How to Keep Your Confidence And Perform Under Pressure

The biggest problem every athlete has is learning how to have confidence under pressure. Performing your best under pressure in sport is a matter of emotional self-mastery in the key moments of the competition.

Mastering Fear and Performance Anxiety

To be confident under pressure, you must know how to handle your fear, frustration, and performance anxiety.

Why? Because these negative feelings have to potential to destroy your ability to trust yourself under pressure. Have you ever been told by a coach to re-gain your confidence by thinking more positively?

Did it work?

I'm betting that it worked sometimes, but other times, it only made you more frustrated and anxious.

Affirmations, positive thinking, and visualization pump you up temporarily, but the moment you stop doing them, your fear and performance anxiety comes back. This is because you are using a lone technique that may or may not fit the competitive situation you are facing.


There are times in competition when positive thinking is the wrong technique. In these situations, you're better off not pressuring yourself to be positive.

Here's why:
Being positive means finding something good in the situation. The problem with trying to be positive in all situations is that there may not be anything good about the problem you are facing. Trying to force a positive reaction in such a situation will only deflate you.


Rather than telling yourself to be positive when things are collapsing around you, a better idea is to ask yourself for optimism instead.

Optimism is not being positive.

Optimism is the ability to find hope by believing that the challenges you are facing are temporary.


To restore your confidence in a slump, release yourself from the burden of trying to be happy and positive right away. Instead, just try to be optimistic. Find as many rational reasons as possible to believe your slump is temporary. Then, quietly channel your frustration into performing better.

Soon, you'll light it up other there, and your confidence
will return.