The psychology of “ultra-confidence” in business and sports
Performance psychology reveals the mental techniques elite athletes use to build and maintain their confidence.
By Kevin Dickinson
Someone has probably told you that confidence is key. Key to what exactly? Whatever you aim to accomplish, it seems. Want to play music in front of an audience? You need confidence in your skills. Want to be a better writer or public speaker? Different skill sets but confidence is still required. What about starting a business, excelling in a leadership role, or being a better networker? Confidence, confidence, and — you guessed it — confidence.
But if there’s one pursuit where confidence’s benefits are best on display, it has to be sports. Professional athletes and coaches radiate self-assurance, making the link between their successes and confidence a common talking point in sports media.
For instance, golf legend Jack Nicklaus is reported to have said: “Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.”
Nine-time Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis held a similar view: “If you don’t have confidence, you will always find a way to not win.”
And the trophy for most self-confidence squeezed into a single sentence goes to Brain Clough, one of British football’s more successful team managers: “Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.”
As encouraging as these quotes are, they also inspire a chicken-and-egg question: Does confidence propel great athletes and coaches to success, or did success later imbue them with an exceptional degree of confidence — an attribute we might call “ultra-confidence”?
As with most things in life, the answer is nuanced, but the research overall suggests confidence to be an important psychological characteristic underpinning success. That may sound bleak to the naturally self-doubting, as if success is the inheritance of those born with certitude and self-certainty pre-coded into their genes. But the research reveals a silver lining: Athletes can build their confidence using certain psychological techniques, and those techniques can be employed in pursuits on and off the pitch.
Finding your confidence
To better understand the relationship between confidence and success, performance psychologists first needed to determine where athletes gain confidence from and how it affects their performance.
(It’s worth noting here that psychologists differentiate between self-efficacy and self-confidence. Self-efficacy is the belief that you have the skills to attain a desired result, whereas self-confidence represents a broader trust in your abilities. For simplicity, this article uses confidence as a catchall to describe trust in one’s abilities to attain results.)
In an influential 2007 paper, researchers proposed nine potential sources of athletic self-confidence. One of those was achievements, meaning there is some truth to the idea that successful people are confident because of their successes.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but I wasn’t on that particular job.”
Brian Clough, 1935-2004, football manager
As psychologist Noel Brick and author Scott Douglas write in Strong Minds: “Our previous accomplishments — what we’ve achieved in the past — are our strongest source of self-confidence.” But they quickly add: “Previous accomplishments include experiences of success, but they also include learning, improving, and mastering the skills required to meet a challenge.”
In other words, preparation and past experiences help athletes and coaches strengthen their skills and gain the knowledge necessary to execute when it counts. As long as they make the mental connection between their preparation and later execution, they feel ready to perform.
Preparation helps explain why some people sport ultra confidence before achieving career-making success. Football manager Jose Mourinho famously referred to himself as a “top manager” and “a special one” before winning two League Cups in three years with Chelsea Football Club. Such confidence may come naturally to Mourinho, but it likely stemmed from the preparation, experiences, and successes he earned earlier in his career, as well.
Other important sources of self-confidence include coaching, social support, positive self-talk, and competitive advantage. That said, not all the sources can be mined as deeply by everyone. Two examples: First, the more credible a coach or supporter is, the more valuable their encouragement. Second, women athletes find personal performance significant, while men derive more assurance by proving themselves superior to others — which, as we’ll see, is a troublesome outlook for maintaining confidence.
Whatever the source, once gained, confidence has been shown to improve player effort, strategy selection, and emotional regulation. “Remember, self-confidence isn’t about what we’re actually capable of, but what we think we can do with the skills we possess,” Brick and Douglas write.
Though, as Muhammed Ali may confidently add, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.”
The good kind of confidence game
Nonetheless, confidence isn’t a guaranteed win. A 2006 systematic review examined 41 studies on confidence and performance in the sports literature. All told, the studies accounted for four decades of research, totaling 3,711 athletes from 15 countries who played 24 different sports.
That’s a lot of data, and after analyzing it, the researchers found that confidence aided players by helping them feel more relaxed, focus on important details, and be more committed to the task. These profitable attitudes improved performance, but while the relationship was positive, it was also small. In other words, confidence proved far from the only ingredient in successful play.
