“Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks” – Joe Paterno

Learning–it’s what we all do. Every day, in uncountable ways, we learn things. To understand how unhealthy habits are affecting your football confidence, first you need to know how strong your feelings were when you learned them.

Emotions are a built in alerting systems. Feelings often occur strongest when warning us about possible risks and threats. The sabotaging reactions occur only when situations are quite similar to the original events.

As the habits develop, we find ways to escape or avoid reminders, and we learn a new self-defeating habit: isolation.

Our hope of avoiding painful reminders distances us from the exciting challenges of building confidence and the warmth of closeness with teammates.

Once a habit is learned, it begins to appear more and more. Situations, similar to the original learning moment, begin to trigger the overwhelming feelings and the related self-defeating habits.

Repetitive, doom-laden thoughts are common to these depressed minds.

Such thoughts are both a feature of depressed, out-of-balance neurochemistry and of the way that memory is networked. And, because depressed minds ruminate, repetitively revisiting that network, that category then solidifies into an “It has always (never) been this way,” way of thinking. Your neurochemistry causes you to create a past in which you always fail, are always disappointed or in which you never get what you want.

This kind of categorical description of past events becomes a prediction of things to come. The idea that you are destined to fail will prevent you from trying new things that will help you improve your football mental game.

Few thoughts are more likely to prevent change than those that predict defeat. Self-defeating thoughts are central in maintaining depression and blocking change. The most common in the self-defeating category of thoughts stems from the belief we are doomed to letting our past determine our future.

As per sport psychologists for football, the misery-inducing mantra, “it has always been this way,” is ultimately responsible for stopping people cold, before they even attempt to change a behavior or emotion.

Such thoughts are depression-reinforcing. The more often your neurochemistry causes you to think a helpless thought, the worse your depression gets.

The good news is you do not need to stay stuck in this negative football mind. You can develop your own slogans that can change that downward spiral of your confidence.

You can consider the power of a phrase. Like “Until now…” means things could change. It means you do not have to deny your past or pretend it was good or even think you have a bright future. It just means things do not need to be the way they have been. Small hope is often safer than big hope and thus more powerful for the person who cannot believe in a big change but could believe in some change.

“UNTIL NOW” helps reverse the downward spiral of depressed thinking is the goal.

Consider common ‘downers’ that can be reversed with “UNTIL NOW”:
• “I have always been unlucky… until now.”
• “I have always been the one who lets my team down… until now.”
• “No one in my family has ever succeeded at this… until now.”
• “I have always been depressed… until now.”

“Until now…” These words subtly suggest you will think or do something different than you have done before. They can lead you to identify what you have been doing and thinking and, even better, lead you to recognize that if you keep on doing what you have been doing you will get what you have always gotten.

But if you alter your old belief, if you start saying, “Well that was true… until now,” then what was true before might no longer be your destiny. If new actions or thoughts could produce change in your football mind, you will be more willing to try doing something differently than what you have done before. While they do not guarantee success these two words help you achieve a greater football confidence than what you had in your past.

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 workbook – An Athlete’s Guide To Peak Performance Series– Building Confidence

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