Lack of self-confidence and its effect on performance

I’ve been inspired by two particular situations prior to writing this article. Firstly, a usual reader asked me to write something about how to manage fear and insecurity in athletes. After that, I read a story on Instagram about how insecurity can affect personal relationships.

So, in honor of the circumstances, I’m taking up the challenge. First and foremost, I’ll start the best way I know: defining insecurity. But this is no psycho-babble, so I need a construct that has a solid scientific base. And so it is, that insecurity is nothing but a lack of self-confidence.

How can we define self-confidence?

It seems pretty straight-forward but the reality of the situation is that it’s stirred up quite a commotion in the scientific community. Given its conceptual similarities to self-esteem or self-concept, there is no universal definition for self-confidence.

Bandura (1977) defined it based on perception of self-efficacy. He considered that self-efficacy – the perception we have of our capability to execute a course of action that will lead us to a given outcome – measures self-confidence in relation to specific tasks (not seen as a global construct).

Vealey (1986), on the other hand, conceptualized self-confidence in relation to sport as “the belief individuals have regarding their ability to be successful in sport”. This model is highly appealing to me since it includes a measure for “trait sport confidence” – applied to sports in general – and “state sport confidence” – applied to specific sport situations (Lenney, 1992).

Let’s see it through an example: as a coach, we ask two of our athletes to perform a 15” box jump. First, we ask if they feel fit to complete the task.

• Athlete A, showing an elevated state sport confidence for this particular task, confirms she can do it. Her self-confidence leads her to performing the box jump with no issue.
• Athlete B, has a decent trait sport confidence but does not have the state sport confidence in her ability for box jumps because she hasn’t done them since she gave birth to her first son. Her lack of self-confidence paralyzes her and she doesn’t even give it a go.

As we can see, Vealey’s model gives us more information. Now we know that the movement at hand isn’t the only thing that matters, but also past experiences of success or failure when understanding where lack of self-confidence stems from.

Self-confidence and its effect on performance in sport

Since it’s one of the most influential psychological variables when it comes to performance, it’s been studied in numerous sports: soccer (Catala et. al, 2016; Gonzalez-Campos et. al, 2017), gymnasts (Leon-Prados et. al, 2011), handball (Ortin-Montero et. al, 2013), triathlon (Sanchez et al, 2012), among many others.

The common thread is that higher levels of self-confidence have a modulating effect over states of anxiety, making performance easier (Sanchez et. al, 2012; Ortin-Montero et. al, 2013; Gonzalez-Campos et. al, 2017). In conjunction with other variables such as an elevated intrinsic motivation (Catala et. al, 2016) and optimism (Ortin-Montero et. al, 2013) it can lead to a more favorable emotional state prior to competition.

How to work on fears and insecurity in CrossFit

Our regular crossfitters will show fear and insecurity quite often. However, once we understand how the brain works, we learn which buttons we need to push to effectively cope with any circumstance. Our brain is an active agent in the sense that it processes past, present and future information at lightning speed in order to mold our behavior. It’s important that we give it interesting data.

We’ve seen that self-confidence is highly dependent on past success. So, it comes down to this: if I’ve done it once, why not twice? The brain will bring up experiences stored in our long-term memory to heighten our self-confidence. So, logically, what we need is to be successful.

If you’re scared of any overhead movements, simplify it. You can do that by either lowering the weight or changing the implement (instead of an Olympic bar, use the dumbbell or even a medball). If you’re scared of handstands, start with pike pushups. That way you’ll get used to being in an inverted position. Get confident with smaller gestures and slowly progress from there.

As a matter of fact, I’ll tell you that the biggest secret to this sport is mastering the technique. Being afraid to a certain extent may be convenient because you’ll necessarily be working a lot more on technique at lower instensity which will build a more solid foundation.

“Fear is a friend who’s misunderstood” (as John Mayer would say). Self-confidence will always be there to say: hey, we got this. Stop thinking so much about what fear is taking from you and think more about what self-confidence can give you.

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