There’s a quality that I see working with some the best athletes in the World in their sport which I believe keeps them at the top. Confident humility – having a strong belief in your skills, abilities, and strengths while being able to recognise you can still learn and develop.
As a Performance Psychologist I’ve worked with people who compete at the highest level and those who are on the development pathway, and there is a characteristic that sets apart the ones who succeed. They believe in their abilities and are able to articulate to you what it is they have that makes them good or an expert at what they do. Not in an arrogant way, they simply state that they have repeatedly trained to make them good at certain skills. So, when someone asks them if they are good at what they do, these top performers reply, ‘yes’, and can express specifically what that is.
Yet, accompanied with this is a humility where they recognise that they can be better. They know they are not perfect. They accept that may lack certain knowledge or will share that they have identified a weakness. And what I observe is that this is what motivates them. This is where they put their attention, effort and resources and when they observe the improvements it leads to feelings of achievement. They are happy to share these weaknesses with coaches or support staff because this is what will make or keep them at the top of the table.
Creating the balance
The crucial point I have begun to observe is that it is a balance. For it to be healthy and lead to high performance, you can’t have one without the other.
A one-sided belief in your abilities without a consideration for areas to improve will stagnate learning and development. Motivation will diminish and you will create an unhealthy comfort zone where weaknesses are perceived as threats.
But with only a focus to weaknesses or areas that need improvement, your belief in abilities gets eroded which leads to fear or doubts to being able to perform at your best.
In high performance environments it is inevitable that you will have to perform with a stress response, the feeling of being under pressure, encountering difficulties and demands. With a lack of belief in abilities, dysfunctional emotions that hamper performance are unavoidable.
Remove doubt
There are many leadership articles that espouse the quality of confident humility, however, there is one aspect from these articles that in my observations is not apparent in the top performers. These leadership texts talk of people having faith in abilities but ‘doubting’ their knowledge and methods. There is no ‘doubting’ in the top performers I deal with. They perceive a weakness or an area to improve upon and look to what they can ‘add’ to their training. They believe that they can learn this knowledge and add to their training methods. Humility for the top performers, therefore, has recognition of areas where they can improve and then a focus to what they can add to learn and develop.
How do you build this quality?
Here are the ways that I help athletes and corporate executives build confident humility.
1. Self-efficacy reflections
Self-efficacy is a term that describes your belief in your abilities to be able to perform in a given situation at a certain level. Building self-efficacy requires reflecting on your performances and particularly to what specific skills you have been demonstrating.
The exercise that I get high performers to do is list what skills, abilities and strengths that they believe they have or displayed in their performance. These have to be specific! Having a vague idea is not belief. They also have to believe that these are available at most times when they are performing, regardless of things outside of their control (e.g. weather).
When you identify these specific skills, the brain will start presenting evidence to you when you are performing with these skills. By recognising them, a brain area called the reticular activating system identifies these as important and will flag them within your perception more readily. If you’ve ever thought of buying something you like, and then seeing people wearing that item is evidence of this in action.
2. What can I ‘ADD?’ reflections
In my coaching of ski racing I learned that I got better performances out of athletes when they reflected on what they could add to their next training run. Some simple phrases that I used was to ask:
· ‘if you were to do that run again, what would you add that could help you perform even better?’
· ‘what do you need to develop to be able to add that to your performance?’
The advantage here is that the athlete or performer often identifies what it is that they need to learn and develop themself, or at least opens up a dialogue where you can guide them. This becomes their learning and development goal and is self-determined which means it is more motivating.
You can do this yourself by reflecting on performances you’ve made and identifying the skills you could add that would have made that performance even better.
3. A WEASOL reflection
A simple reflection tool that I have developed that can be used to provide that quality of confident humility is the acronym WEASOL.
The WEASO reflection uses these reflection questions:
- What can you recall that you have done Well today?
- What have you put Effort into today that involved working hard – but you Earned the outcome you were after?
- What have you done where you demonstrated your capabilities and Achieved something?
- What minor or major Successes have you been able to achieve?
- What challenges have you been able to Overcome today?
- What have you Learned from today – perhaps from things you’ve done well – or even from mistakes you’ve made?
I’d love to know if you found this article interesting and useful. Feel free to share and please reach out if you would like to learn more about resilience skills for performance excellence.
Stuart Munro is a Performance Psychologist with the Canadian Paralympic Alpine Ski Team and consults with individuals and teams helping them to reach their performance goals.