By: Matthew Gonzalez, Ph.D., CMPC
Coffee holds a special place in my heart. In addition to helping me kick start most of my mornings, working as a barista at Starbucks was my first “real” job, it’s far and away my wife’s favorite beverage, and it’s long been my favorite way to connect with others.
I’ve made and drank thousands of cups of coffee and spent many years studying and applying sport and performance psychology; often doing these things at the same time. In that time, I’ve noticed a few surprising similarities between the process of making a good cup of coffee and developing robust confidence, and wanted to share with you some of my reflections.
Before reading on, take a moment to think of a domain of your life where you are working on developing more robust confidence. Hold that in your mind as you read and reflect along the way.
Quality In, Equals Quality Out.
As with most things in food and cooking, the quality of the starting ingredients will play a substantial role in the final product. The technique applied to any ingredient might be flawless, but flawless technique applied to garbage often just results in flawless garbage.
When making coffee, if you start with pre-ground beans that have gone stale, it doesn't matter how good the water is, the coffee won't taste as good as hoped.
Conversely, if you have great beans, they will be spoiled with the use of poor-tasting water. If both ingredients are of good quality, this is where the magic can begin. And if both ingredients are of poor quality… then you end up with whatever is sold at your local gas station.
For our simplified discussion, we might consider a couple of main “ingredients” to build confidence. These ingredients are growth opportunities and successes. Just like our beans and water, if either of these two ingredients are low-quality, then we can likewise expect the result to be limited and/or unstable confidence.
Growth opportunities are much like coffee beans. A good growth opportunity has temporarily pushed you beyond your current capability and has quite possibly resulted in a moment of failure. Like coffee, failure has a bitter quality to it.
But the final product depends on this key ingredient. After all, we cannot get coffee without coffee beans; as such, we can’t develop confidence without exposure to failure.
So, what does a high-quality growth opportunity look like? First and foremost, a high-quality growth opportunity will lie beyond the periphery of your comfort zone. That isn’t to say that you can’t grow within your comfort zone, but the returns will be limited. The growth will be stale so to speak.
Indeed, the building of robust confidence REQUIRES frequent excursions outside of one’s comfort zone. You can build a limited sense of confidence within your comfort zone, but once pressure is experienced (as will be discussed later) that confidence might not hold fast because the factors within your comfort zone are often stable and predictable. The execution of a skill in a pressure-filled performance context rarely enjoys that luxury.
To continue our metaphor, our successes most closely mirror the water. This is an equally important component. While we might not need a bank of previous successes to try something for the first time, developing robust confidence in the skill certainly requires it.
Oddly (or perhaps not oddly at all given our natural negativity bias), successes often go unrecognized. Before getting caught up in the weeds of what should count as a worthy “success”, the first step is to make sure to be equally as aggressive in recognizing successes as you are in cataloging your mistakes.
Once you have gotten into a good habit of that, then you can scrutinize what “successes” merit the most confidence-enhancing possibilities. High-quality successes are those that are gathered when you are flirting with the boundaries of your current capability. Said differently, we are looking for successful attempts under conditions perceived to be challenging.
Remember, the most important step is to have equal fidelity in logging successes as you do in logging failures. There needs to be something to lean against during the long-haul, and frequently mistake-laden process of mastery.
Recall that current endeavor from earlier where you feel like your confidence has room to grow. Ask yourself the following questions:
Am I regularly exposing myself to experiences beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone?
Am I tracking all my successes? Or am I letting my confidence get dragged down by my natural negativity bias?
An Intentional Process: Getting the Most Out of Beans and Growth
If you pour hot water over solid coffee beans you get… soggy coffee beans and dirty water. Not exactly the beverage many of us love. The beans have to be mechanically altered (ground) in order to create the beverage. Likewise, growth opportunities need to experience some psychological alteration to help produce confidence.
You see, the best growth opportunity in the world is meaningless if the person who just experienced it wasn’t paying attention. Practice should be conducted with purpose, on purpose. At least as important (if not more so), the reflection after that practice should also happen on purpose. More often than not, intentionality is the name of the game when it comes to enhancing confidence.
Once attended to with purpose, growth opportunities should be received warmly, with a curious and open heart. What does that mean in plain language? It means that despite the bitterness of failure, the experience is genuinely let in so that the lesson can be learned.
Too often, the natural inclination to protect oneself from the emotional pain of failure inadvertently leads to closing oneself off from the learning that comes with making mistakes. And no one… NO ONE is as good of an instructor as Dr. Mistake.
After the mechanical alteration of the grind, the two ingredients of the beans and water often have to pass through a filter to achieve the final product. Chewing on spent coffee grounds is not most people’s idea of a good time.
So, what are we filtering in the confidence-building process? It’s not the growth opportunities or the success themselves, rather, it’s any unworkable perception that might be coming along with them. Here are a couple of common examples that I've heard in my work with high performers.
If exposure to failure and mistakes is perceived to be an agonizing process, then the likelihood of getting the lesson out of it might be lessened. Reasons for having this perception are varied, but a common one is that sometimes people believe that failure and mistakes reveal their true and permanent capability (“This is how I am and I’ll never be able to do it.”).
Instead, these performers should strive to filter away this perception of this experience and practice diligently by replacing it with language reflecting growth. For example, “This mistake means I’m one rep closer to mastery if I'm committed to learning from it.”
Likewise, present successes can’t be viewed as a finality either. Just because you are successful now, it doesn’t mean the work has ended. The pursuit of mastery continues in perpetuity. Skills go stale without reps and there is ALWAYS something new to learn.
Note the intentional language used above is about finding the perceptions that work. Not everyone has the same perceptual operating instructions. Finding what mindset works best for you as an authentic individual is a critical component of moving toward peak mental performance.
