Confidence as a Mentality and Skill in Soccer

Confidence is essential for success at anything in life, but it especially important in sports. You can’t perform if you don’t think you’re capable of performing, period. In soccer, confidence is what fuels players to make bold decisions, take risks, bounce back from mistakes, and trust their own judgement.

There’s a common misconception that all successful athletes were born confident. That you either have confidence, or you don’t. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

In reality, confidence can be learned just like any other vital skill. So, it’s totally fine if confidence doesn’t come naturally to you. There are certain actions you can take to improve your perception of yourself, silence negative self-talk, and maintain your confidence in the face of adversity.

How to Gain Confidence Through Hard Work

Another way of saying confidence is believing in yourself. There are two main ways to do so: the commonly cited one is through hard work. When you prove to yourself that you can consistently push the limit at what you are capable of, and grow your abilities, confidence naturally develops. If you put your mind to it, nothing can stop you.

The trick to getting hard work to build your confidence is to set goals and then accomplish them. Even if it’s small – say, 300 touches a day for a month outside of team training – when you look back at the end of the month, you will see that you got and extra 9,000 touches on your own and be proud of yourself. Most players will set an even bigger goal for the next month.

So, the more challenging your goals, the higher your confidence will grow as you accomplish them. When you set goals, you are clearly outlining how your next training regimen will be more challenging than your previous routine.

Positive Self-Talk 

This is a secret that most successful people readily acknowledge – they talk positively to themselves. It’s as simple as that.

What we say to ourselves determines our mindset. If we say that it’s never going to work, then we believe that it won’t work and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the inverse, if you tell yourself positive thoughts regularly, things have a habit of working out.

There are many effective ways to do this, but one of our favorites at Beyond Goals Mentoring is doorway affirmations, where you say a good thing about yourself every single time you walk through a door. This could be something as general as “I am a great player,” or “I am such a hard-working person,” or as specific as “I will win every 1v1 duel.”

Another way we like is printing out a list of positive affirmations and taping it to the bathroom mirror. Every time you’re brushing your teeth or washing your hands, read them. After a few weeks, you’ll start to believe them.

They are pretty simple concepts, but saying so many positive affirmations each day trains your brain to use the same language.

Embracing Setbacks or Adversity  

As Greg loves to point out, soccer is known as a game of mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes on the pitch and faces setbacks in their career, like getting injured or benched.

If you’re not confident in yourself, setbacks are a sign of something negative, and should be feared. A confident person, on the other hand, embraces setbacks – they are why we grow.  Instead of dwelling on what’s wrong, confident people look towards the future and view setbacks as opportunities to do something positive for themselves.

When they get injured, they use this opportunity to work on their soccer IQ. When they get benched, they use it as fuel to improve a weak area of their game and form a more well-rounded skill set.

Positivity Should Be Part of Training 

Staying positive in the face of adversity isn’t easy but it comes naturally when your brain is trained to envision positive outcomes. Since adversity is an inevitability in sports, positive affirmations and other confidence-building activities should be an essential component of your training regimen.

If you struggling with confidence or negative self-talk, Beyond Goals Mentoring is here to help. As retired pros, we specialize in teaching young athlete’s how to develop the same mindset as the iconic athletes they admire.  Let’s set up a mentoring session today and start building a plan for taking your confidence sky high.