Are You Competent Or Just Confident?
“I just need to feel more confident, and I will be able to perform at my best. Can you help me to build confidence?”
This is one of the most common reasons why athletes and performers reach out to us at Condor Performance. This article will seek to debunk some common misconceptions about confidence. It may even help you to be more confident when you are performing! Probably not in the way that you would imagine.
Confidence Vs. Competence
Confidence is simply the belief in one’s ability to perform a particular behaviour or action. What confidence is not is some magical state that will guarantee you perform at your best. If only! Ultimately confidence is a feeling or a thought (or a combination) but it is definitely not an action. In other words, it is quite possible to lack confidence in something you are excellent at as well as be very confident in something that you suck at.
Competence, on the other hand, is defined as the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. Competence is what we develop over time, at training and practice, through hard work and repetition. And in the long run, competence is far more useful from a performance perspective than confidence will ever be. Competence for the most part is permanent, reliable, and predictable. Confidence on the hand can be fleeting and unpredictable.
Consider The Following Scenario
You are an experienced driver and you are driving your car on your way to training. In this scenario, your ability to drive the car, to use the brakes and accelerator as you need, to indicate when you are turning, to change gears, and so forth is your competence. In other words, you are a competent driver. And so where does confidence fit in? You may be feeling confident about your driving ability, but you may not. Perhaps the weather conditions are challenging for driving. Maybe it is dark. Perhaps there is a lot of traffic, or the roads are unfamiliar. Regardless of the circumstances, you don’t need to feel confident in your ability to be able to drive the car in order to drive it well.
And the same is true when it comes to performance.
Basically, consistent motor execution (i.e., actions) is possible regardless of how you are feeling. We don’t need to feel confident in order to be able to perform. Most athletes and other performers have experienced this at least once; the “Suprise Performance”. A situation where the performance was excellent despite all sorts of self-doubt. Sometimes our clients describe this as being surprised at their ability to perform so well whilst lacking confidence. As evidence-based sport psychologists and performance psychologists, this is not surprising to us in the slightest.
Hmm, Tell Me More …
As a performance psychologist, part of my approach to consulting is to focus on learning to accept our thoughts and feelings whilst still committing to our actions. It is an approach shared by several of my colleagues at Condor Performance, including our founder Gareth J. Mole. With this approach, I focus on using our actions to generate the thoughts and feelings that we want and not the other way around.
If we take the view that we need to feel confident in order to be able to perform, we are relying on our feelings and feelings to influence our actions. The pitfall of this approach is that we are (highly) unlikely to wake up one day suddenly filled with confidence and ready to perform. So, by holding onto the belief that confidence is the key to performance, we are actually likely to undermine our ability to perform in situations when we do not feel confident.
So, it is more effective to focus on our actions (i.e., what we are doing) and use these to generate our feelings. When it comes to confidence, we want to be focusing on actions that help to develop our confidence and let the feeling follow. These actions can include our body language and displaying confidence even if we’re not feeling confident (“Fake It Til You Feel It”) as well as our preparation, and performance routines. By focusing on our actions, what we are doing is focusing on our competence. Focus on actions first, feelings will follow. In other words, competence before confidence.
Not Convinced Yet, Then Read On …
Another reason why focusing on competence before confidence will help you to perform better is that competence can be measured easily and directly, whereas confidence can’t. If we take the driving scenario from above, we can measure our competence as a car driver with a driving test or the number of speeding fines we get. In order to be able to drive a car, we need to get a license. Passing a driving test is evidence of our competence as a driver, not our confidence. But how can we measure our level of confidence when it comes to driving? The answer is that we can’t, not objectively anyway. We may feel confident as a driver, and then we find ourselves in a challenging and unusual environment (such as driving at night on unfamiliar roads in the rain), and all of a sudden, our confidence has gone.
Focusing on our competence, which we can easily and directly measure, helps to guide us in practice. We can focus on developing and refining our skills, and we can measure our progress.
Competence Before Confidence – Conclusion
One common misconception about elite athletes and performers is that we often overestimate their level of confidence. We assume because of how skilled and experienced they are that they must feel supreme confidence. But this is far from true. Some performers never feel real confidence. Some performers are so plagued by self-doubt and performance anxieties and insecurities that they cannot feel confident before and when they are performing. Yet they can still produce exceptional performance despite not feeling confident. How are they capable of this? Because they focus on competence instead confidence.
So to help feel more confident, focus on just getting better. How? Through the right amount of high-quality practice. After all, as detailed in this excellent article by my colleague Gareth, Practice Makes Permanent.
If this article has encouraged you to consider going about your performance from a more psychological point of view then get in touch and be guided by Harley (author) or one of our other psychologists. Even better complete one of the free, online Mental Toughness Questionnaire via this link here, and one of the crew will get back to you ASAP.