Basketball: Coaching Players' Confidence

Giving advice is a thankless business...a schoolgirl wrote, "Socrates was a Greek philosopher who went about giving people good advice. They poisoned him." And yet, here we are. (anecdote from Braude)

Coaches take players and teams where they cannot go alone. Growth spans physical, intellectual, spiritual (team), and psychological dimensions. Add value to get buy-in.  

Preparation. "Make practice hard so that games are easy." Prepared teams earn the right to be confident, believing in their execution. Do well what you do a lot. Kevin Eastman says defensively to "know your nos." Offensively, we might add "know your goes." Where are you looking to score? How do you press your advantage (power, perimeter scoring, cutting)? For example, the UCONN women look to score a third in transition, a third in sets, and a third in threes. 

Positive body language. Expansive body position raises feelings of power. To feel more powerful assume power positions. Initial work suggesting that occurred via hormonal mediation remains controversial. Amy Cuddy's initially well-received work was followed by fierce and overdone criticism, which she successfully rebutted. 

Language and self-talk. Henry Ford said, "Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right." Our strongest messages come internally. "I'll try" undermines "I will." When we message our team about being unworthy, lazy, or soft, we can't expect high performance. Dr. Jason Selk, author of Ten-Minute Toughness, counsels an identity statement (who we are) and a performance statement (how we do it). In your basketball notebook, log your successes and incorporate them into success worksheets.  

Mindfulness. Professional and Olympic athletes use mindfulness to leverage success. Author Tim Ferriss (Tools of Titans) shares that eighty percent of highly successful people he interviewed use mindfulness in their process. Mindfulness literally reorganizes brain structure and function, lowers blood pressure, and reduces blood pressure. Search Inside Yourself is an authoritative reference. 

The Confidence Equation. Wayne Goldsmith preaches the "confidence equation" a blend of self-belief and evidence. I strongly recommend his article. 

He argues that individuals have either high or low self-belief personalities. The low self-belief athlete needs more evidence (Bill Parcells says, "confidence comes from proven success") to elevate their confidence. Of course, this raises the chicken and egg dilemma, about the confident athlete having demonstrated prior success. 

Balancing authentic praise and constructive criticism challenges all coaches. We should remember that our words and their delivery profoundly affect those we coach. 

Lagniappe: 



Meng Tan facetiously named his program, SILLY, actually SIYLI, the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute. Mindfulness enhances productivity, confidence, and happiness.