Chapter 14
Cognitive Techniques for Building
Confidence and Enhancing
Performance
Jean M. Williams, Nate Zinsser, & Linda Bunker
“But with hard work, with belief, with confidence and trust in
yourself and those around you, there are no limits.”
Michael Phelps, winner of 18 Olympic gold medals
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Thoughts
Feelings
Behavior
• There is a direct correlation between self-confidence
and success
• Must understand confidence and how to enhance it in
athletes
• What is the relationship between thoughts and
confidence?
• How do self-talk and particular thinking habits
influence confidence?
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Confidence
• Self-Confidence:
• Feeling of assurance
• Belief in one’s power
• Expectation of success
• Sport Confidence:
• An individuals’ belief that they can do
whatever it takes to be successful in their sport
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Confident Athletes
• Have high:
• Mental toughness
• Optimism
• Self-efficacy
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Mental Toughness
– Related to confidence
– The unshakable belief in your ability to
achieve goals (Jones, Hanton, &
Connaugton )
– The way some athletes can remain more
determined, focused, confident, and in
control better than competitors
– Belief + Focus
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Optimism
• Also related to confidence
• Expect the best possible outcome
• Focus on the most hopeful aspects of a situation
• In sport, it means looking for opportunities to score,
win, and excel
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Self-Efficacy
• Situational-specific type of
confidence
• Having the expectation of
succeeding at a specific task or
meeting a particular challenge
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Misconceptions about Confidence
• Either you have it or you don’t
• Only positive feedback can build confidence
• Success always builds confidence
• Confidence = outspoken arrogance
• Mistakes inevitably destroy confidence
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Prerequisites for Gaining Confidence
1. Understanding the interaction of thought
and performance
• Confident athletes deliberately direct
thoughts to produce powerful feelings 
improves performance
2. Cultivate honest self-awareness
• “Am I really thinking in a way that will give
me the best chance of success?”
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Prerequisites for Gaining Confidence (cont.)
3. Develop an optimistic explanatory style
• Explanatory style = the way an athlete internally
responds to events that occur in his or her life
• Optimistic explanatory style views errors as
temporary and atypical, views successes as more
permanent, general, and indicative of true ability
• Explanatory style has 3 dimensions:
• Permanence
• Pervasiveness
• Personalization
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Prerequisites for Gaining Confidence
(cont.)
4. Embrace a psychology of excellence
• Go for your dreams
• Focus on your successes
• Be your best friend, biggest fan and greatest
coach
• Create your own reality
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Self-Talk
• Dialogue with yourself
• Giving yourself instructions and reinforcement or
interpreting what you are feeling
• Can be out loud or inside your head
• Self-talk is an asset when it enhances self-worth and
performance
• Key to cognitive control
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Constructive vs. Destructive Self-Talk
• Constructive:
•
•
•
•
Fosters positive expectancies
Enhances self-worth and confidence
Enhances performance
Appropriately focuses attention on the task
• Destructive:
•
•
•
•
Focuses on what you don’t want (usually is negative)
Distracting to the task at hand
So frequent it disrupts automatic performance
Engage in derogatory self-labeling (e.g. loser, choker)
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Uses for Self-Talk
• Skill acquisition and performance
• Use words to cue action
• Learning: technique cue words
• As skills improve: strategies/feeling cues
• Self-talk to direct attentional focus
• Changing bad habits
• Focus on desired outcome vs. error
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Uses for Self-Talk (cont.)
• Attention control
• Remain in the present tense
• Create/change affect or mood
• Control effort
• Building self-efficacy and confidence
• Adoption/maintenance exercise behavior
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Identifying Self-Talk
• Athletes need to develop awareness around the ways
in which they talk to themselves in different types of
situations
• Identify what kind of thinking helps, what
thoughts are harmful, and what situations are
associated with this talk
• Must know when and how to talk to yourself
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3 effective tools for identifying self-talk
1. Retrospection
• Re-create the thoughts and feelings that occurred prior
to and during a good or bad performance
• Recall the specific circumstances that led to the
thoughts and resulting performance
2. Imagery
• Recreating all relevant sensory experiences of a past
performance
3. Self-talk log
• Keep a thought awareness logbook
• What do I say before, during, and following my good
and poor performances?
