What is Self-Confidence in Sports?

In this video sport psychology expert Dr. Patrick Cohn talks about self confidence and how it can be gained and lost.  There are two types of self confidence: global level and task specific.  Global level is the belief in your abilities and belief in that you and your team can win.  It has to do with how you perceive your own ability or you perception on your ability to win.  Task specific is like a figure skater's belief that they can successfully compete a specific jump and that they have the ability to land that jump.  You can have confidence in your double axel, but not as much in your triple lutz and that makes your confidence task specific.  

Confidence comes from many factors but some of the things that people do not associate confidence with as often are: the conditions you play in, the quality of your warm up, your parents, and your teammates.  A very important thing for athletes to learn and remember is that you need to be in control your confidence since you cannot be in control of what other people say and do.  What you can control is how you think, and how you practice and perform.  

Confidence can be destroyed by several factors: not performing well, having a poor practice, by other people, and by high/ elevated expectations.   If you do not reach your goal your confidence will decrease so it is very important to set yourself goals that you will be able to accomplish.  Otherwise it will mirror poorly on your performance and confidence.  


This is very much related to self-efficacy.  If you have the confidence to perform in your sport or a specific task at a certain level, your performance will increase which will in return boost your self confidence even more.  Again, that level you set for yourself should be realistic, and should not stress perfection or something that is beyond your capabilities. 

Dr. Cohn says that it is important to understand that confidence is long term, stable, and comes from many years of practice.  You cannot only be confident when you have a good practice session and then have no confidence when you have a bad day.  That is not true confidence in yourself and that will affect your sport performance.

You can watch this video on YouTube here.