Hello, and welcome back to Brain in the Game. Brain in the Game is a podcast that's been specifically designed for athletes, coaches, and parents who are out there looking to do their sport just that little bit smarter. Brain in the Game is like a mental tune-up, and I'm your host, Dave Diggle.
In this episode 67, we're going to look at building sustainable self-belief. Why is that an issue? When we look at the traditional athlete, they look very full of themselves, very confident, so very self-assured. But the reality is often athletes, and sometimes more so athletes than most people, have issues about self-belief. They are always on display, whether it's training, whether it's competition, whether it's on field or off field. They appear to be in especially in social media these days on TV and obviously in the old traditional newspapers. So they're on display constantly. So there's a constant stages of are they doing the right thing? And when they don't do the right thing, it's highlighted very quickly, very publicly and globally. So being an elite athlete or a pro athlete, by its very nature, is a tough ask. Not only are we asking them to go above and beyond their physical capabilities of the traditional human being and be exceptional in their playing ability, we're also asking them to be physically, emotionally well-rounded and robust, too, to be able to sustain that constant criticism, to be able to sustain that constant under the microscope.
And again, especially in today's society, where it is such an accessible world that we live in, and these people tend to be the ones on the plate all the time that we're examining them. If we want longevity in our sport, then we need to manage the output a little smarter than most of us tend to do. The old-fashioned '70s and '80s world where I grew up in sport is very, very different. It's a world away from the world of elite athletes today. When I did something stupid, it may be a competition or on the road when we were travelling as a team, no one ever really got to hear about it. However, today, an athlete does something stupid off the field or does something and makes a mistake on the field, It tends to be global before they even get off. So it's a huge area that we need to be smarter in how we manage our athletes mentally, emotionally, and physically. The mental and Emotional and physical fatigue is a real issue. It's something that once the athletes today are constantly on, they're constantly switched on, they're constantly engaged or plugged in. Again, back in my era in the '70s, and '80s.
Once you left the training hall or the competition venue, then you were left alone until you saw somebody or you picked up a newspaper or sometimes saw it on the news that evening. But athletes today are expected to have an accessibility beyond their competition realms. Whether that be interactivity with the social media, whether that be sponsorship appearances, whether that be TV or radio interviews, there's a huge demand on the athlete, which means they're constantly switched on, constantly thinking about what they need to say, have said, or could have said. This overwhelm can create a mental, emotional, and potentially physical fatigue that can have a debilitating effect on the self-belief of an athlete. So these could lead to depleted energy, either acute right in the moment where you often see athletes just want to go to sleep. And a lot of that is their brain shutting down. It's an overwhelm. And long term, we have quite some serious issues that can come out of that, from emotional overwhelm and depression, through to mental confusion, a lack of focus, a sense of loss of control, and loss of identity. So all of these can be huge issues that can have a way bigger effect on the athlete than just what they do competitively.
A major part of this is the fine balance of many of our internal chemistries. We all know about the serotonin positivity and knowing that we need to make sure that our serotonin levels are up and our dopamine levels are well balanced, so we get that anticipation of excitement of where we're going. The flip side of that is obviously the negativity side of that which comes with the cortisol, which is our fight or flight mechanism. This changes the chemistry in our brain from being a good serotonin-dopamine mix to being a dopamine and cortisol mix. We go from being in anticipation of excitement to being anxious and feeling that levels of anxiety rising inside as a fear of consequence of what may go wrong. That also has a huge impact on our self-belief, because if we're constantly doubting ourselves and constantly thinking about what could go wrong or what I need to say or how I need to say it, then we're not living a life that's well balanced. We're living a life that's in this fight or flight mode constantly. It can play havoc with many parts of our world, increasing our self doubts, as I said, stunting our progress limiting our perception of what is possible and our possibilities of growth and development within our, not only skills, but our career.
