The Mystery Behind Gaining Self-Confidence

I wanted to give you some information that you can use about what confidence and self-confidence is and how you can achieve it. It is a skill to have like anything else, which means that it is something you learn to be, do and have. First let me explain how self-confidence is defined.

“SELF-CONFIDENCE is nothing more than belief in one’s ability to decide in one’s decisions” L Ron Hubbard HBFPC 1951

Let’s take a look at what that means. There can be so many complexities that can surround “having confidence” and people can make it seem like it’s an impossibility to achieve or that only a few select people can actually have confidence or self-confidence. But it is nothing more than making a decision and sticking with it. It does not have to be the right decision, it only has to be your decision. Your ability in making your own decision and sticking with it is confidence.

See what can happen is this, when people start punishing people for being incorrect, making a mistake or making the wrong decision, the person who was punished now does not want to make decisions in fear of being punished. They can then become indecisive and always be in a maybe because they fear being wrong and they fear being punished.

This is why I do not punish on the court mistakes because I do not want to take away somebody’s willingness to make their own decisions or diminish their confidence to make decisions. A player can lose their confidence by continually being told they were wrong, being punished for mistakes or wrong decisions. I know where this has happened to me I lost confidence in that area. I am sure you can think of times this has happened to you (not just on the court but in life) and see where you lost self-confidence. Even with that you decided you made a bad decision and the irony is that is the one decision that you followed through on. “I make bad decisions”, “I shouldn’t be the one to decide”, “I have no confidence” all are saying the same thing.

But one of the tricky things about all of this is that to some degree you had to agree with those who invalidated or punished you that you made a bad decision or that deciding was bad. See at the end of it all, no matter how easy or hard it is we are always in control of ourselves, how we act, react, believe, what we agree to, or communicate about. We are always cause over these things for ourselves and we choose who we let influence us either positively or negatively.

Ok, so now how do we get confidence or how do we become more confident? Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog sereis.

Confidence over Critics.

Coach Julz