Why You Don’t Play Confident in Games — Even If You Outwork Everyone

Now, if you struggle with playing with confidence on the court, you've probably been told the same thing that I was told, which is, if you just work harder than everybody else, then you'll be more confident than them too. And so I heard that advice, and I trained harder than anybody else. I was in the gym for more time than anybody else that I knew, and I would feel great in those workouts, that I would get into games and I would freeze, I would second guess myself, I'd be unsure of what to do. The reality of it is that it sounds great. Just work harder than everybody put in the work, and you're going to be more confident. It sounds great, it sounds simple. But I think it's an oversimplified definition of what confidence actually is. And hard work is 100% necessary. You do have to work hard, but it doesn't guarantee confidence unless it's directed the right way. So when we get rid of the idea that confidence just comes from hard work, we can actually define what it is. Confidence is very simple. It is the belief that you have what it takes to be successful in a certain situation. A super simple example of this would be you're probably really confident in your ability to make a wide open layup. You're very confident because you believe that you have what it takes to succeed almost every single time when you have that open layup situation. But on the flip side of that, if you aren't sure you have what it takes to beat your defender to the basket, or you aren't sure you have what it takes to handle full court pressure, then you're not going to play with confidence in those situations because you're not sure you don't have complete belief in your ability to be successful. Successful. And that's why confidence is not something that you can fake. There's the whole myth out there that just fake it till you make it. But eventually, if you have fake confidence, you're gonna get exposed sooner or later because you don't truly have that belief. Confidence, something that maybe sometimes you can fake to the people around you, but deep down, you're always gonna know whether or not you have that belief in yourself. So when you understand this, how can you actually develop true confidence? Or otherwise known as the unshakable belief that you have what it takes to be be successful on the court. Here's three simple things that I've learned that will help you so much when it comes to developing that true confidence that you want when you play. Number one is that you have to have a very clear and definite purpose offensively. One of the biggest reasons why players play with a lack of confidence is because they don't know exactly what they're looking for. They don't know what opportunities to hunt, they don't know what opportunities to avoid. And so they kind of just go out and hope that something good happens to them on offense and they hope that they have a good day or that they find hide opportunities, but they don't know for sure. They just hope you have to go out with a purpose. Meaning I'm looking for this situation, I'm looking for this advantage to attack and I know that this is going to be the best chance for me to be successful when I look to be aggressive in those situations. And so when you do that, you now all of a sudden go out there not hoping that you find something or not hoping that you have opportunities, but knowing exactly what you want to do and, and because of that you're going to be more successful. So for example, looking for closeout situations or momentum advantages to attack, looking for opportunities to get out and run in transition, looking for opportunities for post ups both yourself, but also looking at like cutting whenever your teammate gets post touches, looking for other opportunities to backdoor cut or 45 cut and knowing exactly what's going to trigger those things and then knowing exactly how to utilize the most common actions like pin downs and ball screens and handoffs and knowing exactly what you want to get out of those actions. When you have purpose with those things, your confidence is going to be completely transformed because you're going to know exactly what you want to do and you're going to have a purpose and a focus when you play. If you want a resource that's going to help you develop all those things we just talked about right here, check out my free Basketball IQ Masterclass. That's the top link down below. We go into all the stuff that we just kind of mentioned right there and it's going to help you to go out there and play with purpose the very next time you play. You don't need any extra workouts or anything like that. You can take the stuff that you learn, apply it so that you have the confidence of going out and playing with purpose. Like I said, completely free. Top link in the description down below. The second thing that's going to help you to develop a higher level of confidence is understanding the 8020 rule when it comes to perfection. A lot of times players set the bar for themselves at perfect. They have to go out there and make every shot and never turn the ball over and never make the wrong decision. And if they mess up one time, you can see, sometimes they just take themselves out of the game. And maybe that's you. Maybe whenever you make a mistake or you look bad or you struggle, you just get in your mind that you're a failure and you're having a terrible day. You have to get away from having that perfectionist mindset. The best players in the world are imperfect guys like Steph