If confidence comes from success, and success requires confidence, how does anyone ever win for the first time? I call this the confidence catch-22. Sports psychologist Bob Rotella addresses it in How Champions Think.
Where first-time confidence comes from
The confidence for a first win doesn’t come from winning. It comes from two places: trust in your preparation and a decision to believe in yourself before the results arrive.
Before you’ve won anything, you’ve succeeded many times in practice. You’ve made the shot on the range, landed the argument in the mock trial, delivered the presentation well in rehearsal. Those successes are real evidence, and they’re what you draw on the first time it counts.
Psychologist Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy explains why. He found that our belief in our abilities draws on several sources: small successes along the way, seeing people like us succeed, encouragement from credible people, and how we interpret our own nerves. None of these requires having won before. Confidence isn’t proof that you’ll succeed. It’s a willingness to compete without that proof.
The confident self-image
Rotella describes the self-image as an archive of all the thoughts you’ve had about yourself, recorded uncritically by the subconscious. The most influential thoughts are the most recent and the most emotionally charged. So the frustrated thought right after an unforced error can carry more weight than everything you thought during practice and preparation. For this reason, he recommends deliberately feeding the subconscious positive thoughts: “I am an excellent golfer,” “I am a formidable attorney.”
CBT adds an important refinement. In CBT terms, the self-image works like a core belief. It filters what we notice, so we remember the evidence that confirms it and dismiss the evidence that doesn’t. Positive self-statements alone rarely change a core belief, and research shows they can even backfire for people who don’t believe them. What changes a core belief is evidence.
Index your wins, including the small ones
This is why Rotella recommends keeping a record of what goes well, and not just in competition. Log the good shots in practice, the rehearsal that went smoothly, the preparation that paid off. Take note of incremental progress. In his words, “The act of writing down a thought about a successful shot helps reinforce its importance in the subconscious registry.”
Logging successes also counters the negativity bias, our tendency to give more attention to what goes wrong than to what goes right. Rotella notes that many golfers instantly forget their good shots, as if “They’re supposed to happen. There’s nothing remarkable about them.” Instead, they dwell on the bad ones and how to prevent them. He recommends the opposite: take pleasure in your good shots and detach emotionally from the bad ones.
A log of real successes, in practice and in competition, is data your mind can’t easily argue with. It’s how you prepare for your first win and how you build on every one after it.
Of course, confidence doesn’t come from a log alone. It also requires dedicated practice, developing the skills that matter, visualizing successful outcomes, and enjoying them when they happen.
Maintaining confidence
Once confidence is built, it has to be maintained, and changing circumstances can test it. A high school golfer who dominated locally may lose confidence on a college team full of other high school stars. Someone else is now hitting it longer and straighter and getting the coach’s praise. A college basketball star may struggle the same way in the NBA.
Rotella argues that the real problem is that these players never owned their confidence. They had outsourced it to their coaches, and when the new coaches didn’t praise them, their confidence disappeared. Nothing about the game itself had changed. In Rotella’s words, “There’s no reason an 80% free throw shooter in college should deteriorate in the pros, yet it happens.” The free-throw line is the same distance in college and the NBA.
The same thing happens off the court: the associate whose confidence rose and fell with a partner’s approval, or the executive who thrived under one CEO and stalled under the next. If your confidence depends on someone else’s praise, you don’t fully own it.
The perfection trap
Another reliable way to undermine confidence is to make perfection a precondition: “I’ll be confident when I perfect my swing.” As Rotella points out, no one ever perfects the golf swing. Time spent chasing perfect skills is better spent building a confident self-image. Champions learn to compensate for their weaknesses and find a way to win with what they have.
Golf legend Ben Hogan came to the same conclusion. He realized that his relentless quest for perfection was “neither possible, nor advisable, nor even necessary.”
The bottom line
Confidence isn’t a reward you collect after you succeed. It starts as trust in your preparation and a decision to believe in yourself, and it grows with every win you take the time to notice, in practice and in competition. Champions don’t wait to win to feel confident. They bring it to the first tee and build on it with every shot after.
Try this
At the end of each day this week, write down three things that went well in your preparation or performance. They can be small: a good shot in practice, a meeting you handled well, a hard conversation you prepared for. On Friday, read the whole list.
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