Focus on Confidence
Confidence is the key factor that underpins high performance...
If you’ve got the right attitude and essential skill it boils down to confidence and belief. The challenge for many people is that confidence can be very transient and it inevitably fluctuates in response to events and circumstances. Even the best performers have self-doubt from time to time, particularly in unfamiliar environments or high pressure situations. Therefore, what the best performers do, is develop strategies for regaining and enhancing confidence quickly when they need it. They do not leave confidence to chance, instead they invest time and energy in building their confidence; they know what fuels their confidence and they make sure they do regular things to keep it topped up.
Fortunately confidence is not an attribute that you either have or don’t have, it can be built and developed if you know what to do.
Here is World and Olympic Champion Mark Hunter and triple World Champion Elise Christie talking about what confidence is and where they get their confidence from.
In summary:
- Understand yourself and know your strengths and weaknesses
- Be proud of your strengths, have them at the tips of your fingers and exploit them
- Reflect on past successes which you can draw confidence from
- Identify your recent successes and establish what it was that allowed you to be successful. Did you prepare in a specific manner? Did you adopt a particular mindset? What did you do well and what are the learning points that you can carry forward
- Understand what you need to do to get the best out of yourself
- Set short term goals – when you have achieved them you can look back and gain confidence from all the small accomplishments that highlight how far you have come. This allows you to build a store of recent achievements, you could even record them and your strengths on a card that you carry around with you for use when you need a confidence boost
Focus on your confidence, you cannot afford not to!
For more information on our confidence masterclasses please visit our Exceptional Individuals section or please get in touch.
Published: Tuesday 18 September 2018
Written by: Anna Hemmings, MBE