Curry, LeBron James, Luka Doncic, all those guys make mistakes, they miss shots, they make the wrong decision, they turn the ball over. And yet a lot of players think that they're somehow the exception to that. They should go out there and set the bar at perfect. And then the bar is always at an unattainable level. So that means going back to our definition of confidence. If your definition of successful in a situation is that you never get it wrong and you never miss the shot, you never mess up, well, now you're telling yourself that you're, you're never successful. So now you can't be confident because you believe in your mind that you always have failed, you've never reached your goal, even though your goal has been unattainable for everybody. So that's why it's really important to get away from the idea that you should be perfect 100% of the time. You should make every shot, never throw the ball over, because nobody's like that. And not only is it unrealistic, but it's going to hurt you from a confidence perspective because you're, you're going to, it's going to kill your self belief that you can accomplish the goals that you set for yourself. So you have to be able to accept the fact that you are not going to be perfect and you're not going to perform perfectly. And that's a hard thing for a lot of players to do, really. Here's the general rule of thumb. You need to assume that about 20% of the time things are going to go bad for you. 20% of the time you're going to make a bad mistake and going to make the wrong decision. Things are just not going to work out, you're going to get unlucky, and that's just how it is. And every player in the world is dealing with that same idea, that 20% of the time, no matter what you do or don't do, things just aren't going to work out for you. So when you go into a game and all of a sudden you turn the ball over it doesn't affect you as much. You're able to move on and play really hard the next possession because you understand that stuff that's bad just happens sometimes. That's just the way it is. Instead of holding yourself to that goal of perfection, hold yourself to the idea that you need to just really focus on that 80%. The 80% that you, you can be great in, be great in that. And while all these players are focused on being at 100% and in reality it's killing them when you're focused on, hey, I gotta be great 80% of the time. The funny thing is you're probably going to be more successful than those players who are holding themselves to that 100 standard because there's going to be all this other stuff going on in their mind. Meanwhile, you're looking, learning to accept the fact that you're not going to be perfect, that things aren't always going to work out. And because of that, you're able to be way more present in the present moment and focused on just being as good as you can be. And that's going to lead to you being not just more successful, but more confident overall. The third thing that's so important to do if you want to develop true confidence is to be able to show up. And this seems super simple, but a lot of times it's the simple things that we overlook. The players who succeed are the ones who show up over and over and over and over again. Regardless of whether or not yesterday was a great day or a terrible day. They show up the same exact way the next day as if nothing happened the day before. They just show up and they do it again. You had a terrible shooting night, you show up at practice the next day and you carry on as if it was a great shooting day. Players who are able to do that and show up and not say, ah, man, I was, I was terrible. I guess I'm going to, you know, take a step back from trying as hard or working as hard or doing as much as I was trying to do beforehand. The players who were inconsistent with their, their ability to show up and not just showing up for a physical perspective, but being able to show up and give that same amount of effort that they can give. The players who can do those things are the ones who are going to be successful and who are going to win long term. If you commit to following your training plan, sticking to the habits that you know are going to make you successful no matter how you feel, feel or how things have gone if you commit to sticking to that, you're going to win the long run. The crazy thing is that most people don't fail because they're not good enough or because they're failures. They fail because they just stop showing up eventually. Whether it be physically like showing up at all, or they stop showing up in terms of giving that same amount of effort that they once were. Those are the people who usually end up failing. So if you commit to being able to show up every single day, that itself is going to breed a ton of confidence for you. Knowing that you can overcome any bad performance and you can build on any good performance because you know that nothing is going to kill you, nothing's going to take you out because you're able to get up and show up the next day. I've seen these three things help so many players transform their confidence on the court. Like I mentioned, if you want a resource that's going to help you to develop some of that purpose offensively, check out the the Basketball IQ Masterclass link down below. We also get into a little bit more when it comes to mindset and confidence as well. Two more things we can talk about in this but I think really important to know. So like I said, completely free. Make sure you check that out. Appreciate you for watching. Talk soon. Peace.