FROM NERVES TO NERVE.
Do you aspire to compete?
How do you feel when you think about it?
Do you get worried, anxious? Maybe have a distinct lack of confidence around the subject?
At my academy we do not push the idea of competition; as the head coach, I stress that competition can be a great tool, it’s my belief that individuals should try to compete at least once at each belt, and we have a weekly session that forms part of our overall methodology devoted to the discussion of competition strategy, tactics and positional rounds, but it’s never emphasised as imperative or compulsory.
There are some that enjoy the idea and regularly test themselves in the arena while others, well, it’s simply not for them. There are also a silent few, that are noticeably intrigued – deep down they want to give it a go, they want to grasp the challenge, but something is holding them back and that something is confidence.
If that is you, then read on.
It’s worth adding in here that I am not going to present you a toolkit to develop confidence solely to compete in a jiu jitsu event but rather provide a framework for understanding what confidence is as an over-arching skill; and as a skill you should treat it – understand it, sharpen it.
Confidence isn’t something you tap into when it’s needed – it is not something you switch on and off. It’s not binary in that sense and there lies the misunderstanding of confidence, striving to be ‘confident’ for a moment is instant failure.
Whilst you can have the courage to be confident when there’s doubt, there is no picking and choosing to be confident.
Take a moment to think about this: do you radiate a level of confidence in one arena but not another? Maybe you’re a great public speaker, get you on a subject that you’re passionate about and you can command a whole room yet, parenting, no chance.
Are you a natural athlete and thrive on the pressure associated with performing yet, the thought of being vulnerable about your feelings terrifies you.
Fixate on this idea: being confident is a skill; skills can be practiced, developed and refined to ensure a level of proficiency that’s transferrable across many situations, with that in mind, confidence is an important ability that enables you to deal with all uncertainties or challenges.
WHAT CONFIDENCE IS NOT
First, confidence is not the absence of fear, fear is always present where growth resides.
Confidence is not knowing what to do all the time and, in every circumstance, rather it’s knowing you can handle it, and I don’t only mean the outcome; confidence is knowing you can handle the feelings after the event – good and bad, in both victory and defeat.
Ultimately, confidence is in entering the unknown and dealing with it.
At the macro-level, to have confidence, you must trust in yourself – develop micro-level skills that add to the larger picture that is Confidence.
Self-awareness is one such competence.
Awareness of your own thoughts, having agency over them and an aptitude to manage your thought patterns. An ability to navigate the mental tripwires and self-authored stories you tell yourself, cognizance of your inner-world, your internal dialogue, and how it can reinforce and subjugate.
Self-awareness requires you to expand your relationship with yourself, as most of the time, if you are truthful, you’re not afraid of a particular task, but troubled by the feelings associated with it.
Learn to slow down; sit with yourself, meditate, be mindful, journal and reflect; these are great tools to exercise and develop self-awareness.
Alongside self-awareness sits emotional regulation or self-discipline – keeping a toggle on your emotions – a micro-level discipline that again, adds to the bigger picture. Develop the expertise to recognise emotion within you, nobody likes to lose but it’s important to deal with a defeat with some self-assuredness. Emotional regulation doesn’t mean turning off emotions, rather it is to work with them, learn not to react but to respond.
Develop agency of your emotions.
Here, any kind of regular voluntary adversity is perfect: cold exposure, heat exposure, hard workouts, pushing yourself towards the darkness of fragility and coming back.
Hunt adversity and create your own daily interactions with it. Seek it, suffer it, sustain it.
Having discipline here and seeing it through also gives rise to a sense of accountability, which in turn builds confidence, grounding you to the moment that’s challenging. If you can learn to hold yourself to responsible action despite not wanting to, that’s accomplishment and holds a level of authenticity – you do what you say you’ll do, or you’ve put your mind to.
Realising that you have followed through on what you said when nobody was watching or when Instagram isn’t open builds a house of internal reliability.
Now, let’s look at the architecture associated with confidence and develop a roadmap for you to take that step towards your first competition.
A. CONFIDENCE THROUGH SELF-TRUST
Learn to trust yourself.
Confidence is cultivated over time; you can earn the ability to trust. Confidence is not just walking out knowing “I’ve got this”, that’s a level of arrogance, self-trust is about knowing you’ve put the time in over several weeks of effort towards this moment.
Self-trust is built in small instants, moments of solitude in your mind, where you’re able to trust you’ve turned up, followed through and accomplished.
This is not about thinking your great, there is a grounded sense that you can handle what comes next. Framed another way, your confidence is not based on the outcome of the competition (there is no losing or winning). Your internal integrity is built on small moments, where you’ve showed up and because of this there is trust that you’ll face that truth no matter how uncomfortable.
“I have done this [something difficult] therefore I can count on me”.
The first part of our Confidence Framework – Self-trust – is braced by aspects we have already touched upon and provides the third leg to our stool if you like.
- Self-awareness: Know Yourself
- Self-discipline: Control Yourself
- Self-confidence: Believe (Trust) Yourself.
Lock the above three in and have systems for each.
Example:
- Become aware of the negative aspects of your mind.
- Push yourself towards voluntary adversity as a training tool.