As you continue your reflection on your confidence development, ask yourself these questions:
Am I being intentional about the process of practice AND reflection on that practice?
Am I mindful of my natural perceptions regarding mistakes and success? If so, am I working to find the most workable perceptions for myself?
Application of Just the Right Pressure
In some forms of coffee, such as in drawing shots of espresso, the coffee grounds need to be tamped (pressed) before the shot can be drawn.
Here's the deal, you can’t just up and attempt this part all willy-nilly. With too little pressure, the puck of espresso is too loose, and the water doesn't have adequate time to interact with the grounds and the final product is weak.
Too much pressure and the water has too much time with the grounds and the final product is much more bitter than hoped. The puck should be pressed to a just right pressure (fun fact: this happens to be approximately 130 psi) to extract the best quality shot possible.
The relationship between the development of confidence and the application of pressure isn't all that different. If you really think about it, as we develop a skill set in a performance context, we really don't even begin to concern ourselves with confidence until there is an application of an expectation.
These expectations (whether they are external or internal) often manifest themselves as the physical and mental experience of pressure. Pressure creeps up on you and whispers, “This is important, something is on the line.” And it is this perception of heightened importance that can lead to the psychological and physiological changes you might be familiar with in pressure-filled situations.
The good news is that steady, thoughtful exposure to pressure situations in practices, scrimmages, competitions, etc., paired with successful attempts typically generates robust confidence. This is because if the skill can be deployed with proficiency when it matters, then the process of mastery over the skill has begun. In other words, the skill can be relied on.
However, if pressure is never experienced, then the skill set is never truly tested. Without that test, we can't develop robust confidence because there is no trust that the skill can performed with efficiency when it truly matters.
Likewise, too much pressure and/or pressure applied at the wrong moments of skill development doesn't allow space for optimal growth. Since pressure often results in an acceleration of physical and mental factors, pressure applied at the wrong time is a sub-optimal condition for skill development because there isn’t space allotted for mastery at the basic level.
In the pursuit of your own performance goals, think critically about the ways in which you have thoughtfully applied pressure to your skill set. When leveraged correctly, pressure is what will take you from fair-weather confidence, towards much more reliable robust confidence.
Ask yourself the following questions in reflection.
Have I given myself fair opportunity to start to master the demand without pressure? In other words, have I truly practiced the basics enough?
If so, then have I thoughtfully and regularly integrated exposure to pressure as part of the training of that skill?
Different Forms and Different Experiences
Coffee is a product enjoyed in about as many different ways as there are people who enjoy coffee regularly. Some prefer brewed, some French-pressed. Some prefer their coffee black, while others enjoy copious amounts of cream and sugar. Some enjoy their coffee searing hot, while others prefer their coffee to be frozen and blended.
Confidence likewise looks different for every person. As much as we would like to boil down confidence to a singular experience for people, the reality is more complicated than that.
Some people experience confidence as something that they do. Some people experience confidence as something that they are. And others yet experience confidence as something that they have.
Pulling this all apart will certainly be the focus of a future post. But for now, know that there isn’t really a wrong way to experience it. Instead, we just have to recognize that there are implications for experiencing confidence in any of these ways.
Furthermore, we have to understand that not everyone experiences confidence in the same way. This makes the coaching and support of confidence development more complicated than simply telling someone to “Be confident” because what confidence is to one person, might not be what confidence is to some one else.
I have a final tangential note on experiencing confidence. I have a surprising amount of conversations with performers I work with who are concerned that the development of robust confidence will inevitably lead to them becoming arrogant or cocky. Almost like there is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome of experiencing confidence too often that people are wary of.
If you are reading this, please listen very carefully…
CONFIDENCE AND ARROGANCE ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
Are some arrogant people confident? Absolutely! I’ll also let you in on a secret… some arrogant people are wildly unconfident and use their arrogance as a facade.
Arrogance is a personality trait. Confidence can be argued to be tangentially related to personality, but it is much more dynamic and complex than that. Just know that if you are not arrogant now, it is unlikely that you will suddenly become arrogant after you begin to develop confidence. Our personalities just don’t work that way.
This concern that I hear ever so often has more to do with family and/or cultural values regarding staying humble. While I certainly respect diverse perspectives in values, I’d personally argue that confidence and humility are certainly not mutually exclusive.
I also hear concerns from performers that too much confidence can lead to a false sense of security. This one is also a misconception. Robust confidence is developed through reality. It has to be earned with countless exposures to failures and successes. Robust confidence doesn’t necessarily say “I am unbeatable” or “I am the best ever” or “I’m infallible” or so on…
Robust confidence simply recognizes “I’ve done the work and I'm skilled” and declares “I’m ready to be tested and I can handle the challenge.”
If you work in a group or team, ask yourself these two final questions as you reflect upon confidence:
Do I understand that both the learning and embodiment of confidence are experienced differently by everyone?
Do I account for those differences in my interactions with my group or team?
Wrap-Up
There is so much more nuance to the development of confidence than what has been explained above, but distilled here is a snap-shot of some of the important basics.
Like coffee, the creation of confidence is a thoughtful process. It requires good-quality ingredients, an intentional alteration of those ingredients, the filtering of less than palatable byproducts, and sometimes a little exposure to pressure.
Confidence, like coffee, is also a personal experience and ultimately comes to reflect our authentic selves.
And striving towards a more authentic version of ourselves is a worthwhile pursuit indeed.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this post, I truly hope you enjoyed it and reflected on your own confidence for a moment. Please feel free to share with others if it has resonated with you, as well, please feel free to send any feedback to my email at matthew.gonzalez@greenpeakperformance.com.
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