It can make us question everything. And one of the key things I explain to many of my athletes is the way that our brain is structured. And we've got our prefrontal cortex, which does all the problem solving, creates strategies for us, and is incredibly detailed loud and efficient at what it does. In part, it's why we are where we are in the food chain. It's because of our prefrontal cortex. However, it's incredibly slow. Because of its diligence, it's very, very slow. Our subconscious, on the flip side of that, is incredibly fast, but it doesn't do a lot of problem solving or it doesn't create any strategy. It just does what it's told to do by the prefrontal cortex. If we start to doubt ourselves and our self-belief goes down, then we take from the back of our brain the parts that we've trusted, our subconscious, our subsea performance, some call it the flow, and it puts it back into the boss's office at the prefrontal cortex, and we start to overthink everything again. Revaluate things that have worked incredibly well, we start to unpack and examine again, which can again create self-doubt because if you start to have to evaluate everything, it means you don't trust what you already know.
So there's some of the issues that come with this low self-belief. So what do we need to do different? Clearly, we need to have a better balance. We need a better dopamine and serotonin balance mix. We need to reduce the frequency of the cortisol hits, the fight or flight, the fear of what may go wrong, the over-questioning, the over-processing and over-analyzing of things. We need to have big picture objective and know exactly what it is and why, why it's so important to us. By creating this, we create that momentum forward. We need to have better stepping stones so that we know the path that they're following. That allows us to feel comfortable and confident. We need to have targeted stimulants. When kids used to have the sticker charts or the star charts when they achieve something, as adults, we need the same stimulation of success. We need to have an active, frequent, and replicable calibration process. We need to be able to have better ways of judging how we're going and micromanaging that rather than just waiting to get to those high pressure, high consequence events such as competitions or selection. We need to have more in between there so we know that we're on that right path.
We also need to increase the everyday actions. Again, that comes back to not waiting so long to have something that we can do. And that is about taking back control, doing things on a regular basis to feel that we're back in control of what we're doing. We need to feed the emotional monster positivity, things that's going to make it grow, not make it grow. The above stuff that we've talked about is predominantly mental frameworking. It's creating a framework and a structure that keeps us on track. When we talk about feeding the emotional monster, that's increasing the positive fuel forwards, making the momentum forward a strong and sustainable process. Look, the reality is we need to get way, way better at rewarding ourselves. And athletes are incredibly good at being incredibly harsh on themselves and self-denegrating what they've achieved. And I hear it so often, well, you know what? So I should have done good at that because I train hard enough. Well, you're right. Yeah, you should have done. However, it doesn't take away from the fact that you've achieved something and you should recognise that. So how do we do it? How do we do it much smarter?
How do we manage a way to increase our self-belief in a way that's not force, but is incredibly powerful and sustainable. The easiest way or the first step really is to look at less focus on what could go wrong and more focus on what we have achieved and where we can take this, that growth mindset. Athletes, and not only athletes, everybody really, are very good at highlighting things that weren't perfect. And the reality is nothing is ever perfect. So if you're waiting for it to feel right, if you're waiting for it to feel perfect, then it will never happen. If we talk about feelings anyway, and you're waiting for something to feel a certain way, the reality is a feeling is a gauge of something that's already occurred. So when you stab your toe and it hurts, that pain doesn't come instantly. What happens is you stab your toe, your brain assesses that and goes, Oh, that would hurt, and the pain then comes after that. Feeling comes after the stubborn of the toe and the process. If you're waiting for your competition persona to be just right to feel right, then it's got to have occurred and gone past that before you can gauge that, which means it's not really an efficient way of knowing when you're ready.
It's a late an inhibited way of recognising how that being ready made you feel after the effect. We need to have a better gauge on knowing, right, what's my focus here and how do I gauge that? That's going to help us increase the frequency of being able to recognise when we've done something right, when we've hit a target, and creating a mental connexion between hitting that target and the dopamine-ceratona mix release. It doesn't matter how long the gap is, if it's a microsecond or a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes later, trying to get that trigger between doing something and that good release becomes incredibly difficult, almost impossible. We want to make sure that when we do something and we tip into doing that, that's when the release occurs. The same with, we talk about the Pavlov's dogs, where they rung the bell and they salivated in anticipation for the food. Now, that was a long, long process. They had to feed them the food and ring the bell for them to associate associate the two. We want to make sure that when we ring the bell, they instantly salivate. When we do something that's productive, we instantly feel good about it.
