Confidence in sports can be quite fragile. It’s easy to have your confidence drop after a bad game or a string of bad games.
However, confidence is also crucial to your success. Which means, if your confidence does drop, we need a way for you to rebuild your confidence after a bad game.
Below, I have outlined a strategy you can use to rebuild your confidence after a bad game. But before we get into the strategy, let’s examine why confidence drops following a bad game in the first place.
Why Confidence Drops After a Bad Game
I can remember many times in college waking up the day after a bad game and feeling like I didn’t even want to get out of bed. My confidence was shot and I was embarrassed to even show up to practice.
My entire mood changed, all because of a poorly played baseball game.
Have you ever felt something similar?
It’s natural to feel down after a bad game. Especially when you hold yourself to a high standard as a player. You expect yourself to play a certain way, and it’s frustrating when you don’t live up to those expectations.
Going into practices and then into my next game, I doubted myself. I questioned whether or not I could hit or field and I often over-analyzed my mechanics.
Where did all this doubt come from? What happened to the confidence I had before the bad game?
When we play poorly, confidence drops because the most recent performance validates that we’re not good enough. The memory is that of failing.
This is what happens when we focus on the negatives. Negatives lead to doubt because what you see is you messing up and failing. When those are the images in your mind, there is no place for confidence to live.
When doubt takes over, fear begins to form.
How a Drop in Confidence Leads to Fear & Worry
When you have a bad game and the bad game leads to a drop in confidence, it’s easy for fear and anxiety to form.
After I had a bad game and was feeling down on myself, I played scared. I didn’t want to have another equally bad game or a worse game.
Unfortunately this fear led to worry which led to more mistakes and poor play.
When we play with fear we play to avoid. This is where you find yourself playing hesitantly during games and holding yourself back.
In the field, I hoped the ball wouldn’t be hit to me. I was scared walking up to the plate. And many times I found my legs literally shaking as I stood in the batter’s box.
All of this fear and worry was fueled by my lack of confidence. Confidence that dropped simply due to a bad game.
I share all of this to illustrate the importance of responding well to bad games. If you don’t, what will follow is fear, anxiety, and worse and worse performances. This is where you find yourself spiraling into a slump that is difficult to climb your way out of.
Strategy to Rebuild Confidence After a Bad Game
With this strategy, our goal is to go from having a bad game to having confidence going into your next game.
If you can have a stable level of confidence going into your next game, you won’t see one bad game lead into two or three. Since you are no longer allowing your previous bad game to impact your confidence as severely.
To rebuild your confidence after a bad game, we want to follow four steps. These four steps will begin immediately following the bad game and take you into your next game.
Step #1: Evaluate Your Game
When a bad game tears down your confidence, it does so because of your focus being on the negatives. Now this is natural, since the mistakes you made and negatives of your performance are what stand out the most when you think about the game.
However, when you focus so much on the negatives, this opens you up to being too critical of yourself and getting down on yourself. This form of negative thinking does nothing but lower your confidence.
The mistakes happened, though. You did play poorly. So it’s not realistic for you to completely forget about what happened or tell yourself it was a good game if it wasn’t.
So we don’t want to dwell on the negatives but we also cannot pretend like they’re not there…so what should we do?
Well, this is where a good evaluation process comes into play.
When you evaluate your game, you do so with two goals in mind: build confidence and improve.
No matter how well or poorly you played, we know you need confidence moving forward. Confidence that comes from seeing what you did well.
The first part of the post-game evaluation is looking at what you did well during the game. Try to find 3-5 positives from the performance.
Yes, this will be difficult if you played poorly. But it is a necessary first step to the evaluation process.
Next, you want to examine your mistakes. Not in the normal negative way. Rather, in a way where you examine them with the intent to improve.
This is where you ask yourself, What can I learn from today?
When you think about your mistakes with the goal of improving and learning from them, we begin to turn mistakes into a productive part of your game instead of them being a reason you played poorly…and a reason for your confidence to drop.
Step #2: Focus on Improving During Practice – NOT Being Perfect
After I had a bad game, my focus would be on perfecting my swing or my fielding. In my head, if I could be perfect during practice, that was how I would manage to bounce back the next game.
