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 build confidence in my abilities?”
This is one of the most common reasons why athletes and performers reach out to us at Condor Performance. This article aims to debunk common misconceptions about confidence. It may even help you feel more confident when you perform! But 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. Confidence is not a magical state that guarantees you will 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 through training, practice, hard work and repetition. And in the long run, competence is far more helpful for performance than confidence ever will be.
Competence, for the most part, is permanent, reliable, and predictable. Confidence, on the other hand, can be fleeting and unpredictable.
Consider The Following Scenario
You are an experienced driver and are driving your car to training. In this scenario, your ability to drive the vehicle, 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 feel confident in your driving ability, but you may not. The weather conditions may be challenging for driving. Maybe it is dark. Perhaps there is heavy traffic, or the roads are unfamiliar. Regardless of the circumstances, you don’t need to feel confident.
The same applies to performance.
Consistent motor execution (i.e., actions) is possible regardless of how you feel. We don’t need to feel confident to perform. Most athletes and other performers have experienced this at least once: the “Surprise Performance”—a situation where the performance was excellent despite all sorts of self-doubt. Sometimes our clients describe themselves as surprised by 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 sport psychologist, part of my consulting approach is to focus on learning to accept our thoughts and feelings while remaining committed to our actions. With this approach, I focus on using our actions to generate the thoughts and feelings we want, rather than the other way around.
If we take the view that we need to feel confident to perform, we are relying on our 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. By clinging to the belief that confidence is the key to performance, we are likely to undermine our ability to perform when we do not feel confident.
It is more effective to focus on our actions (i.e., what we are doing) and use them to generate our feelings. When it comes to confidence, we want to focus on actions that help build it and let the feeling follow. These actions can include our body language and confidence, even when we don’t feel it (“Fake It Til You Feel It”), as well as our preparation and performance routines. By focusing on our actions, we are 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 use the driving scenario above, we can measure our driving competence with a driving test or by counting the number of speeding fines we receive. To drive a car, we need a license. Passing a driving test is evidence of our competence as drivers, not of 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, only to find ourselves in a challenging, unfamiliar environment (such as driving at night on unfamiliar roads in the rain), and suddenly our confidence disappears.
Focusing on our competence, which we can easily and directly measure, helps guide our practice. We can focus on developing and refining our skills and measuring 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 that, given their skill and experience, they must have supreme confidence.
But this is far from true.
Some performers never feel absolute confidence. Some performers are so plagued by self-doubt, performance anxiety, and insecurity that they cannot feel confident before or during performances. Yet they can still produce exceptional performance despite not feeling confident. How are they capable of this? Because they focus on competence instead of confidence.
To help you feel more confident, focus on improving. How? Through the right amount of high-quality practice. After all, as detailed in this excellent article by my colleague Gareth, Practice Makes Permanent. He also wrote another article closely related to this one, titled The Confidence Myth.
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