On Confidence, Navigating Chaos and Overcoming Our Fears

Over the past two years, The Daily Coach has spoken to dozens of coaches and keynote speakers about building confidence, navigating fast-moving situations and performing under pressure.

For this week’s Saturday Blueprint, we put together some of the best thoughts from our guests.

On Confidence:

You use the phrase “Adjusted confidence and innocence.” What is that to you? 

I didn’t have any thoughts of coming in here and building something that’s never been done before. I didn’t go into it like that. I went into it like, “I’ve got confidence in myself. I have a work ethic. I’m going to lean on other people for help. I’m not going into this situation unknowing. I’m going in with a realistic approach of, ‘If I put my head down and stay in my lane and do it to the best of my ability, then I have confidence this will work out at some point in time.’”

I didn’t build up these false expectations that I think some people get lost in. I just wanted to make this program as good it possibly could be. If it’s only as good as being mid-range, then that’s what it is.

I believe in karma. I didn’t want to think that I had this figured out. I didn’t have anything figured out. I was just trying to build as a coach and build the players around us and create an environment that could help other people be good.

-Tim Corbin, Vanderbilt baseball coach

You’ve worked with the Tampa Bay Rays, the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Browns and have developed some pretty original views on performance. One of these is that you feel confidence is overrated.

A lot of people say, “I want to be more confident.” I often ask in response, “Have you ever been really confident and performed poorly? Have you ever had no confidence and performed really well?” They say yeah. To me, the amount of confidence you have is not an accurate predictor of future success. I get it. We’d rather have it than not. But what I don’t want is an athlete who doesn’t have confidence going into a game thinking they can’t perform.

I was working with another professional athlete who was working on a new technique and was really struggling, to the point where if people were to see him, they wouldn’t have believed he was a professional. I go up to him after and say, “Do you ever worry that working on something new is going to rock your confidence?” He goes, “I didn’t do that to build my confidence. I practice to build my competence and I let the confidence follow.”

People who are focusing on just building confidence are essentially grabbing air. You can’t control the level of your confidence. You can control the effort you put in every day and focus on the present to get better on a drill. We don’t focus on feelings or how much confidence we have or don’t have. We focus on our level of preparation, which is something we have 100 percent control over.

-Justin Su’a, organizational performance development coach 

You’re a big believer that your identity and self-worth can’t be tied to your performance and results. How do you shift away from rooting your identity in what the scoreboard says?

Let’s think about it in terms of confidence. If your confidence goes up or down based on the performance, you have to ask, “Are you very confident?” If one bad shot can bring it down, are you really confident? The answer is no.

Whether you do right or wrong, your confidence has to remain the same. Your process before you take the shot has to be right.

In the life context, if my identity, who I am and what I bring to the table is contingent on performance, what happens when my performance is taken away? My value drops like a stock. That tells me I’m not very confident in who I am. It’s when our identity, value and worth are separate from our performance that we find who we are.

The way we get to this place and move from a performance-based identity to a purpose-based identity is to find ourselves in something bigger than ourselves, something that can’t be taken away by injury or consequence or someone else’s choice. Who I am is independent of my performance. Those are things like faith, tradition, core values. Those things are rock solid and bigger than me so when I make a mistake, they’re not at threat. 

-Stephen Mackey, keynote speaker and best-selling author

On navigating chaos:

You mentioned that when you step into certain procedures, you encounter a great deal of uncertainty. Are there main questions you try to ask or what’s the key to bringing stability to a fast-moving, chaotic situation in your eyes?

At times, you just don’t know what to do. You want to look it up in a book or ask a friend or call somebody, but you just don’t have time. You simply have to do something.

There’s a story I read about some European soldiers in World War II who were in the mountains during winter, and snow was all over the place, to the point the mountains had become impassable. They didn’t know which way to go. Supplies were dwindling, morale was dropping. Then, one of the folks says, “Look! I found a map! I know the way out. This is it. We’re going down!” They started walking through the snow down the side of a mountain. It was a long haul that took a day or two. But they made it. When they got down, somebody asked, “How did you find that map?” The soldier said, “I didn’t have a map. We were all going to die up there, and I knew our only hope was to go.” He had to make a decision and just go with it.

