Cognitive Techniques for Building Confidence and Enhancing Performance

Dr. Victor Pendleton

Sport Psychologist

The University of Queensland

Sem2, 2004

What Does Confidence Mean?

•Webster’s Dictionary defines it as:
A feeling of assurance; self-assurance

–Self-efficacy vs. self-confidence?

•Does that mean that the psychologically prepared athlete expects to win? Is it important that an athlete expects to win?

Thought Control

•The 8 inch plank

•Controlling the imagination

•Thinking on purpose rather than being a victim of your thinking

Arousal Management

•Attention is a function of arousal

•Regress to dominant style under stress

Key Points in Chapter

•The mind, like the body, must be disciplined to respond effectively in competition

–boxing is 90% physical and 90% mental

•“Confidence in sport is more the result of thinking habits than physical talent, opportunity, or previous success.”

Confidence Builders

•Practice

•Past success

•Physical talent

•Habits of thinking

Fear of Failure

•Beckeresque: Fear of death

•Allow Yourself to “Fail”

•Meaning system:

–focus on mastery rather than on outcome: find the improvement and focus on that.

Prerequisites For Building Confidence

•Preparation

•Understand the relation between thoughts, physical response to thoughts, and athletic performance.

•Cultivate an honest self-awareness

•Develop an optimistic explanatory style

Interaction between thought and performance

•Increased respiration, perspiration, muscular tension, heartrate, ...

•“The confident athlete deliberately directs his thoughts onto those
aspects of the environment and self that produce powerful, confident
feelings”

Choking

•Deterioration of performance under negatively perceived stress

•Inverted U

•Reversal Theory

Honest Self-Awareness

•A difficult battle for many of us

•Much potential for self-development and satisfaction

Cultivate an Honest Self-Awareness

•Prerequisite to controlling thoughts/feelings

•Real opponent is within?

Cultivate an Honest Self-Awareness

•Prerequisite to controlling thoughts/feelings

•Real opponent is within: Fear, self-doubt

•Fear & self-doubt can be overcome by effective thinking

•Addressing this issue is what gives sport the potential for self-development

Develop an Optimistic Explanatory Style

•Explanatory style is developed in childhood and in adolescence? Does biology play a role?

•Aspects of explanatory style

–Permanence

–Pervasiveness

–Personalization

The Optimistic Explanatory Style

•View good events as permanent and bad events as temporary

•Good events are generalized and bad events are localized

•Attribution of good events is internal, bad events, external:

–positive aspect of externalization!

“Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician.”

Hippocrates

•Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

–Ernest Hemingway

–

•“The greater part of our happiness or our misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.”

–Martha Washington

–

•“how we see and think about what is happening to us” determines impact

–Martin Seligman

14 Ways To Increase Confidence

–Praise - Emphasize Advantages

–Feedback - Focus on Performance

–Positive Statements - Emphasize Readiness

–Work on Strengths - Expect success

–Encourage Self-statements

–Verbal Persuasion

–Positive framing

–Analyse Performance

–Encourage Reflection

–Visualize

Butler, R.J. (1996)

Three Most Effective Ways of Increasing Self Efficacy

Gould, et al. (1989)

•Physical practice

•Modeling of confidence by the coach

•Positive self-talk

•Confidence building: military example

The Fanatical Subordination of the Self

•“The way is in training”

–Miyamoto Musashi

•“tough, realistic training spells the difference between success and failure”

–Gen. G.S. Patton

•“boxing requires a clean life”

–Battling Battalino

What Drives a Person to Such Lengths?

