Trusting in your abilities

by Robert Poole

The feeling of being entrusted with a role or a job is something we can all relate to. Whether you are working in an office and your role is to make sure that the mail is sent out on time or whether you are a full time athlete working as part of a squad, you will have a role to play and usually you have or are developing the skill set to enable you to perform that role effectively. Sometimes you might have a problem with understanding your role – something that I have had to battle with over my last few years as a professional volleyball player – where the role hasn’t been fully defined to you. However, you should at least be aware of what you are capable of and have the belief that you can execute the tasks to the best of your ability.

Yet we all experience periods of self-doubt when we don’t always believe that we can fulfil the role or task that we have been given. We are afraid of letting the team down, or worse still, scared to discuss with others our feelings of inadequacy to undertake what we have been asked to do. There is an element of doubt in our minds, whether it is directly related to the task or to other external factors that have been going on in our everyday lives. It can be described as having a “Fear of Failure” – focussing solely on the possible negative outcomes of an action rather than considering the possible successful outcomes. What we need to do is realise that someone else has had faith in us to undertake the task – otherwise they wouldn’t have given us the task in the first place – and that if they believe in us then so should we believe in ourselves!

So how might you find yourself distrusting yourself in a volleyball environment and how might you be able to overcome that internal struggle?

Knowing and believing you can do it

One of the areas of the mental game that players sometimes struggle with, especially when attacking, is differentiating between knowing they can do something and believing that they can do it. This might sound really confusing because surely if you know you can do it then you should believe in yourself? I think the difference is that players know from previous experience that they can play the high hand shot or the line shot consistently but if they make an error playing one of those shots – and particularly so if it happens 2 times in a row – they then stop believing that they can make the shot. They then start to doubt themselves, especially if they are low on confidence at that particular point in time and then this self doubt grows and creates anxiety, causing them to doubt every aspect of their game.

This is a negative development that players need to work to eliminate from their game. They probably know they are making the right shot selection, they can likely even hear their team mates telling them the shot that they played was the same one they would have gone for and they were just unlucky in it’s execution on this particular occasion. They need to learn to accept that they made the right choice and allow themselves to make the odd mistake, instead of telling themselves that the shot is not something that they are capable of playing and then panicking on the next ball, chickening out and playing a high tip or roll shot.

We are constantly reminded that volleyball is such a mental game, which sometimes can be easy to forget but if you can back yourself and your skills and convince yourself that you believe that you can make those plays, you are probably 90% of the way to mastering this aspect of the game and executing the majority of your shots consistently.

When I change my mindset and believe that I can make the shots and if I commit 100% to the play, I know I will score the points for my team. In a recent practice session I made 1 error immediately followed by back to back points, solely because I believed I could make the shots and acknowledged that one mistake doesn’t define that shot as a failure. As my setter explained to me, for him its not that I make the error that’s an issue, its that I then have the subsequent doubts in my abilities because how can he have confidence to set me if the team is 24-23 down when I don’t believe in myself ?.

One of the hardest situations to overcome is an injury. My teammate told me the other day that after he had knee surgery, on his recovery he felt so determined that his confidence was sky high and he believed he could out jump the other players and perform as if he hadn’t had any issues at all. He believed in himself and now he is still doing what he loves – playing professional volleyball at a high level. Maybe just something to bear in mind the next time you have a bad session…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Christenson (@mchristenson5)

Overview

As an athlete you will go through times where you are so confident in yourself that you almost take it to the point of arrogance. You will also have lows where you barely feel like you can play the sport any more and that it might be time to move on. However, these individual points do not define you as an athlete and they are simply just points on your journey. It is important to understand that no one else is going to give you self belief, it has to come from inside yourself. Have confidence in yourself that you do know how to play the sport, you wouldn’t have made it as far as you have if you didn’t have the ability. Only you can change your mentality, changing from dwelling on the past and instead creating a positive outlook for future situations. The corny saying… “believe and you can achieve” might sound like it only belongs in movie, but maybe there is a message here that can apply to all of us in our lives.