The Confident Mind

By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo

This book can help us overcome those jitters when speaking in front of an audience for the first time, perform a piano recital or play in a high-stakes basketball championship game.  “The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance” by Dr. Nate Zinsser offers practical tips to defeat nervousness and help bring about a confident performance during tense filled situations.

The author says, confidence in performance is a mindset that make us say to ourselves, “I am good at this, I don’t have to think how to do it, I just let my ability flow.”  The confident mindset is a product of many hours of practice as well as keeping those “good performance memories” or building up your mental bank account.

Build Up Your Mental Bank Account

Our mind maintains a “bank account” of memories for the sport, craft, or profession we want to excel in. Our mental bank account balance grows when you make E.S.P. deposits.  E.S.P means Effort, Success and Progress.

When your mental bank account is loaded with E.S.Ps, you feel confident and walk around with swagger.  But when your mental bank account balance is low, you experience self‐doubt and panic when a performance is not going well.  Fortunately, we can make every day deposits to our mental bank account by keeping in mind those “good performance memories”.  The idea is to build up our mental bank account, while practicing, by adding up those good performance memories.  First ask the question when practicing “Where did I put forth quality effort today?”  For a tennis player it might be how he or she dug deep to finish that extra bench‐press rep at the gym.  Next question would be, ““What success did I have due to my effort?”, in relation to that bench-press, it could be completing the five‐set bench‐press exercise, and remembering that feeling of pride after doing it.  And finally, we ask, “How does all this contribute to my goal?”  The tennis player considers that all these bench press exercise will contribute to an increased strength in making a serve.

Taking note of those “good performance memories” will make one person perform better than another person who does exactly the same kind of practice but does not make deposits to his mental bank account.

Trigger Total Confidence

As your piano recital, inspirational speech or championship game is about to begin and knowing that your mental bank account is loaded with memories of quality effort, success, and progress, you are ready to deliver a confident performance. Now, you need the right pre‐performance routine to trigger “complete confidence” and kill any nervous mental chatter. Dr. Nate Zinsser teaches his elite performers a simple three‐step pre‐performance routine called C‐B‐A: C-ue your conviction, B-reathe your body, A-ttach your attention.

Cue your conviction:  Come up with a phrase that helps you to overcome your performance butterflies and convert nervous energy into pure excitement. Answer the following question: What would you think to yourself in the moments before a competition if you were eager to show the world how great you were? In the book, a quarterback tells himself: “Do it like you know it!” A marathon runner tells herself: “Time to cruise!”  Or a confident champion boxer like Manny Pacquiao would say, “Bring it on!”

Breathe your body: Work your breathing muscles by pushing down and into your belly as you inhale, and then up and in through your rib cage as you exhale. As you work your breathing muscles, you’ll feel in control of your mental state. And as Belisa Vranich writes in her book Breathing for Warriors, “Focusing on my breathing means that I can let my body tap into what it

knows and has practiced without my brain interrupting.”

Attach your attention: Pick something inside your performance to be deeply curious about – like the pace and rhythm of the words coming out of your mouth as you give a presentation, how the guitar strings feel on your fingers as you play, or the movement of a tennis ball as your opponent tosses it in the air before serving to you. When Tiger Woods played his best golf

between 2000‐2003, he told a documentary filmmaker that he often became so “entrenched” and so “engrossed” on a shot that all background noise and self‐conscious thought disappeared. He said, “It’s almost as if I get out of the way…and my subconscious takes over.”