About the author:

Alex Bolowich is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and founder of Elite Mental Performance and Co-Founder of Ibex Tactics. Alex is based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, where he specializes in working with athletes and teams to help them perform in the most intense situations, building practices for sustained excellence at elite levels like the NCAA, MLS, NBA, and more. If you are interested in any of his signature programs, use the link here! Enjoy the article below!

Athletic Confidence: The Myths, Traps, and Harsh Truths On How To Build It

Confidence is one of the most common mental challenges athletes face, and often the most frustrating. For any athlete to build true, lasting confidence that holds up under pressure, they must understand what confidence actually is, recognize the version they're currently experiencing, and know the brutal truth about how to build it and what it takes to maintain it.

Buckle up. You might not like everything you're about to read, but if you actually want to fix this, you need to hear it.

You're Not Alone (But That Doesn't Make It Suck Less)

You've been at the top of your game, maybe for years. Then suddenly, the wheels come off. You start underperforming. You get benched. Cut. Traded. Injured. It hits you like a tidal wave, leaving you confused, frustrated, and second-guessing everything.

Do I even have what it takes anymore?

What if I fail? What if I make a mistake?

What's everyone going to think of me? What's the storyline going to read?

You've trained for thousands of hours, poured blood, sweat, and tears into this sport, and now you're stuck. And here's the kicker: most of the time, it's because you built your confidence on a fractured foundation that just now got exposed. It's been cracking silently for a while, you just didn't notice until the ground gave way.

The 5 Confidence Traps (AKA The Bear Pit You've Been Standing Over)

So many athletes are standing on trap doors, just waiting for the harsh reality of competitive athletics to drop them into a pit of doubt. Let's expose the five biggest confidence traps right now:

1️⃣ Status: "I play at a D1 university. I'm on a pro team. I'm the starter."
Cool. And if you lose that starting spot tomorrow? Then what?

2️⃣ Statistics: "I was the leading rusher in the league last year."
In cutthroat leagues, no one cares what you did yesterday. They care what you can do today and tomorrow. And when you start rushing poorly... then what?

3️⃣ Praise: "Coaches and teammates tell me I'm HIM."
The same people who praise you today will criticize you tomorrow. Then what do you have?

4️⃣ Physicality: "I'm the biggest, fastest, strongest one out here."
You might work hard, but you inherited genetics. They were given, not earned. And when someone younger, faster, and stronger comes up out of nowhere... then what?

5️⃣ Performance: "I'm confident when I play well. But when I don't, I lose it."
It's easy to feel confident after a good game. Every athlete can do that. But you're going to have bad games. Then what? Will your belief still be there?

Here's the harsh truth: If your confidence is created by something or someone other than you, it can be taken away. If it comes fast (good game), it can leave fast (bad game). None of these sources are fully in your control. They're external. They're outcomes. They're traps.

So what's a more meaningful way to build confidence? First, let's talk about what NOT to do.

The Misinformation Crisis (Or: Stop Listening to Lying Sacks of You-Know-What)

There's a tsunami of garbage advice on the internet and social media, making confidence look easy: "Here are 3 simple ways to get your confidence back!"

If confidence were that simple and that easy, why wouldn't everyone do it?

At Elite Mental Performance, we have a saying: "If your skills and physical capabilities took time to build, why wouldn't your mind? Whatever can be quickly gained can be quickly gone."

There are no tips, tricks, or hacks to confidence. Anyone who promises you otherwise is a lying sack of you-know-what, and they can kick rocks. It's unethical and dishonest.

My personal favorite piece of trash advice? "Fake it 'til you make it." The idea that you can "trick" yourself into being confident by shouting affirmations at yourself in the mirror. Think about it: if your friend is being fake with you, do you trust them? No. So if you're faking it to yourself by saying "I'm awesome. I'm a good player. I got this," but you don't deeply believe it, will you trust yourself? Also no.