•“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”

–Nietzsche

Developing Confidence and Enhancing Performance

•Positive Self Talk

•Selective perception

•Sense of History - Patton example

•Uniforms - sense of unity & identity

•Courage – Encouragement

–Being believed in by others

Confidence Can Be Developed

•Remember/build-on positive

•Let-go/reframe negative

•Practice

•Repetition

•Mastery experiences thru goalsetting

•Belief/trust in system

•Expect success from your athletes

Myths Dispelled

Myth 1: Negative Feedback Destroys Confidence

•Motivation from negative feedback

–Work harder when losing

•Active interpretation strategy

–Learned how not to do it

Myth 2: Success Always Builds Confidence

•May harbor self-doubt if felt wins were luck

•Easy competition

–tomato cans

•Repeated success in the face of adversity will build confidence

•Requires a balance

Myth 3: Mistakes Destroy Confidence

•Mistakes are expected as part of growth

•Focus on the positive

•Active interpretation

Ref’d Studies Finding Confidence in Elite Athletes

•Mahoney & Avener (1977)

•Mahoney, Gabriel & Perkins (1987)

•Highlen & Bennett (1979)

•Highlen & Bennett (1983)

•Gould, Weiss & Weinberg (1981)

How Do the Authors Measure Confidence?

•Mahoney & Avener (1977) – No operational description of self-confidence provided in the article. Unvalidated instrument.

•Mahoney, Gabriel & Perkins (1987) – Modified unvalidated 1977 instrument.

•Highlen & Bennett (1979) – modified the unvalidated Mahoney & Avener (1977) questionnaire

How Do the Authors Measure Confidence?(cont.)

•Highlen & Bennett (1983) – Same questionnaire they used in 1979

•Gould, Weiss & Weinberg (1981) – Used Highlen & Bennett (1979) questionnaire

Sample Questions from the Confidence Instrument

•I am very self-confident about my athletic ability: T/F

•In most competitions I go in confident that I will do well. T/F

•It doesn’t take much to shake my self-confidence. T/F

•I have frequent doubts about my athletic ability. T/F

•When I begin to perform poorly, my self-confidence drops very quickly. T/F

•I can usually stay “up” and confident even through one of my poorer performances. T/F

•My self-confidence jumps all over the place. (T/F)

Criticisms of the Research
Rowley, Landers, Kyllo, and Etnier (1995)

•Successful performance measured in terms of selection to team or placement in event. No consideration of personal bests. Does not adequately account for how athlete performed.

•Item transparency.

•Social desirability bias: maybe “good” answers will help get me selected to the team.

Criticisms of the Research
(cont.)

•Inadequate self-insight: the research assumes a high degree of awareness: a capability that is difficult to achieve.

•Reanalysis of the POMS data revealed successful athletes had better seasons, more experience, and came from better training programs (Heyman, 1982)

Limitations of the Research

•“Can one assume that the psychological differences between successful and less successful athletes were critical to performance differences?”

•Need clearer definitions of constructs in order to drive interventions.

•We would expect winners to report greater confidence. In boxing, fighters get confidence from winning, which requires a few things.

Thoughts or No-Thoughts During Performance?

•Automatic responses result from consistent realistic training

•Musashi talks about the void:

–“the void is where there is nothing”

–“when your spirit is not the least bit clouded”

•no thoughts of success or failure

•When we think, think on purpose

"Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind"
Rudyard Kipling

Self-Talk

Self-Talk for

•Skill acquisition and performance

•Changing bad habits

•Attention control

•Creating/changing affect or mood

•Controlling effort

•Building self-efficacy

•Increasing exercise behaviour

Self-Talk

•Vocalizations and cognitions (We think in words)

–Only vocalizations are apparent

•Negative self-talk related to poor performance

Uses for Self-Talk

•Aid in learning skills

•Correcting bad habits

•Preparing for performance

•Focusing attention

•Creating the appropriate mood

•Building confidence and competence

Self-Talk for Skill Acquisition

•Self-instruction during early learning

•Self-instruction to focus on strategy

•Internal vs.. external pace (talk during the pauses)

Self-Talk for Changing Bad Habits

•Focus on the desired change rather than on the bad habit

Self-Talk for Attention Control

•“The point of power is the present moment”

•Focusing the mind on what is desired right now

•e.g.. controlling pace during a long distance run

Self-Talk and Rapid Breathing for Under-Arousal

•“An equal number of athletes may experience inadequately low levels of arousal. The problem is less apparent”