At times, you’re looking at somebody’s heart that stopped. You’ve got about four options and can only do one of them. You’ve just got to say, “This is what we’re going to do now. You, do that. You, go here. You, stand here, give me that knife.”

The concept of the insanity of indecision is real. You might have several things that are equally attractive to do or to say or to plan, but you’ve got to choose one. You just have to go with it. 

-Dr. Curtis Tribble, University of Virginia Medical Center surgeon

You didn’t have a soccer background at all. What stands out to you the most from those early weeks in branding a sports franchise?  

It went from disbelief to belief in about an hour because he asked me and another gentleman to go with him to New York when he bought the team from A.G. That was probably the most challenging 45 days of my professional career, going from marketing and selling cans to, “Go figure out how the Red Bulls are going to play here in 45 days in the home opener when I come back in April.”

It was tough as nails, but it was also so rewarding to see it come together. I didn’t play soccer. I didn’t know soccer. To me, it was the power of setting this ambition, an almost impossible goal, and finding a way. We found a way working with Adidas and everyone else to change everything from ticket stock to the paint in the locker rooms, all the merchandise and gear. We had a great event and locked in Shakira, Rihanna, Wyclef Jean. We had Pelé there. 

It reminds me as a leader to continually set ambitious targets for your team and hold them accountable to them. There’s always a way to find a solution if you have the right people.

-Marc de Grandpré, New York Red Bulls president

On overcoming our fears:

In your book, you share some interesting views on failure and its connection to toughness.

A real competitor acknowledges that he/she can lose. If you’re going into a game or competition, you’re laying it on the line and you’re endeavoring to win, but you have to acknowledge that the competitor across from you is doing the same thing. Whether you play well, don’t play well or whatever, you can lose. You have to accept this. How you behave afterwards is indicative of your competitive nature.

I think it’s an important thing in dealing with competitiveness. You’re going to fail, but are you going to beat yourself up for it or accept, “I failed. Why did I fail and what do I have to do so this doesn’t happen again?” 

-Jay Bilas, ESPN college basketball analyst

You went on to serve as a senior National Security advisor, where one of your responsibilities was briefing the vice president. I heard you say in another interview you felt some anxiety being in some of the rooms you were in. How did you overcome that?  

It could be quite intimidating. Imagine being 28 years old, I’m the only person who looks like me, and I’m going to brief the Vice President of the United States and members of his team. 

I moved past it by No. 1, grounding myself on a fact I learned early in my military career: It’s O.K. if they don’t like you. It’s O.K. because I remind myself I don’t like everybody I meet.

No. 2, I remind myself I’m capable and I’m confident. My credentials are evidence of that.

I also have a small group of personal confidants I can call and talk to and say I may be having a crisis of confidence. They’ll remind me of a time I really nailed it to move past that anxiety. 

The last thing I do is I just shift my focus and think, “Who else might be feeling the same way?” Maybe if I can pull them along, we can help each other at the same time. 

-Brittany Masalosalo, HP Inc. chief public policy officer, former Senior National Security Advisor

You’re a big believer in having a specific plan for handling failure. Where did that come from and what does a good failure plan look like?

I heard about contingency planning from a former military officer. They don’t plan to hit a land mine, but if they do, every single person in the vehicle knows what they’re doing. I thought that was so fascinating and it basically breaks down to are we being proactive or reactive?

We’re all guaranteed to hit land mines, whether it’s family, travel, exhaustion, injury, bad performance, fans, somebody gets promoted and you don’t. The list is endless. How are we going to handle that?

If you have tools in your toolbox to handle high-stress situations, low-stress situations, really successful situations, then when we’re faced with these, we can go straight to our toolbox instead of going through the process of what I experienced, accepting it, trying to find a solution.

We don’t want to fail, but if you’re playing baseball and think you’re not going to fail, you’re being delusional. It’s all a matter of who can get over the failure quickest. If we already have a plan before the failure happens, I like our odds.

-Hannah Huesman, mental performance coach

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