Building Foundations of Confidence For Officiating

Confidence is the psychological factor my clients most frequently come to me for support with. Confidence is typically noticed the most when it’s gone missing, so as a result, effort is typically invested in restoring confidence. If you build your confidence systematically through your training and preparation for appointments, you can aim for a situation where you always know that you have optimal confidence at the times when you most need it. It’s worth considering the challenge of getting your confidence to peak at the right times, in exactly the same way, as you look to get your physiology to peak.

The general principles to be working towards when looking to boost your confidence are:

• Create a robust foundation through all of your training and matchday preparation that you know will not be compromised, a robust base, a bullet-proof core.
• Be clear when you’re peaking for a performance and consider the specific challenges that you’ll face for having peak confidence when you need it. Ensure that your confidence has been fine tuned from the solid base to be completely focused on stepping up to the specific challenges you’ll be taking on.
• Protecting confidence – Identify specific situations out on the field of play where your confidence is challenged and be ready for these so that they don’t reduce confidence excessively. Elite officials have got the balance just right between having a really strong/high level of confidence, but having a great ability to ‘not lose confidence’. Building a strong confidence foundation and not losing confidence easily should be the combination you are constantly striving for.

Here are some key reminders that are worth evaluating in relation to building and maintaining confidence.

1. Know your strengths inside out so that you can maximise the impact of getting rid of weaknesses (in a lot of cases officials spend all of their time focused on getting rid of weaknesses without having a strong grip on the strengths base that is beneath them. This creates an overly negative view of capabilities and can lead to a loss of confidence). If you don’t keep focused on your strengths frequently enough, you’ll easily find yourself going out into the middle with the aim of minimising the negative impact of your weaknesses, rather than striving to exploit all of your strengths. Defensive mentality versus attacking mentality.
2. It’s clear that you have to work on weaknesses in order to improve performance. The golden rule to be taken from number 1 though is to follow the course of 1.) Identify and value your strengths, 2.) Ensure strengths are exploited consistently and you can always deliver on them, 3.) When 2. has been achieved, begin to focus on reducing the negative impact of weaknesses, 4.) Once weaknesses have been reduced, focus on seeing if you can begin to add them to your strengths pool. A lot of problems with confidence occur when you cut straight to 3. and 4. and begin working on the negatives without a real understanding of your core performance strengths.
3. No-one’s ever complained of having too much confidence! As long as the confidence you have doesn’t result in complacency then keep fuelling your confidence so that it’s as high and robust as possible.
4. Check out your self-talk. The way in which you talk to yourself will give you a pretty good insight into how you’re influencing your own confidence. A useful check for your self-talk is to tune into it and then imagine that the words you’re saying to yourself are coming out of your Referee Coach/Development Manager’s mouth. What would the impact be on your confidence if a Coach/Development Manager was speaking to you in the way that you speak to yourself? If you’re not happy with what you hear, then work out what you would want to hear and fuel your own confidence by ensuring that you’re talking to yourself in that way as consistently as possible.
5. Being confident doesn’t mean being positive for the sake of being positive. Facing up to problems and attacking them with maximum conviction is essential. So get the balance right between facing up to the reality of the challenges you need to take on and making sure that you take on those challenges with maximum belief and optimism that you’ll ultimately be able to deliver matches successfully.
6. Confident body language is an important factor to make sure you get maximum benefit from. Being confident in your demeanour is an obvious variable to always exploit. So, how good are you at always making sure that at key times your body language is having the best possible influence on your performance?
7. Confidence is infectious, as is lack of confidence. Therefore, from a team perspective always look to make sure that you’re maximising your confidence so that you spread your confidence in yourself to other team members. If you’re confident in yourself, then it’s much easier for everybody else to be confident in you and just focus on raising their game without having to worry whether everybody else is up to the challenge.
8. The Process/Outcome balance is critical in building and maintaining confidence. As much as possible, ensure that you gain as much confidence as you can from all of the processes that you successfully deliver on the field of play. These repeat processes are your multiple injections of confidence to benefit from every game you referee, rather than simply waiting for one large shot of confidence that comes from the occasional flawless performance. Grab the injections when you can, but bank on process!

All of the confidence information above is focused upon you being maximally confident in your capabilities as an official, being confident in the process of training and performing on matchday, being confident as a result of the qualities that you carry around with you because of who you are and how you’ve developed your abilities.

There is very little reference above to getting confidence simply from outperforming colleagues. Performing well is obviously critical and having confidence that you know “how to referee well” is the kind of high level confidence you should be striving for.

In terms of “controlling the controllables”, your quest should be to make as much of your confidence as possible all about you.

The more that you take steps to ensure that your confidence is defined and refined by factors that are directly under your control, the stronger your confidence base will become.

Your confidence is such a valuable commodity that it’s worth making sure that you’re putting as much of it in place a possible, so that you can draw on it whenever you most need it on the field of play.

Remember, confidence is ultimately knowing that you’re going to do what you say you’re going to! So, are you practising doing what you say you’re going to? Think ahead to a crucial time out in the middle, and you’re standing there absolutely knowing that you’re going to do what you’ve planned to do… now that’s a position of confidence.

At The Third Team I work individually and in collaboration with different professionals where I have developed workshops and 1-2-1 sessions associated with Resilience and Mental Toughness Development to help referees. The workshops and 1-2-1 sessions are interactive, where referees are encouraged to open up and share their experiences to help themselves and each other.

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more about my workshops or 1-2-1 sessions and how I could help you or your officials.

Best Wishes,