–W.P.Morgan

•Mohammed Ali said that when he was under aroused he would imagine that his opponent was the person who stole his bicycle when he was a young boy

•Rex

Self-Talk for Building Self-Efficacy

•Task-specific self-confidence

•Influenced by self-talk and words of others

•Rowers Cadence

•Military Cadence

Military Self-Talk

Airborne Airborne all the way
This is the way we start our day
Up in the morning before the sun
Do PT and then we run
Here we go
All the way
Can’t stop
Can’t quit
Gotta go
Every day
Airborne
Airborne
Grrrooowwwwwllllll……
Grrrooowwwwwllllll……

Identifying Self-Talk

•Difficult to assess - vocal and sub-vocalizations. (awareness again!)

•Retrospection

–Imagery, videotape

•Self-talk log

–Audio tape, systematic reminders

Techniques for Controlling Negative Self-Talk

•Thought Stopping

–Use trigger to interrupt undesired thought
or, gently come back to your desired thought

–Will not work without awareness and motivation to stop

•Cognitive restructuring

–Stinkin thinkin

–Countering

–Reframing

Stinkin Thinkin

•I must at all times perform outstandingly well

•The significant people in my life must approve and love me

•Everyone has got to treat me kindly and fairly

•I must always get what I want when I want it.

–sustained effort, pain, and sacrifice

Polarized Thinking

•Sports are by nature polarized into winner-loser.

•Challenge is to find positive meaning in losing

Modifying Stinkin Thinkin

•Repetitive self-talk – positive affirmations
“wishful inking”

•Effective when relaxed, and therefor receptive to the message

•Affirmative reminders

Practical Considerations

•The changes will not come overnight

•Some might be ridiculed for doing something so silly

•Requires a strong belief that the effort will pay off

•Consultants must enCOURAGE their clients

Peak Performance

•An episode of superior performance

•Is it involuntary or can it be trained?

•We don’t have all of the answers

•We don’t have all of the questions

80% Reported the Following During Peak Performances

•Loss of fear

•No thinking of performance

•Total immersion in the activity

•Narrow focus of attention

•Effortless performance

•Feeling of control

•Slowing down of time

•Temporary, involuntary experience

Other Characteristics of Peak Performance

•Mentally relaxed

•Physically relaxed

•Confident/optimistic

•Focused on the present

•Highly energized

•Extraordinary awareness

•In control

Elements of Excellence

•Desire, self-motivation (meaning)

•Commitment. Courage.

•Self-control

•Practice

•Environmental engineering

•Goals

•Plans and strategies

•By developing positive self-talk and intentional thinking, and employing these systematically in practice and in competition, athletes can cultivate optimism and gain self-confidence.

Confidence

•Perhaps winners are simply more hopeful (Seligman, 1991)

Components of a Confident Attitude

•Confidence

–I can do this and you can’t stop me

–Healthy arrogance

•Optimism - expecting to succeed

•Self-efficacy

–Confidence in ones skills

Athletes Who Are Truly Outstanding Are Self-Confident

•Why is that?

•Is there any other way to be?

•Does a confident attitude make a winner?

Meaning and Purpose

•How important is this?

–Burning boats

–Buster Douglas’ Mum

–Guy who stole Ali’s bike

–Look at the blank stares of people in dead-end jobs. When people have meaning they glow.

Meaning and Purpose

•Constant rebirth

•Eat daily, rivers flow, ears hear

•Olympic wreaths made of laurel

•Two imposters: success and failure

–learn how to win & learn how to lose

–“got to be able to handle all kinds of days”

•Boxing is 90% physical and 90% mental

The Fanatical Subordination of the Self

•“The way is in training”

–Miyamoto Musashi

•“tough, realistic training spells the difference between success and failure”

–Gen. G.S. Patton

•“boxing requires a clean life”

–Battling Battalino

•“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”

–Nietzsche

Awareness Revisited, Again, and Again, and Again…

•Most people are not aware of their thoughts, much less the powerful impact they have on their feelings and behaviour

•The previous questions measuring confidence could very well measure one’s ability to control their cognitions (self-talk)