We instantly get that serotonin release in our body and go, wow, that's awesome. We get the dopamine going, well, let's have more of that. Let's chase that down. We also need to take back control. When we looked at the fight or flight, the more frequency see a release of cortisol, cortisol tends to come when we have a fear of consequence or fear of something that could hurt us or go wrong. If we take back control, if we build a process that all around us, is geared towards us, is controlled by us, is targeted to what works for us, then we get that sense of control back again. Now, when you started your sporting career, you probably did almost everything from getting your gear ready to searching out what you need to do to get physically prepared, skill acquisition. You probably these days would YouTube things. You would probably spend a lot of time getting yourself to training, even training on your own to a certain degree. That's a huge sense of control. You knew what you needed to do. So when it worked, you did that. When it didn't work, you did that. So that sense of control gave you some tangibility to managing your successes and your failures.
The further up the tree you go, the closer to the pinnacle of your sport you get to, the less control you have. You're told where to be, what to wear, what to say, how to eat, when to eat, when to train, what to do in training, and how to recover. As you get better at your sport, that sense of control gets stripped away from you. I work with a lot of high-end elite teams, and the athletes are literally drones. They turn up, they do what they're told, and they leave. Somebody else has done all that thinking for them. So when they have that success, there's a disconnect between them actually achieving that and feeling good about that, because the reality is they've just applied what somebody else has built. We want to make sure that if we have that serotonin release, it's because we've created it, not because somebody else has thought about it. This is where often we get habitual behaviours come from, why so many athletes will wear the same socks, wear the same undies, eat the same foods, all because it's the things that they can control. The more habitual behaviours they adopt, the bigger indicator that they're feeling less and less in control.
It's that frantic scramble for what can I control? That's mine. You can't take that away from me. I'm going to wear those same undies all year because that's the way. It's the only thing they control, and it makes them feel good about having a part to play in the come. So that's a huge aspect and probably another whole podcast that we can discuss on habitual behaviours and why we do that. But let's keep moving forward on this self-belief. We want to have clear and concise and precise understanding about what our big picture objective is, what it looks like to us, what the tipping point is. Again, we don't want to get there and wait for it to feel right because that would have gone past that point. We want to know the millisecond that we step into that and we've achieved it, that we go, I did that. Release that serotonin, feel good about yourself, increase your self-worth and your self-belief to go, If I can do that, then I can do the next thing or the bigger thing or the bolder Everything. So having a clear and concise understanding about what your big picture objective is, whether that's being Olympic champion, being selected and being number one in the world, or whatever it is for you as an athlete, know what it looks like, know what it would feel like once you've been there, know what it sounds like to you to be there, and know why.
Why is it important to you? Why do I want it? It's It's okay to say, I want to be an Olympic champion, but is that because you want it or is it because you've been told you can have it? There's a big, huge difference, and it goes back to that sense of control, again, of who builds the plan. Are you applying somebody else's plan or do you have a control over what you do? Your objectives are just as relevant here. If it's somebody else's dream, it's never, ever going to be achievable for you the way that you want it to be. It'll almost be a hollow success. So make sure that it's all about you. It's you understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. Your big picture objective, the end step for you is the tractor being that's dragging you along through the tough times and keeping you on that straight and narrow path towards that objective. We talked a little bit having very clear and concise stepping stones. We want to build a path that is, again, like is specific for you. We want to make sure the objective is specific for you, and you know why that's important.
We want to know what each step is going to get us towards that. Some of you have heard me talk before. I don't talk to any of my clients about winning. For me, it's every time that you go out to perform, it's an opportunity for you to go out and grow, to learn something new and apply it, to have a new skill set that you can take towards the next competition. Everything is incrementally building towards that big picture objective, that tractor being dragging you in. This is when it all becomes about you and allows you to have a self-belief and an almost performance arrogance that says, yes, I know what I'm doing, I know how to do it, and I know when I do this, I'm going to get the outcome that I want. That sense of control, ownership. We utilise things like the smart and decision matrix, where we have that begin step objective, and we work backwards through the process to the now. We have a very clear stepping stone that's devised and designed by the athlete. We have action steps in between those. It tells you, okay, if I want to go from here to here, what do I need to do to get there?
