Confidence Overview

Confidence is built through practice, repetition, and positive reinforcement. People often give feedback in a dismissive way, which can lower confidence. It's important to provide positive reinforcement along with constructive feedback. A basketball coach realized the power of positive reinforcement and turned his team around during a game. Confidence cannot be magically instilled through luck or directives. It requires practice and positive reinforcement over time. Confidence is a very interesting subject. When people say somebody needs more confidence, I always remind people, remember confidence comes from two fundamental things, practice and repetition, as well as positive reinforcement. Let me give you a really good analogy, or I think a good analogy. You know, when you go to a sales event and you get a bunch of salespeople together and there's role-playing and people say, okay, give each other feedback. Most people are not very gifted at feedback, and most people will say something like, well, that was pretty good, but what I would do if I were you, and that's where people typically provide feedback or how they provide feedback. And ultimately what that does is it dismisses the person. When you dismiss the person, you can decrease their confidence. Now I go back to a great story to kind of tip this off. I remember when I was leading a coaching session and there happened to be for an agricultural company and there was a gentleman in the group who was a basketball coach and I've been a volleyball coach for over 30 years. And he said, but you have to point things out that are wrong. You have to correct people. I said, well, I'm not saying you don't have to. I said, so how often do you provide positive reinforcement? And he stopped and he stared at me and he goes, what do you mean? I said, well, when you're coaching a basketball game, do you literally tell people we got to make more shots? He said, well, of course I do. I said, don't your kids already know that? And he had this aha moment. Ironically, it was a two-day workshop. That night, he ended up taking over the halftime speech. They were down by about seven points. He went up to the whiteboard and he wrote down the three things the kids were doing well and he said, if we keep doing these well, I think we're going to come back and win this game. And as they went back on the court, he could hear one of his captains over his shoulders say, what the heck was that? Basically illustrating they thought they were going to get chewed out because they were losing. They ended up winning the game by nine points, which is a 16-point turnaround. See, one of the fundamental philosophies of coaching is help people feel good about getting better. Now, how often have we done things where we get into a situation or maybe a speech we have to give and somebody says, okay, good luck, be confident, like that directive magically instills confidence in us. It doesn't work that way. Confidence takes practice and positive reinforcement. One of the greatest things that you can do when someone is practicing is to stay away from constructive feedback for four or five sessions. When you get to about six, seven, or eight, start using words like, here's where I think you're performing well and here's the opportunity where you can improve. Confidence is about practice, positive reinforcement, and repetition.