Start thinking more confidently
If you find yourself with a lack of confidence, it might be time to start thinking more confidently.
I know this is a crazy sentence. Why not just will away sadness and pain while we’re at it, and choose to always feel happy instead? Of course it’s not that simple. But what if confidence was different than other emotions? What if it wasn’t an emotion at all? What if we could choose to tailor our thought process to increase our confidence?
This idea doesn’t come from me. It comes from renowned sports psychologist Bob Rotella, PhD. Dr. Rotella is the author of many books, including one called Golf is Not a Game of Perfect. in it, he discusses some technicalities of the game, but most of the book is a method for thinking in a way that increases your confidence on the course. If you’ve ever played golf, or even played mini golf, or gone to the driving range, you know how infuriating golf can be. Confidence is fragile on the course.
“I tell players to try to feel that their confidence is increasing over the course of every round, every tournament, and every season,” Dr. Rotella writes. “They can do this if they learn to be selective about their thoughts and their memories. They have to learn to monitor their thinking and ask themselves whether an idea that springs to mind is likely to help them or hurt them in the effort to grow more confident.”
Some days, we feel like the sun is shining on us, like we’ve hit a hot streak, and like nothing can go wrong. Other days, we feel like nothing will go right again. We’re under a cloud, in a funk, out of sorts. Whatever you want to call it, here’s what’s interesting: during either one of those days, the history of days before carries very little weight in how we feel. We’re not making a logical decision about how to feel based on previous evidence—we just feel how we feel. Our mindset that day is leaning one way, mainly based on how we’ve unintentionally trained ourselves to think. Like an indoor plant that grows toward a window, our minds bend toward their most common
So why can’t we, as Dr. Rotella says, “monitor our thinking” better? “It can sound a little bit like self-deception. But it isn’t,” Rotella writes. He says we can choose to focus on the memories that increase our confidence, and choose not to dwell on the memories that decrease our confidence. “It is simply the way that great athletes, or successful people in any field, have trained themselves to think.”
You may be thinking of taking on a new creative project, or pitching something bigger than you ever have before. That might be draining of your confidence, as you wonder if you’ll fail at this like you’ve failed at other things in the past. I wonder if you can start training your mind today. What if you took the next five minutes to think about the following questions?
What difficult things have I achieved I the past?
What hard things have I stuck with anyway, and what positive things did I learn from that?
What are some of my biggest wins so far in my life?
What in my life am I proud of myself for?