Again, we're taking ownership and we're allowing those successes to be ours. We want to make sure that the funnel process before every competition is individually created for that athlete. What one athlete wants to be ready for the competition will be different to what another athlete wants in order to be ready for that competition. So again, we want to make sure that the path that we're on feeds our needs, not the needs of others. In previous podcasts, you've heard me talk about the ant path and how ants are very good at creating a straight line between where they are and where they want to be, which is traditionally their home and their food source. That's why when we're walking in the forest or in an area where there's ants, you see them in a dead straight line. They have a pheromone path that shows them the most effective and efficient path between their nest, the food source, and back home again. When that gets broken, then we have three kinds of ant behaviour. Some of the ants will just follow that pheromone path back home and go and see the ants that went out and found the food source in the first place, the scavenger ants, and say, Right, go and find me a new one.
That one's broken. I need a one, and they wait for it to be done for them. Then there's other ants that will, at the point where it gets cut off, run around like, Somebody fix it for me. I don't want to do it. I don't know what to do. Somebody else fix it for me. I don't have an answer to this. And they tend to get eaten or die off because they just run around. There's no solution-based thing, and they don't even go back home and wait for somebody else to fix it for them back at the nest. They just wait for it to be fixed there. And a very few of the ants will turn around and go, Okay, what are the one or two things I need to do to get around this blockage and get back on this path? Because I know this path leads to good food. And they change that path. And once they've done that, the remaining ants that haven't been eaten or died off will start to follow that path as well. So doing it for themselves would also increase their sense of achievement. And If we put this into athlete context, when you get something that becomes an inhibitor to you, what do you do?
Are you the person that goes, right, throw my hands in the air. I can't do this. It's not working. It's broken. Somebody else, fix it. When somebody else steps in to fix it, you don't have a sense of achievement. You don't have that self-belief that I could have fixed this. I know what to do. Are you the person going, okay, what do I need to do here? I own this now. I fixed it. I can problem solve and get back on track. Having either the decision matrix that shows you a very clear path that you created for you, having a funnel process that funnels you into the competition preparation process and into the performance, or having that ability to problem solve and have that behavioural flexibility to say, Okay, something's broken, but I can fix this. I'm good enough to fix this. Each one of those strategies will increase your self-belief sustainably because you've got a process in there. We noted that we needed to activate a frequent and replicable calibration process, not wait for a competition to recognise, am I working in the right direction or have I gone off track? And again, those of you who've listened to my podcast in the past, we talk a lot about journaling controlling process, that every single night there's a process of 14 questions that you ask yourself about that training session.
And that allows you to, number one, see patterns. When I have a really good training session, what did I do to instigate that? Self control, self belief. Or when I had a session that went wrong, okay, what would I do that caused that? Control, belief to put the problem right. We want to make sure that journaling is a part of every single athlete's process because it gives them control. It gives them the ability to see the patterns, both the good patterns and the not so good patterns. It gives them that sense of control of, I can fix this, and I'm good enough. I understand me. I'm in control of my destiny here. Journaling is a critical aspect to increasing the self worth of an athlete, having them have control over their outcome. We need to have daily objectives. Now, we talk about the big picture objective, which is attraction being for our career. We need to have season objectives. We We need to have session objectives, too, so that every time that we go into a training session, when we achieve our objective, we can reward that, and that releases serotonin and releases dopamine, replaces or balances out a lot of the fight or flight cortisol.
We get a more healthier balance of mental chemistry going on. We want to make sure that we create momentum. Once we have these daily objectives, and when we hit them, we Okay, we didn't get that one. What do I need to do different next time? Okay, back on track. Next one, next one. So that momentum going forward will become self-sustaining. I often describe it like having a snowball on top of a mountain. When that snowball rolls down that mountain, it increases momentum, it increases mass, because it collects all the other parts on the way. We want to create that same analogy in our training towards competition and beyond. So we want to make sure that the snowball rolls down the hill in the most efficient and effective manner possible. The way we do that is by nudging the snowball in the right direction. What people tend to do is try and force something to happen. That's like applying pressure to the top of the snowball. The only thing it's going to do is flatten the snowball, and it's never going to roll then. It's never going to accumulate or get momentum. So we want to keep the shape of what we've got and apply the pressure in the most efficient way.
