E52: Confidence Series - Coaches - How to Build Confidence in Your Athletes

This episode starts the 1st of three in the confidence series. This first episode is tailored more for coaches and specifically discusses how to build confidence in your athletes. The second episode will shift back to the athletes perspective. Specifically, how to build confidence after a bad practice or competition. The third episode will go into more detail about self-efficacy, what it is and how it relates to sports and sports confidence.

The Focus four for Coaches and how to build confidence in your athletes are:

Use psychological skills training skills, such as goal setting, Mental Imagery or Visualization, Positive Self-Talk and focusing on the right thing at the right time

Create situations within the training environment to provide athletes opportunities for success

Take into account individual differences between athletes and help athlete’s identify individual strengths

Track an athlete’s progress across time for a visual representation of overall increase in skill level and performance

Transcript

Laura Ratto: My player never seems to want to take that shot. He keeps passing the ball even though he's wide open. I know he can make that shot. Why doesn't he? For those of you that are Golden State Warriors fans, such as myself, you may be sitting here wondering why they kept kicking the ball outside for the three when they had an easy two in their 2023 Conference semifinal game 6 elimination loss last night to the Los Angeles Lakers. Was it lack of confidence that they were going to make the shot or a team strategy against an opponent more dynamic in the paint? We'll leave the basketball strategy to another day and another podcast and focus more on the second component. Confidence. This episode starts the first of three in a confidence series. First episode is tailored more for coaches and specifically discusses how to build confidence in your athletes. The second episode will shift back to the athlete's perspective, specifically how to build confidence after a bad practice or competition. The third episode will go into more detail about self efficacy, what it is and how it relates to sports and sports confidence. In episode five, we talked about confidence, what it is, factors that affect it, and how to create and build it. The focus 4 from that episode were number one, confidence is having trust in yourself and in your abilities in your sport, and is on a continuum. Number two, physical and mental preparation are two ways to increase sport confidence. Number three, when you're struggling with confidence, think about the last time you performed that task or skill successfully and see yourself going through the specific movements. Number four, mental training techniques such as goal setting and self talk help athletes to keep confidence high in the long term. This episode discussed general sport confidence and touched on ways to improve it. Now let's take a look from a different perspective. While we will be looking at it from the perspective of a coach, these same concepts can be implemented for yourself as an athlete or an athlete that has a teammate that may be struggling with confidence. Coaches what if it is a specific athlete on your team or your entire team in general that is having some issues with confidence? Not only that, but you've already tried giving them positive feedback, compliment sandwiches and so many other things, but nothing has seemed to work. Here are four additional resources that have been found in research and in real world applications to be effective ways for coaches to build confidence in athletes. Number one, psychological skills training. Using psychological skills training such as goal setting, mental imagery, or visualization positive self talk and focusing on the right thing at the right time can help to increase athlete's self confidence. For example, setting realistic and achievable goals see episode one and 30 will help athletes develop a sense of purpose and direction. When an athlete reaches their goals, they feel a sense of accomplishment and increased confidence. Note that these goals need to be achievable, but also not too easy. Mental Imagery and Visualization, episode nine, is a technique that involves mentally rehearsing successful performances. Coaches can help athletes visualize themselves successfully completing desired tasks, which can help to reduce anxiety in the specific tasks when brought to a real world setting. Coaches can also encourage positive self talk episode three, which involves replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. This reframing of negative thoughts is useful to athletes when facing challenges and setbacks, and helps them to feel confident and capable of handling difficult situations by changing the focus to their strengths and successes. Encouraging positive self talk is one of the more effective ways to build self confidence in athletes. You can encourage athletes to replace negative self talk with positive, such as I can do this or I will make this shot. Number two manipulating the training environment to provide opportunities for success. Coaches can create situations where athletes can experience success and build confidence in their abilities. This can involve providing scenarios that are achievable but still challenge the athlete's abilities. Number three take into account individual differences between athletes and incorporate the most beneficial for each athlete. One way you can do this is to develop an athlete's specialty or goto skill set by helping the athlete focus on the aspect of performance at which they excel and that sets them apart from other athletes. By helping the athlete to identify their strengths, it can help them to leverage those strengths to improve their overall performance. As a coach, it is also important to manage expectations. Realize that your expectations affect not only your behavior, but also the feelings and behavior of others. If you expect the athlete to not have confidence, then that will be counterproductive to helping to increase their self confidence. It is easier for an athlete to have confidence in themselves if you have confidence in them. Number four tracking progress. When an athlete is learning a new skill or when an athlete is struggling with their self confidence, one thing you can do is to track the progress of the athlete across time. This can be done using things such as journals, videos or reflections. Tracking their progress provides evidence to the athlete of the gains that they have made across time. This progress can help to build their confidence during times and situations when they are struggling, such as a bad performance or competition or practice. An example of this is to track a weightlifting program in the offseason. While the weights may increase in small increments or not at all from week to week, from the beginning of the offseason to the end, the athlete will see huge gains. Going back to the beginning of the program will show the athlete how much progress they've actually made over the course of the protocol. It is important to note that building self confidence in athletes is an ongoing process that requires time, effort and a positive attitude from the coach. Coaches should be patient and consistent in their approach and work closely with the athletes to understand their individual needs and strengths. By incorporating these techniques, coaches can help their athletes to build self confidence to reach their full potential and achieve success both on and off the field. To review the focus, four for coaches and how to build confidence in your athletes are number one, use psychological skills training such as goal setting, mental imagery, or visualization positive self talk and focusing on the right thing at the right time. Number two, create situations within the training environment to provide athletes opportunities for success. Number three, take into account individual differences between athletes and help athletes identify individual strengths. Number four, track an athlete's progress across time for a visual representation of overall increase in skill level and performance. Now that you have this snippet for how coaches can build confidence in their athletes, think about a skill one of your athletes is currently having difficulty with. What situation can you create in practice to help them to overcome this? What are some of the psychological skills that you can incorporate or introduce to the athlete or team to provide them with the tools that they need to succeed? For more information on the what, when, where, why and how of sports confidence, please contact me at rattoconsulting.com. If you or your coaches or organization are interested in hosting a workshop or virtual seminar on this or any other sports psychology or performance optimizing topic, please email me at laura@rattoconsulting.com. That's Laura At. R-A-T-T-O-C-O-N-S-U-L-T-I-N-G.com. Next week, we will continue the confidence series with how to build confidence after a bad practice. Have a great week. And in the words of Marie Curie remember that we must have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.