Inspire Confidence

How do you inspire confidence in your team and yourself when you are facing challenges and things aren’t going well? How do you lift yourself and others up when you’ve been knocked down? And what do you do when self doubt rears its ugly head again and again?

I was faced with this question a few weeks ago from a coach who wrote the following:

"I am the Varsity girl’s golf coach at Hudsonville. As I listened to your message today I felt like my girls were doing everything right. So far this year each girl has improved their average by 5-7 strokes per 9 holes from last year. We have won every match and two tournaments, but in the last week we have stumbled (2 losses) and many of the girls have lost some confidence. Tomorrow we play in our conference tournament and must win it to win the league. This seemed very realistic 10 days ago but now there is some self doubt. These girls are everything you could ask for. Humble, hungry, full of integrity, they work hard. I want so badly for them to attain their goals and would be devastated for them if they did not. Any recommendations of what I can say to them to motivate them to do their very best, but yet not feel pressure? How can I get their confidence back when mentally they are down?" -Kevin Wolma

I responded by emailing him the 20 Ways to Get Mentally Tough PDF and encouraged him to have a team meeting and have each girl recall and share, with the rest of the team, their favorite accomplishment/success of the season. He responded a few days later with the following:

"Jon, Thought you would like to know we won our conference tournament today and broke our school record by 12 strokes!!! We also had 5 out of our 6 girls make the all-conference team. On the way to the golf course I had each girl tell me a hole that they remembered from the season where they played the hole great. It was interesting. Some girls talked about how they hit a bad shot but was then able to recover and get par on a hole. Some girls talked about hitting a long putt. I was surprised at what they remembered because I started to remember much more about each player’s success. I would add things like 'Do you remember when you birdied that hole or do you remember that beautiful shot you made into that par three?' Doing this exercise really made a difference. Also, the last thing I said was what my wife wrote on our mirror that morning 'Try your best and God will take of the rest.'Thanks again for your insights."

When I received his email I was excited but not surprised. I have found that one of the best ways to regain confidence is to recall past accomplishments and visualize success. Instead of focusing on your failures, you and your team can refocus on your successes. This breeds confidence, inspires hope and creates an expectation that you will once again be successful. After all, if you did it once then you can do it again.

This approach is not just for athletes. You can also do this at your school, in your business office, during a sales conference call or in any workplace. Inspire confidence in your team today. They need it more than you know.

How do you inspire confidence in your team? I’d love to hear your suggestions. Share your insights on our blog at www.jongordon.com/blog.

- Jon