The way we do that is a framework of positivity. Yep, you've achieved that, you got this, and that momentum will grow and grow and grow. That serotonin and dopamine mix is what we're aiming for here. That self-worth, that ability to control and have ownership over it, to recognise it when it worked, you made that happen. When it didn't work, you had a part to play in that. Then you have the ability to problem-solve and solution-based think to correct that. We talked about positivity, the language that we use. When we talked before about the feeding the emotional monster. When I picture an athlete, I picture inside them this emotional monster. And their emotions are our fuel that gets things moving. We tend to react to our emotions and respond to our framework. It's like having a train on a train track and stoking the fire with our emotions. It's going to go in a straight line as long as that's where those tracks are going. We want to have the same with our career and our momentum and our self-belief and self-worth. Our emotional monster needs to be fed right fuel. If we think about our emotional monster a teenager, what happens when we feed our teenager crap, when they're eating junk food or they're not drinking enough water or they're eating too late or not eating at all?
Their emotions become unproductive They become these teenagers that are animals that we can't control. Our emotional monster inside us is exactly the same. We want to make sure that we do the right thing. We feed them good food frequently and something that's going allow them to have energy to stoke the fire and keep the train going in the right direction. That comes down to the language we use, we choose to use within ourself. It's easy to gauge how we've spoken to other people because we get a reaction from them. If we're rude to them, we'll see it on their face or we might even bite back at us, and we know that that was the wrong thing to do, or maybe that's what we went for, but it got a reaction. We don't tend to have the same efficient gauges inside ourselves. So if we have an expectation that, Yeah, of course I should have done that. Well, I trained hard enough, so I should have achieved that. Then it doesn't allow us to increase the value of what we've achieved, and it also sells a short on the things and the hard work that we've done to get the outcome.
So the language, the recognition, the acknowledgement needs to come from within. When you do something that works, when you set an objective and you achieve it, then you need to recognise that. Even if you just give yourself a verbal pat on the back and say, Good job, I did that. I set that objective, I've reached it. That means I can now go and do this, this, this, and this. If you just turn around and go, Oh, yeah. Well, move on. Next one. Again, which athletes tend to be very good at. They'll go to a competition, they'll get a medal, the medal gets thrown in the bottom of the bag, and they're straight away thinking about, Okay, what's the next one? They don't take the time to rejoice and reward and acknowledge what they've just achieved. So therefore the brain goes, wow, all that hard work. And for what? A piece of metal that I've just thrown in the bottom of the bag that I clearly don't value. Why would I do that? Why would I do that again? Then it becomes very, very difficult to create that momentum with that feeling of value and motivation forwards.
Motivation is fed. We only get out of motivation what we put into motivation. It's not a set and forget. The second you take your mind off of what feeds your motivation, then it will run flat. There's no stock or story now. The language we use needs to be positive language. It needs to be directive language. It needs to be purposeful language. If we're going to learn a skill, then that skill is so that I can do this routine, which means I can do that competition, which means I can be up for selection, which means I can go to the World Championships, which means I have a chance of becoming world champion. There's always a feeder into the next, into the next, into the next, into the next. So the language, every time we achieve anything, whether it's, I had a good session today, I nailed that skill, or I consolidated that technique, or you know what? I didn't get that skill today, but I now know what I need to do different. All of those need to be acknowledged, recognised, and you turn around to yourself and say, Well, I've done that. Serotonin, dopamine, value.
Value means self-belief. I created that. It wasn't something that was done to me or for me. It was something I did for myself. Once we have that structure and those strategies of framework to keep us on track and the emotional fuel that's feeding that, we want to make sure that they calibrate frequently. That just flips back to what we were talking about before, making sure that journaling is a classic opportunity every single session to recognise success. When I build a decision matrix, one of the hardest things for athletes to do is to build in the reward process. So when they achieve something great, they have to, they're accountable, they've put it down on paper, there's a verbal contract with myself or their coach to say, When I get that, I value that to this point, which It means I'm going to go and give myself something, whether it's acknowledgement, whether it's a social event, whether it's actually something physical to validate the effort I've put in to get that there. That's going to increase my self-value and my self-belief that I can achieve stuff. If I can achieve that, I can achieve the next one.