• How frequently
am I talking to myself?
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Techniques for Controlling Self-Talk
• Thought stoppage
• Changing negative thoughts to positive
thoughts
• Countering
• Reframing
• ABC cognitive restructuring
• Affirmation statements
• Mastery and coping tapes
• Video technology
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Thought Stoppage
• Method for eliminating counterproductive
thoughts
• Become aware of unwanted thought
• Use a trigger to interrupt or stop the
undesirable thought
• Practice by combining it with imagery
of past performance
• Might be difficult for some to suppress
an unwanted thought
• Beware: focusing on suppressing
unwanted thoughts can increase them
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Changing Negative Thoughts to Positive
Thoughts
• Use when thought stoppage does not work
• Learn to couple any negative thought with a
positive thought that provides support or
appropriately redirects attention
• Switch to a positive thought as soon as you
are aware of a dysfunctional self-statement
• Combine this technique with a relaxation
• Stop the negative thought
• Take a deep breath
• Slowly exhale and substitute the selfenhancing thought as body relaxes
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Countering
• An internal dialogue that uses facts and reasons to
refute the underlying beliefs and assumptions that led
to negative thinking
• Use this technique if the athlete still believes in the
negative statements
• Identify and build a case against the negative selfstatements
• Use past evidence and future possibilities to refute
underlying beliefs that led to dysfunctional thinking
• Argue against the dysfunctional and for the more
functional self-talk
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Reframing
• The process of creating alternative frames of
reference or different ways of looking at the world
• Interpret situations in a more positive way
• Can transform weakness/difficulty into a strength
/possibility
• Does not deny or downplay what the athlete is
experiencing or encourage the athlete to ignore
something troublesome
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Irrational and Distorted Beliefs
• Perfection is essential: Must be thoroughly
competent, successful, and achieving in all possible
respects
• Catastrophizing: Expect disaster, worst-case scenario
(awfulizing)
• Worth depends on achievement: You are your
accomplishments
• Personalization: Everything is some kind of
reaction to you
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Irrational and Distorted Beliefs (cont.)
• Fallacy of fairness and ideal conditions: Expect fair
treatment/ideal conditions and resentful when others
don’t agree with your definition of fairness
• Blaming: Make excuses/blame others or, at the other
extreme, unreasonable self-blame
• All-or-nothing thinking and labeling: No shades of grey
– often judgmental and prone to negative labels.
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Irrational and Distorted Beliefs (cont.)
• One-trial generalizations: Form general conclusions
based on a single incident or piece of evidence
• Shoulds: List of ironclad rules for behaviour - get
angry or feel guilty when violated
• Emotional reasoning: What you feel must be true
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Modifying Irrational and Distorted
Thinking
• ABC Cognitive Restructuring
• Based on REBT by Albert Ellis
• Helps identify and dispute irrational beliefs in maladaptive
thinking
• The idea is that it’s faulty thinking, not the situation, causes
the deleterious emotional reaction and behavior
• The ultimate goal = create such awareness that athletes
immediately recognize and dispute dysfunctional self-talk
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ABC Cognitive Restructuring
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Affirmation Statements
• Statement that reflect positive attitudes or thoughts about
oneself
• Positive action-oriented statement
• The most effective affirmations are both believable and
vivid
• State in present tense and avoid perfectionistic demands
• Use a self-esteem list to help create affirmations
• Write/say many times
• Once the affirmation becomes true, choose another and
begin again
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Coping and Mastery Self-Talk
Tapes or Files
• Mastery self-talk tape/file:
• Voice describes a perfect performance including ideal
thoughts, feelings, and emotions experienced just
before, during, and after performance
• Coping self-talk tape/file:
• Allows the athlete to practice dealing with all the
potential things that could go wrong by describing a
negative situation and bad reaction but then rehearsing
coping strategies and processes for regaining
control/confidence
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Coping and Mastery Self-Talk
Tapes or Files (cont.)
• Videotape, CDs, or DVDs:
• Splice personal or team highlights (select performances where
athletes excel at the skills or strategies currently needing emphasis);
watch many times while imaging the action, with accompanying
emotions and self-talk
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