Mindset Mondays- Where does Confidence come from?

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Today I want to talk about confidence. Why are some wrestlers so confident and where does confidence come from? I think Jesse Delgado in the clip above nails it. Two words stuck out to me; time and energy.

Let’s take it one word at a time, which the first word happens to be “time.” Time is a period or an interval between two connecting events. In wrestling, those two connecting events could be the beginning of your wrestling career and the end of it, or it could be the first day of practice for the season and your first match. What you do in that period of time determines an outcome, but it also determines your confidence. That period of time between events is called your training, and in your training, you are given an opportunity to erase doubt. When you erase doubt, you become confident. You become confident that you will have more stamina than your opponent because you did extra conditioning. You become more confident that you are stronger than your opponent because you were in the weight room multiple times a week. I could go on about your diet and other areas involved in wrestling as well, but the idea is to erase the doubt and replace it with confidence because of the time that you put in.

One of those other areas in your training that is very important is practice and technique, which also bring me to our second word, and that is “energy.” Energy is the amount of effort and focus that you put into an activity. So in wrestling practice while working on technique, you can choose how much energy you put in. You can choose to put in little effort and focus and over time will give you little confidence in that technique. Another option would be to put in a lot of effort and focus, which turns into a lot of confidence in your technique. The more confident you are in your techniques, the more you will score.

That brings us back to the original question, where does confidence come from? Confidence is a controllable mental aspect of wrestling, and it comes from the choices that a wrestler makes when deciding how much time and energy he or she decides to put in.