Confidence. All of this comes down to how confident we are to apply what we know. Confidence is a history of success. If If you do something and you get acknowledged for it, you'll do it again. The more times you do it, the more confident you become about applying it. That's going to raise your self-belief. Let's have a little quick look and recap over the key areas that we've talked about. We need to be less focused on what can go wrong and more focused on what can go right, on the things that we've achieved rather than the things that we haven't achieved. We want to take control, make Making sure that when we achieve something, we release that serotonin dope dopamine mix. It's not serotonin dope, that serotonin dopamine mix that allows us to be anticipating the next time we get that. The flip side of that is when we focus on what we don't achieve or can't achieve or haven't achieved, we increase the cortisol and dopamine and we get anxiety. We don't want anxiety, we want anticipation for the next time. We want to be clear, concise, and precise about our big picture objective.
We want to know that tractor beam that's dragging us forward is of huge value to us. We need to know why it's important to us, what it gives us uniquely to us, not what it meant to my grandad or my coach or my parents or the butcher down the road, it's got to be about you. Or when it's mine, it's got to be about me, making sure that that tractor beam is dragging me for me, not dragging me because somebody else I thought it'd be a good idea at the time. We want to build a replicable path. We want to make sure our decision matrix, our funnel process, is fed into a system that we create for us. We design it, we own it, we reward it, we get what the outcomes are for us. We made that happen. We made that outcome, our outcome. When something doesn't go right, we want to be solution-based thinking. We want to be that ant that turns goes, right, I can fix this. I know how to fix this because I want that end objective big enough to fix it. We need to make sure that we're measuring.
We have a calibration process, the journaling process, the rewards process, the decision matrix rewards when we achieve something, making sure that that snowball that we're pushing is pushed with efficiency so that it can gain momentum and mass so that we get that motivation forward. We want it to be self-sustaining, and the more we feed into it, the bigger, bolder, brighter, faster it becomes. We want to make sure the language we're using is positive language. Things that we want rather than focus on things that we don't want. I want to achieve this skill, so therefore I need to do this to get there, wants and needs, rather than, I don't want to lose, so what I need to do is not go there. And we end up just bouncing around somewhere else and not going in a trajectory that we want, just avoiding what we don't. We want to take the time to acknowledge everything, making sure that when we achieve something, we value it. It's not just a step in the process. It has to have a value to us because we've achieved it. We've put the hard work in. We want our brain to go, Yep, that was hard work, but I want to do it again.
And actual fact, let's do it even bigger and bolder and brighter this time. We want that buy in. We want that, this is awesome, rather than, wow, I've got to get out of bed again tomorrow. I've only just finished. We don't want to go down that track. We know what we do want. We want it sustainable. We want that self-belief. Yet, I can make this happen. We want to remember that everything is a history of success. Our confidence grows on the things that we achieve. Even if you achieve them, if you don't recognise them, we don't accumulate them. I talk often to my clients about accumulating marbles. Every single time that you achieve something, you take a marble and you add it to the bag of marbles that you're carrying. The more marbles you've got, the confidence you have. When you focus on something else or somebody else, like what you don't want, or they do something you don't do, you're giving away one of your marbles. You're giving away some of your confidence and your focus. So make sure that you collect as many marbles as you can. That's going to increase your self-belief that you can do anything.
You can achieve whatever you set your mind to. As long as you know you can achieve it through structured approach, then you will build confidence. Confidence builds that self-belief. So sustainably. I hope you found a lot of really interesting and relevant information here that you can apply to your training straight away. If you want to know more about this, I'm happy for you to contact me and we can talk more specifically about what it is you're looking to achieve, how you build your self-belief. But until the next time, train smart and enjoy the ride. My name is Dave Diggle, and I'm the mind coach.