- Accumulate hard training sessions as proof to yourself.
B. CONFIDENCE EARNED THROUGH REPETITION
Build confidence through repetition.
The more familiar you are to a “challenge” for more comfortable it will be. Confidence is not imagined readiness; repetition forges a deep level of self-trust and any mantra holding the sentiment of “I’ve got this…” will only have substance if you have the repeated practice of moving through something you find hard or hate the thought of doing.
Confidence is earned through repetition, develop the habit of repetitions.
Deliberate repeated effort combines with self-talk but, how you speak to yourself via inner dialogue is paramount and it can serve you or sacrifice you.
Self-talk needs to be truthful: know you have the skills, know you have done the reps; if not, you are unconsciously undermining yourself and how you’ll perform.
True repeated effort and the knowledge you have done the work will carry you like you’re marching to a victory, without any need for false bravado, you’ll have knowledge, conviction and the Posture of a Champion.
C. CONFIDENCE THROUGH EMOTIONAL FLUENCY
Recognise that you’re not fearful of the competition but fear the feeling that thing (competition) will trigger. An unwillingness to face the challenge of jiu jitsu competition stems from you hating the associated anxiety; therefore, you won’t do the thing that makes you anxious.
Be honest with yourself, is what’s holding you back from competing simply the shame and uneasiness of losing?
Do you have an identity crisis? Ultimately, you fear what you feel.
Confidence comes from not only doing the thing (repetition of competing) but also learning to feel the thing and not flinching in response – emotional fluency is the ability to experience the whole.
Once you can captain your emotions in this sense, knowing you may well fail but can handle the feelings, you develop a sense of freedom to be more confident. Emotional fluency involves you being comfortable with the intensity of your internal state without letting it dictate your choice to engage.
The knowledge that your net worth isn’t entirely dependent on the result/outcome really does set you free.
D. CONFIDENCE THROUGH CLARITY OF IDENTITY
What’s the purpose of you entering a competition?
If your hesitant and apprehensive, appreciate that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds meaning. Get out of your own way!
Have some clarity on why you’re here in the first place, because when your outside matches what you hold close on the inside you have internal coherence, a level of drive and authenticity that underpins a confidence that you are what you say you are.
Without this clarity of identity, you’ll become riddled with self-doubt – the opposite of self-trust and the root of confidence.
Know what you are, what you want.
Know your why.
The alignment between your inside and out will foster the confidence to repeatedly move towards your challenge. Clarity of identity will extinguish the burdensome nature of repetition, and those repeats will compound, because your identity isn’t held up in the scoreboard anymore. You’ll begin bolstering your self-trust and enable emotional fluency, as you move through what once made you fearful. All of this will develop the discipline and self-awareness to deal with the thought patterns to go again.
GOING BEYOND CONFIDENCE
- Self-awareness: Know Yourself
- Self-discipline: Control Yourself
- Self-confidence: Believe Yourself
- Confidence through self-trust
- Confidence earned through repetition
- Confidence through emotional fluency
- Confidence through clarity of identity
If you harvest the framework from above, you’ll learn the skill of always having total confidence everywhere and begin to recognise the reality that desiring confidence before a task, before action is fragility – don’t become dependent on requiring confidence when you need it.
The most successful do not feel confident all the time, they just operate without the need to ‘feel’ confident, standing in the face of fear or uncertainty having built an inner freedom to contend.
Confidence isn’t about facing the task at hand; it’s about facing the task and knowing you can handle whatever happens next – you can still want to win but your identity is not bound by the outcome, it’s evolved confidence.
Adaptation is key, you must learn to evolve through setbacks, reframe problems, complete after-action reports, compose an honest Skills Sheet and learn to debrief with ‘Performance Postcards’.
- How did it go?
- What differences should I make?
- Where did I lose?
- Where did I win?
- What did I do better this time?
- What are the learning opportunities?
The Meta skill in all of this is presence; be here, fully here. Find the truth attached to the moment and act from your truth to develop the confidence to go again.
Confidence is not the need to feel worthy, real confidence isn’t about having it all figured out. Confidence is about slowly and steadily learning to trust yourself in the unknown.
Confidence is not the absence of fear, but feeling fear and still showing up, an ability to notice your doubts, notice your fears and staying in the room; of course, you want to win but you already feel whole.
Developing overarching sureness in the three areas I have laid out: knowing yourself, controlling yourself and believing yourself (using self-trust, repeating challenge, becoming emotionally fluid and adopting clarity) is a giant step away from Nerves to Nerve.
Start to think of your impending competition, not as an end-game endeavour but rather, your next intentional step towards being great.
If you like what you’ve read here, then I’m sure you’ll get a great deal from my latest eBook: Your Playbook for Performance.
It’s a forward-thinking, backwards planning effort to get you ready for competition, it considers every mental aspect associated with the day and distills advice down into 5 Skills of Focus: preparation, self-belief, team culture, stepping on and dealing with a loss.
Building a relationship and fostering the development of all these areas will enable you to navigate towards success. I’ll share five skills I have adopted and adapted over the past 30+ years to help myself and others realise their competitive goals. Allow me to help you create a posture that betters your capabilities in this aspect, one that readies you for competition.
