“Confidence comes from being prepared” — John Wooden.

It is quite common for most of us to have a set of commonly held core beliefs about ourselves, about the future and about people in our lives.

These core beliefs are often so deeply embedded in our, where else, “cores,” to the point that we are not consciously aware of them.

Here I am going to point out three common self-defeating core beliefs which you must eliminate in order to build confidence and improve your overall basketball mental game.

1. Always comparing yourself to others – This is a great way to feel lousy about yourself! If you measure your every accomplishment against someone else, you will probably always be successful in finding some shortcoming in your own performance.
2. Always chasing the elusive perfectionism- Perfectionism may be the ultimate self-defeating behavior. It turns you into slaves of success—and keep you focused on failure, dooming you to a lifetime of doubt and depression. It also winds up undermining achievement in your basketball career.
3. Keeping old feelings of past failure, guilt, fear and other bad things alive and in the frontal lobe of your brain at all times – To maintain that fearful feeling of never being good enough, be sure to constantly conjure up and nurture your past woes. Right? WRONG! You cannot move ahead while looking backward.

To change those self-destructive patterns, you must first believe you can change those habits.

A new mindset begins by accepting that you can control your reactions in the here and now.

• Develop Slogans: To change these self-defeating behaviors it is imperative to change your attitude and then your actions. To do this takes some strength to block any fear that tells you— you can’t do this. Replace them with “Yes I can.”
• Know Your Triggers: We really can change unhealthy habits, by building confidence and re-engineering our reactions. The change grows out of knowing the triggers of your sabotaging patterns. By understanding these triggers, we set the stage to create new, healthy habits.
• Sport psychologists for basketball tells us that one great way to learn your triggers is to keep a diary of your self-defeating habits. The diary should include a description of the key features of the situation, your feelings, and your behaviors. The diary helps you to understand when you are most likely to sabotage yourselves before you defeat yourselves, not afterwards.
• Control your Triggers: Building confidence and re-engineering your life involves taking control of what you expose yourself to. If you are attracted to people who always say negative things about your game, you want to stay away from people like that. The key is to control who, and what, you allow into your life. You can change when you manage your triggers, build confidence and allow healthy experiences and people in your life.
• Keep Moving Forward: When old habits fight back, do not be surprised. All of us will risk temporarily falling back into old patterns. The key to permanent change is keeping your mind in the present. We can control the here and now, but not the future or the past. You will move forward into successful games by shifting your perspective to a mind-set of opportunity, in the here and now. The new perspective allows you to avoid self-criticism and be confident in the mental game of basketball.

No one chooses to self-sabotage. We learned self-defeating habits and feelings from unfortunate pasts.

Self-defeating behaviors ends as you build confidence.

To build your confidence you must change the way you think.

A 100% of the time it is 90% mental.

Confidence is a mind-set skill that doesn’t just happen by chance. You must work at it.

To build your confidence, specific strategies are required. These strategies can be found in my cutting edge workbook – An Athlete’s Guide To Peak Performance Series– Building Confidence.

Go to sportspsychologybasketball.com. Click products and get started on Building Your Confidence with Sports Performance Top Mental Game Coach.