The review identified some of these moderating factors. For instance, confidence was less of a performance booster in team sports, likely because fewer outcomes are under one person’s control. It also proved less beneficial for longer-duration sports since confidence can wane amid a poor performance or as the level of competition rises. Any baseball fan will recognize both at play in the sport’s history of eighth-inning comebacks.
Finally, some moderating factors may not have been identified in the data. These include preparation, timing, and luck — which, as with so many other facets in the sporting life, can be everything.
“Self-confidence dominates the sports media and the athletic rhetoric as vital to performance,” the researchers write. “It might be true, as Carl Lewis asserts, that without confidence one cannot win. However, it might simply be that without more confidence than the other team or competitor at a critical moment, one will find a way not to win.” [Emphasis ours.]
Keeping confidence within your control
A quick recap: Confidence can be built and renewed with the right sources. It’s fantastic for regulating the stress and negative emotions that hinder performance, but not the success cure-all sportscasters and inspirational posters may lead us to believe.
So, how does the research suggest we effectively build a strong and healthy confidence in ourselves and our teams, not just on the field of play but also in our daily work-lives?
To start, establish confidence sources firmly within your control, such as preparation. If your confidence blooms only after proving yourself superior to others, then it will wilt just as fast in the face of stiff competition or poor circumstances. This is especially important for endeavors where success can be ambiguous — rather than displayed quantifiably on a stadium-sized scoreboard.
Coaches and team leaders take note as well: If you only dole out encouragement for wins, you set your team up for a confidence hit at the next loss or substandard performance. And as the laws of averages tell us, those will inevitably happen. Best to prepare your people’s confidence accordingly.
Brick and Douglas offer four additional strategies:
1. Record your preparation. As mentioned, it can be difficult to connect preparation with performance, especially if today’s challenges bear little resemblance to past experiences. To help make that connection, practice logging your progress and accomplishments. Individuals can try journaling or keeping records, whereas teams can hold monthly meetings to recognize achievements or review efforts.
“Nothing helps to ease worries and dampen doubts more than evidence of the work you’ve done to prepare for an event,” Brick and Douglas write.
2. Use mental imagery. In the days leading up to a competition, a champion gymnast will visualize her routine, playing out the perfect execution of it in her mind. Similarly, a top-tier public speaker will mentally run through his presentation. He’ll envision his intonation, where to pause for effect, and how to land that opening joke.
Such mental imagery builds confidence in your ability to perform. It also allows you to forecast problems and what-if scenarios and imagine how you’ll solve them — making you feel even more prepared.
3. Learn from others. Learning about our role models provides us with vicarious experiences to draw on. The lessons you take from their stories can reveal the skills and knowledge you need to gain. Discovering how they overcame setbacks is also advantageous.
“Learning from their failures can increase your belief that you can overcome similar obstacles in your life,” Brick and Douglas point out.
4. Find support and be supportive. Encouragement from others bolsters confidence. A coach or mentor can teach you vital lessons through guidance and feedback; meanwhile, a network of friends and family offers ever-on-tap motivation. However, relying on others is a confidence source beyond your control, so be sure to network with truly supportive peers.
Again, these techniques don’t guarantee performance or future success. Instead, as sports psychologist Robin Vealey likes to say, they “put you in the position to win.” Neither is confidence a quick fix. Like physical training, Vealey notes, it takes time and systematic practice to improve. It may be months before your confidence “muscles” begin to grow.
But in the end, whether you’re an athlete, a business manager, or just someone looking to achieve something new, it’s better to be confident that you’ll get it next time than to give up entirely — even if that means it takes longer than a day to build your Rome.
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When facing something we’ve never tried before, we still make a judgment about whether we can do it. There’s no direct experience yet. So that judgment may come from reasoning, existing abilities, education and family environment, or from emotion and long-developed strategic tendencies.
Once we try it, things change. Action produces results. Results provide new information. The original judgment is tested against reality, and our ways of handling the task begin to update.
So maybe the question isn’t whether success comes before confidence or confidence before success. Confidence itself is a judgment that keeps being updated by reality.
The first judgment can exist without direct experience. But it never exists without some basis. After we try, reality becomes part of that basis.