Speaker: One of the most essential skills athletes report that is needed for success at any level is confidence. The difficulty is confidence is easy to talk about but how do you get it? There are a lot of things we can do to get confidence, for example, stay positive, be able to reframe those negative statements to more positive ones, to use your motivational cue words when they go and get tough. You can do things like that. But a lot of people forget that part of confidence in sport is physical. Sport is a physical activity.
We're moving around, how we look, how we present ourselves, has a lot to do with our performance, especially in sports like gymnastics and figure skating, but all sports. We're going to do a little exercise here now to help you with your confidence. I've asked Erica, volleyball player to come in and help us. Hi Erica!
Erica: Hi!
Speaker: Good! Now, Erica has played volleyball and she has got pretty good confidence already but she wants to further improve her confidence. She wants to be a really mentally tough player that always sticks with it. So what we're going to do in this exercise is we're going to do some with physical confidence and I've asked her to do a little acting for me.
So I want her to think of -- you're serving and you're up there and you blow the serve and you could have won the game and now the game goes on and they win that game and you go to additional one, not a good situation for a volleyball player. Now you've played volleyball a lot of years, I want you to think back to volleyball players you've seen in that service kind of situation, that we're not very mentally tough, they didn't handle it well, they kind of lost it, they didn't show a lot of confidence.
Maybe just act out for me, I move off to the side a little bit here but act out for me what that player might look like after she serves and doesn't make it in and how she might look going to the next part of the rotation. Does that make sense to you?
Erica: Yeah, perfect sense.
Speaker: Good! Let me just move over here a little and let you do it and you could just go the serve and --
Erica: Oh! Really I can't do this right, oh! Man I'm sick!
Speaker: Good! Well, what happens there is, Erica did a nice job of what a lot of us do as athletes. It's hard in sports. We make mistakes, mistakes; John Wooden calls them the building blocks of success. The trouble is, they're not fun. You don't feel good, you did a great job and I think very typical you beat yourself up, I'm no good, I can't do it, her shoulders kind of dropped, her eyes are looking at the ground, she wasn't feeling very good about herself.
Now, you take a second, think of your sport, think of an activity where you've felt there to maybe didn't feel very good. What do you look like? Close your eyes and imagine, what your shoulders look like, what do you feel like, what emotions do you have? Take it a second or two to do that.
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