Confidence that only exists after a win isn’t confidence. It’s just a scoreboard reading.

RESILIENCE

WHAT THIS MEANS

If your sense of yourself rises and falls with results, what you have is a mood attached to outcomes you only partly control. That arrangement works while things go well and collapses at the exact moment you need it. Steadiness comes instead from what you know about your preparation and your conduct, and both of those survive a bad night. A scoreboard is information about one game.

After the next result, good or otherwise, ask what you did well in preparing and in how you behaved. Judge yourself on those, and let the score stand as a separate fact.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

When did you last feel sure of yourself after losing?

MORE IN ADVERSITY, PRESSURE & RESILIENCE

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