‘fears’ are and then face them by challenging how real they actually are. Answering those questions and identifying what is real and what is merely your perception of reality allows your self-confidence to grow.

© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved

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Related articles

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…in fact, are you the athlete you think you are? The winner on competition day is not the athlete with a coach who believes in them as a winner, or the athlete with the support of a noisy crowd of believers, but the athlete who believes in themselves as a winner: the athlete with self-confidence.

If you don’t believe that you’re the athlete your coach believes you to be or your supporters believe you to be, why not? If they have faith in you, why do you lack that faith in yourself?

When you have self-confidence, you have faith in who you are and what you’re capable of but when you lack confidence, you effectively become the only thing standing in the way of your own progress.

The athlete you believe yourself to be and the athlete you become are inextricably linked. The bottom line is that until you are able to think of yourself as a winner and believe in yourself as a winner, you will not be a winner.

“It’s not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not”

- Author Unknown

Winners believe in themselves; they have self-belief and they have confidence in who they are and what they’re capable of achieving, not only today, but also what they’re capable of achieving tomorrow.

Winners know that one performance – win or lose – can’t define them. It’s not their circumstances on any one day that defines who they are, it’s who they believe themselves to be that defines them.

Winning athletes know that circumstances can be changed and it’s confidence and self-belief that allows them to generate those changes.

© Copyright Don MacNauhgton 20011, All Rights Reserved

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Remember the story of the ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’? The Emperor was conned into believing he was wearing a suit of clothes that only intelligent people could see. He couldn’t see it, but he didn’t want his apparent lack of intelligence to be revealed so he went along with the charade. So, who was conning who? The tailors were con men without question but by going along with it, did the Emperor effectively con himself? Skilled con men, and women, trick the confidence of their ‘victims’ by getting them to believe in what they say – even when what they say is total nonsense! With that in mind, is it possible that the little nagging voice of self-doubt that you hear in your head when you lack confidence in yourself might in fact be convincing you to believe in something that really isn’t the case?

What you repeatedly tell yourself is what you begin to believe. When you lack self-confidence, you repeatedly tell yourself what you can’t do, but here’s the thing, can you really not do those things or do you just believe that you can’t do them. Let’s say you’re in training for a major event. Your coach tells you that you’re on track to achieving a personal best performance. His belief that you’re in the form of your life is based on what your results in training are telling him but as the day of the big event gets closer, a nagging voice in your head begins to tell you that you’re not ready and it begins to get louder. Who are you going to believe, your coach or the voice in your head? Which voice is telling the truth? The answer to that question is going to depend on your level of confidence.

Everyone experiences moments of doubt when the pressure is on. The negative voice in your head is the voice of self-doubt. When you’re under pressure, the volume of that voice may get racked up a notch or two but you don’t have to believe what it’s telling you. What if that voice began to tell you that you were wearing training shoes that only intelligent people can see – would you have the confidence to question that or would you just believe it?

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One of the most common hurdles facing coaches of competitive athletes is competition nerves. Why is it that some athletes appear to rise to an occasion yet others appear to fall apart? Excessive nerves can be the result of a lack of confidence but this is often over-looked when the athlete in question seems to be completely confident in training.

Sports psychology 2 techniques can help coaches to spot the symptoms and develop effective coping strategies to make under-achieving in competition a thing of the past.

What is confidence?

• One dictionary definition is: the belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something.
• The sports psychology 2 definition is: confidence is a state of mind, it’s all about how you are thinking and what you are focusing on.

“You need to play with supreme confidence or else you’ll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit” – Joe Paterno (American football coach)

If an athlete has confidence in their abilities, self-belief, they’ll perform confidently – even when the pressure is on. So how do you build that confidence?

A lack of confidence generally stems from a fear of some sort. In competitive sport, a lack of self-belief can simply be a fear of the unknown. As an athlete, you may find yourself standing on the start-line of an important race when the ‘what ifs’ strike: “What if I can’t do this; what if I‘m not ready?” or “What if I get left miles behind and look like an idiot?”

This sort of self-doubt will have a negative impact on performance so as a coach, it becomes an important part of your role to limit the potential for ‘what ifs’ to enter an athlete’s mind. Sports psychology 2 can introduce coaches to mental training tools that equip them with the skills to help athletes banish the ‘what ifs’ by developing greater self-confidence.

The Sports Psychology 2 Model of Confidence

• Skill Set

Based on the pillars of performance, developing equal strength in the four key skill areas – technical, tactical, physical, psychological – will give athletes a solid structure on which to build self-confidence.

Negative ‘what ifs’ become positive ‘what I haves’ giving athletes belief in their abilities.

• Values or Philosophy

A coach with strong values and a clear coaching philosophy will inspire confidence in his athletes. Knowing what you believe and knowing what it is you’re all about makes it much harder for the ‘what ifs’ to interrupt your thoughts.

• Capabilities

Identifying where strengths and weaknesses lie allows you to build on strengths and develop weaknesses to match those strengths. Experiencing progress through training and practice builds confidence in the knowledge that change is always possible. With a growth mindset, there can be no limit to your capabilities.

With the help of sports psychology 2 techniques, coaches can learn to identify the source of each athlete’s ‘fear’ and turn unknowns into familiars. Positive experiences in training will boost confidence in competition. After all, an athlete is unlikely to under-achieve through fear of the familiar!

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