How to Move From Belief Into The Kind of Confidence That Breeds Success
How to Move From Belief Into The Kind of Confidence That Breeds Success
In our last post, Belief and Hard Work are Actually Only Part of Athletic Success. Here’s Why.
we discussed the subjectivity of belief. We want to be a great athlete. We can believe that we will win the game, the championship, or go undefeated. But the truth behind belief will only take you so far.
Your belief may produce the right work ethic, a commitment to the team, and the grit needed to keep moving forward when the obstacles are too much. That’s still not enough. The key is transforming your belief into tangible, measurable, and objective proof through simulated execution.
That objective proof is in the execution and the confidence that comes from consistent and successful execution. In other words, putting the time into practice simulating the circumstances you will have to perform in. Then correct the errors, re-simulate, and prove to yourself, your teammates, and coaches that what you believe is a reality.
Simulating execution is the missing piece of the elite-hitting success equation for many. It converts subjective belief into objective confidence. For this reason, good coaches will make every effort to keep you grounded by not allowing your beliefs to grow past your execution. This important coaching action ensures you know the difference between what you believe you can do and what you can actually achieve. It’s important to ensure that belief is not misguided and that your confidence is not built on a false foundation. With coaches focusing on execution through simulations, you and your team are ensured that belief is backed up by performance, thus providing the foundation for successful execution when the game comes.
The examples below are a typical dialogue and progression of a hitter and coach turning subjective belief into objective confidence through proof of execution.
- “Hey, Johnny Hitter, I know you believe you can hit now that we have slotted your swing, but remember, you have only proven that you can develop a strong barrel-accurate swing in the cage. Now you will have to prove you can do it in intrasquad.”
- “Hey, Johnny Hitter, I know you believe you can go D1 now that we have finished bridging your swing, but remember you have only proven that you can stretch and condense your swing during intrasquad. Now you will have to prove it daily in the lineup.”
- “Hey, Johnny Hitter, I know you believe you can go pro now that you have learned approach strategies, but you have not earned anything yet. Now, you must prove you can execute them against Big Billy Hardthrower on Saturday.”
These reminders will burst a few bubbles and bruise a few egos. But it's the sobering reminder our players need that our game is performance-based. We measure performance in real-time with records, metrics, and statistics. These measurement tools are tangible data points whose sole purpose is to remove subjectivity and replace it with objectivity through simulated execution followed by game execution.
So today, let’s get very practical about what this looks like.
Learning execution through simulations.
Think for a moment about why you practice. There are many reasons. But one critical reason is to create game-like conditions in a controlled environment to measure your ability to execute.
For example, if you know you will face a hard thrower, you can’t just believe you can hit off him. You have to prove you can hit off him before you face him. We do this through simulations. If you know, you will face Big Billy Hardthrower in a week. We go to the cage, set the machine up at a similar velocity, and work on hitting that simulated velocity. If the hitter struggles, we look to see what we need to correct, work hard to make corrections, and then re-simulate against the same simulated high velocity in the cage. When you can successfully execute in the simulation, you have objectively proven your belief that you can hit Big Billy Hardthrower.
The result is skill development that leads to confidence, which produces success.
Confident competitors know what they can do because they have already proven it. They have simulated it in practice and then proved it in a game. They got a hit off that flamethrower, or one just like him, so they don’t need belief. They have confidence built on proof of simulated and game execution. They earned that proof by the only action that turns subjective belief into objective confidence–execution.
Mere belief breeds fear. Confidence creates excitement.
Many sports and activities have similar progressions from subjective belief to objective confidence. Take a mountain climber, for example, who only has experience climbing rock walls and a few 1000-foot faces. Now, let’s say the mountain climber is invited to climb Denali at Mount McKinley at 20,310 feet. To take on this new challenge, his belief system must reset, Why? Because there is little extension of his objective confidence from climbing small faces and rock walls to the magnitude of Denali.
His mountain climbing confidence is reduced to belief accompanied by belief’s everpresent symptoms: sweaty palms, sick stomach, and rubbery legs.
Now, he begins training. Two months, six months, or even a year of training to simulate the climb, failing, refining, and re-simulating. Over time, work, and numerous simulations executing his route, his belief morphs back into objective confidence.
When he looks at the mountain on the day of the climb, the same feelings of sweaty palms, sick stomach, and knocking knees arise, but because of the process of training, which turned belief into confidence through execution, his brain recognizes the symptoms differently. Instead of feelings of fear, they are feelings of excitement.
The symptoms of fear and excitement are the same. The difference is how your brain perceives them, which is completely based on whether you just believe or are entirely confident.
You will always feel fear when faced with the unknown or the overwhelming. But if you put into place a process to train, simulate, measure, fail, retrain, and re-simulate, the symptoms of fear associated with the belief you felt, in the beginning, will end up becoming feelings of confident excitement when it is time to compete.
Make no mistake. It’s all about the process.
There is a specific process all successful hitters engage in that allows them to reach the goals they believe they can achieve. This is why I am offering a free course that will teach you how to develop your objective confidence you need to become an elite-level hitter. The process goes by many names, but we call it the Individual Hitting Process (IHP). The IHP will help you:
- Develop fundamental mechanics of a strong barrel-accurate swing.
- Combine those mechanics into a fully-composed swing action.
- How to simulate game environments.
- Self-diagnose and self-correct your swing.
Remember, vision without execution is hallucination. A vision with no plan or strategy is nothing more than wishful thinking. The same is true in baseball. Whether player, parent, or coach–you can have talent, hope for talent, believe in yourself, your team, and your kids, working from sunup to sundown—without a plan, you simply waste your time.
For a deeper dive into content like this check out my book. “BASS The Path to Elite Level Hitting.”
See ya on the field.
Coach Leo
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