However... (and I cringed writing this, but bear with me) there IS one way "faking it" can help build confidence. More on that later.

The 5 Brutal Truths About Confidence

Ready for what you actually need to hear? Here it is:

1️⃣ It's Earned, Not Given

Stop waiting for your teammates, coaches, and anyone else to believe in you before you believe in yourself.

2️⃣ It's Earned With TIME UNDER TENSION

Just like building muscle. When you lift weights, what's happening? The weight puts stress on your muscle through gravitational pull in one direction, and you resist by going in the opposite direction. Over reps, sets, and consistent weeks to months, you build strength.

For confidence, that means we NEED some doubt and self-questioning. It's healthy and NECESSARY for you to build lasting confidence.

Most athletes stop at the first sign of doubt and don't address it. They avoid it. That's cowardly. Lifting the weight requires looking your inner critic in the eye and acting on it anyway.

3️⃣ You Don't "Win" or "Arrive" at Confidence

It's an infinite game. As soon as you stop being intentional about building it, you're right back to leaving it up to chance, which is what got you reading this article in the first place.

It's like staying fit. You don't get fit and then stop exercising. You have to keep earning it to maintain it.

4️⃣ Being A Confident Person Is More Essential Than Being A Confident Player

If you build your entire identity and foundation on your ability to put the ball in the hoop, run fast, or out muscle someone, what's going to happen when you live 80% of your life post retirement?

You will go into a new field with no experience. Your sports skills don't matter. Even if you became a coach. Some of the best players suck at coaching.

Being a player is an extension of who you are. Therefore, being a confident person helps you be a confident player. Being a confident player does not make you a confident person.

5️⃣ It's a Nicety Not a Necessity

When you're focused on being confident to get yourself to do something (take the shot, commit to the tackle, give full effort) then you're wasting time and energy.

Your focus can only point in one direction. And if it's pointed at how you're feeling it's internal, it's not pointed into what you're doing in your competition which is external (where your focus should be).

Being confident makes it EASIER for you to externally focus. But nonetheless, if you can recognize you feel unsure of yourself, but not let that dictate your focus, energy and commitment to actions, that's mental control. And control is a far greater strength than confidence. Evy Pompouras, former CIA agent says it best in the video below:

Identify Your Confidence Code

Now you know what the brutal truths of confidence, what the traps are, and what bullcrap on the internet to ignore. Let's identify which challenge you're actually facing:

Which sounds more like the doubt you feel?

1️⃣ "I'm not sure I have what it takes at this level." Simply put: "I don't know if I can..."

2️⃣ "I know I can do it, but what if I fail?"

3️⃣ "My teammates and coaches don't like me, and I feel small because of that," or "Who am I without my sport?"

The first one is about confidence or "self-efficacy"—the belief that you can execute at the desired level.

The second is about fear—you know (not think) you have what it takes, but there's a fear of the consequences if you fail.

The third is about self-image—feeling secure in who you are as a person.

For clarity, the rest of this blog focuses solely on the first example. While options 2 and 3 may FEEL like confidence issues, they're not. They're about confronting with inner fears and insecurities.

Newsflash: we all have those. It doesn't make you weak. It's what makes you human. Being fearful and insecure is not the same as having fears and insecurities. The difference lies in how you handle them, or how they handle you.

Okay, back to confidence.

What IS Confidence, Actually?

We've heard "confidence is a choice." Is it? Can you just snap your fingers and say, "Oh, shoot, duh, why not be confident? Yeah, let's do that."

Is it a thought? Do you just start thinking confidently?
Is it a feeling? To feel confident in oneself?
Is it an action? To act confidently even if you don't feel confident?

You can see why so many people struggle to conceptualize it, why there's mountains of research on this, and why it's deeper than you'd imagine.

Here's how we define it:

✅ Confidence = Self-Belief + Self-Trust 💪

Let's break that down.

Trust = Behavior × Time

Do you trust that you can walk up the stairs? Yes. Why? Because you've done it a million times. That's how we build trust—behavior multiplied by time.

