Building Self Confidence In Sport

BUILDING SELF CONFIDENCE

While you need to work on your weaknesses, focus more on what you’ve got and capitalize on your strengths. Once you put more energy into your positive traits, your confidence will start to shine through.

Confidence is the most important mental factor in sports. Confidence is not inborn, it is a skill that can be learned through focus, effort and repetition. There is no quick fix or a 5-minute solution. Becoming confident is readily achievable, just that you should have the focus and determination to carry things through. Take stock of where you are, think about where you want to go, get yourself in the mindset and commit yourself to starting and staying with it. Setting and achieving goals is a key part of this and real confidence comes out of this. We alone are responsible for building our self-confidence. We must see ourselves as worthy and capable of achieving anything we choose to achieve.

There are athletes with extremes – some with a low confidence and some over confident. Getting the right balance is most important to becoming a person with self-confidence and be successful.

Low self-confidence can be self-destructive, and it often manifests itself as negativity. Athletes are often their own enemies. They may have the ability but if they don’t believe in that ability they will not perform to that ability.
The question to be asked is “Which side are you on? Are you against yourself?”

OVER CONFIDENCE

Over confidence is an excess of confidence (as in one’s ability), confidence that is not justified. It is a condition of over approximating one’s capacity to perform or under approximating the capacity of an opponent to perform. It is an unsupported belief or unrealistically good presumption that a favoured result will arise.
Over confident athletes take too many risks, are over optimistic and don’t try hard enough to truly succeed.

SELF CONFIDENCE

Self-confidence is a deep, lasting, and strong belief in one’s ability that enables one to become a professional badminton player . With self-confidence, you can stay confident even when you’re not performing well. It keeps you positive, motivated, intense, focused, and emotionally in control when you need to be. You aren’t negative and uncertain in difficult competitions and you’re not overconfident in easy competitions. Self-confidence also encourages you to seek out pressure situations and to view difficult conditions and tough opponents as challenges to pursue and enables you to perform at your highest level consistently.

It is about trusting your own judgement and feeling comfortable with your abilities and powers. It is the means to realise your full potential and be the person you want to be.
Self Confidence is the belief that if you do the right things you will be successful. You should not expect success – this can lead to arrogance and over confidence. You can be too focussed on winning rather than performing at your best. The more prepared you are, the more confident you’ll feel about your expertise and competency especially during badminton tournaments. Preparation will help you avoid getting tripped up by unexpected happenings.
Positive self-talk gets you feeling relaxed, confident and energises you before a competition. You begin an upward spiral of high confidence and performance in which positive thinking leads to better and better performance. Set your mind to the can-do side of any situation, avoiding the negative self-talk that can make you feel less confident.

Your body language can instantly demonstrate self-assuredness, or it can scream insecurity. Inaction breeds doubt and fear, while action breeds confidence and courage. As an exercise, jot down and act the part you aspire to reach.
Remember the five P’s: Prior planning prevents poor performance. Remember the classic phrase –“Where there is a will there is a way”. 

While you need to work on your weaknesses, focus more on what you’ve got and capitalize on your strengths. Once you put more energy into your positive traits, your confidence will start to shine through.
The key to building self-confidence is to FACE the underlying fear. And practice doing that, until you MASTER the fear.

In a nutshell, to develop Self-confidence, you will have to:-

> Believe that experiencing challenges is a necessary part of becoming the best athlete you can be.
> Be well-prepared to meet the challenges.
> Stay positive and motivated in the face of the difficult situations.
> Focus on what you need to do to overcome the challenges.
> Accept that you may experience failure when faced with new challenges.
> Be assertive, but not aggressive,
> Most importantly, never, ever give up! Believe in yourself.
As we slowly gain belief in ourselves, it is only a matter of time before the lack of self-confidence becomes a matter of past.