Unfortunately, this pressure to be perfect during practice did nothing but increase stress and tension and cause worse play. Then, since I wanted to be perfect in practice, I would get down on myself, only worsening the doubt I was already experiencing.
When you have a bad game, you don’t need to be perfect in practice in order to bounce back. Trying to be perfect will only lead to more anxiety and more mistakes.
The goal of step one was to begin building confidence by focusing on what you did well, and then taking any mistakes you made and learning from them.
The way you then take what you learned and apply it during practice is what step two covers.
Be careful not to go into practices demanding perfection from yourself. Don’t expect everything to feel perfect in order for you to feel confident about your mechanics and play. It won’t feel perfect. And wanting it to will only worsen the confidence you have.
Instead of demanding perfection, focus on improving. Work to get better day by day. Even if that means you’re making small improvements, that’s fine. The goal here is we want to take away any unnecessary pressure.
When athletes focus on improving instead of being perfect, they give more attention to how they actually improve instead of judging themselves and judging their performance during practice.
Feeling like you need to be perfect during practice leads to more self-criticism and lower levels of confidence.
Step #3: Visualize During the Week
When you have a good game, the reason confidence is high going into your next game is because success is on your mind. The most recent experience you’ve had was one of you playing well. As a result, confidence is high that you can play well again.
The same is true for when you have a recent bad game. Since your most recent experience is one of you playing poorly, confidence will be low going into your next game.
When we want to rebuild confidence after a bad game, we need to leverage the idea of seeing yourself succeed and having the memory of success fresh on your mind. We know that reality is working against us, since your recent memory is one of you playing badly.
We can use visualization to generate the memory of success throughout the week.
Between games, your goal needs to be to imagine yourself playing well as much as possible.
After a bad game, it’s easy to keep thinking about the bad game over and over again. But all you’re doing is performing a negative visualization where you imagine yourself playing badly.
If I were to ask you to visualize yourself making mistakes throughout the week, do you think this would be a good recipe for confidence going into your next game?
Unfortunately, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you keep thinking about all the mistakes you made.
We need to change that. The way we change it is by using visualization throughout the week.
Before practices and before bed, visualize yourself playing well. Focus on situations in which you made mistakes in the previous game and do your best to see yourself succeed in the situations in the safety of your mind.
Step #4: Focus on Positive Self-Talk as the Game Begins
Up to this point we have covered what you want to do post game and what you can do throughout the week to rebuild confidence for your next game. Now it’s time to focus on what’s going through your mind as the next game begins.
When you’re coming off a bad game, what kinds of thoughts do you have going into the next game?
Do you think things like, “I hope I don’t play badly again,” or, “I have to play well today?”
Those types of thoughts increase stress and lead to you trying to force a good outcome.
The way we think has a direct impact on how confident we feel. If we can manage the types of thoughts we have going into a game, we can work to build a higher level of trust and confidence.
What you want to do is use a self-talk list before the game begins. This is a list of confident statements you read to yourself to prime your mind to think in a confident way.
After you’ve read your list, you want to keep telling yourself confident thoughts as much as possible. And when you notice yourself having any negative thoughts, quickly recognize them and then reframe them into positive and confident thoughts.
If you can keep your mind positive and thoughts confident, chances are your confidence will rise.
If your thoughts are negative and you think a lot about not wanting to mess up, fear and anxiety will form and confidence will decrease.
The last step to rebuilding your confidence after a bad game is to pay attention to the types of thoughts you have as the next game begins.
Final Thoughts
It’s easy to have your confidence drop after a bad game.
Since your most recent memory of you playing is of you playing badly, it’s natural to have failure on your mind.
But the more you think about how badly you played and the more you worry about not playing badly again, the lower your confidence will drop.
To rebuild your confidence after a bad game, there is a four step strategy you want to follow:
- Evaluate the game.
- Focus on improving during practice – not being perfect!
- Visualize throughout the week.
- Focus on self-talk as the game begins.
By going through this process, you will be working to approach the next game with confidence instead of approaching it with fear, anxiety, and doubt.
Thank you for reading and I wish you the best of success in all that you do.