That's why a lot of coaches and athletes suggest "putting in the work" or "getting the reps," and they build their confidence from that. It's more sustainable. They've proven through bottom-up processing (using physiology to influence psychology) that they have what it takes. Trust is an embodied knowing, not thinking.

Remember how I said "fake it 'til you make it" doesn't work? Here's the one way it can: if you feel the doubt but perform as if you're confident, you'll make a shot, an assist, a big-time play, and that will be PROOF in the presence of TENSION that you have what it takes. Faking confidence to yourself in your head doesn't work. But playing as if you're confident and then getting the success? That works.

Belief = The Inner Dialogue That You're Capable

The harder something seems or the further away it is, the more belief is required. If you have zero experience flying a plane, you have no trust. Therefore, if someone asked you to fly it, you'd need a heck of a lot of belief you can. (Please don't try that.)

This is an act of faith in yourself. It was easy for you to do when you were six years old and dreamt of being an Olympian. Why? You didn't have enough life experience to see how hard the road is. We typically start with very high levels of belief, like a full gas tank. Then we have an injury. We see a teammate get cut. We realize we only have a couple years to make the top team. Those experiences start to empty the tank, if we let them.

Competitive athletics over time is NATURALLY designed to get you to question yourself. Because every next year and every next level, it's a filter system, with less athletes standing. You're inside that filter system and it's designed to get you to wonder if you're going to be the next one cast out of the game.

Therefore, confidence is a combination of trust (built in the past) and belief (faith in the future).

The higher your trust is, the less you need to believe in yourself, and vice versa. That's why you can't shortcut the reps. But nothing in competitive sports will ever be as easy as walking up the stairs, so you have to practice building trust the right way AND backing yourself up (belief) in the face of doubt.

Here's how to do it:

Trust Building: Get Concentrated and Specific

We need to keep building proof to ourselves. Here's one way to get started (this doesn't apply for everyone, but maybe you can tweak it to fit you):

The Action Plan:

1️⃣ Identify one strength and one weakness in your game that have THE HIGHEST RETURN ON YOUR PERFORMANCE (i.e., the most RELEVANT strength and weakness).

2️⃣ Create 30 minutes of additional training on EACH of those skills (1 hour total).

3️⃣ Do that exact training 2x/week for one month.

Get concentrated and specific. After a month, tweak the sessions to add more variety and depth to the skill.

Example: A soccer player working on weak-foot passing at 10-20 yards with the inside of their foot. After a month, lengthen the pass, hit passes while moving at full speed, etc.

Belief Building: Why Not You?

There's many personal ways to build belief that are unique to you. But here is a common approach we use at Elite Mental Performance.

Think about what would get you to question, "Do I have what it takes?"

Maybe you're experiencing something new you haven't seen before, you just made it into the league and you're not starting, but in college, you were the stud. You question yourself.

Good. We've got our mental weight. "Do I have what it takes?"

Now ask yourself: "Why not me?"

Let's go deeper. Has someone else before you already accomplished what you want to? How many have done that? Were they born with something you weren't that got all of them there?

Some may be more athletic. Some might be luckier. Some might have better aim. But there have been others who have exactly what you have, maybe even less, and they made it.

So why not you?

The next level (which we don't have time for in this blog) is to focus on and understand your identity, what makes you... you. Your character strengths, your talents, your journey, all coming together. Focus on what you BRING, not what you LACK.

Final Word

I hope this brought you clarity on confidence, the traps to avoid, who NOT to listen to, and how to build the trust and belief you need for the rest of your career (and life).

This isn't easy work. It's not supposed to be, or everyone would be strutting around (without faking it). But if you actually want lasting confidence that holds up when the pressure's on, this is the path.

Now get to work.

Want to work together? Want a coach that will be honest with you and not give you the fluffy sunshine rainbow stuff other people are trying to sell you? Apply for a consultation to see if we're a good fit!