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Recently, there was a question about confidence posed to the audience on the Linked In network by Avon Harpley, a training and coaching Professional:

Avon Harpley: I am looking at possible areas of research for my dissertation next year. I am interested in the area of confidence in artistic performers and non performers. What makes us confident or not? What do we need to be in place to be confident?

Answer by Pat Ahearne on The Way of Baseball:

There is a process that one goes through.  Not everyone goes through the whole process, but here’s where I’ve gone so far.  It begins with a natural skill or talent – my parents told me stories that I barely remember that I could throw a ball to a spot at a young age so I had a skill to pitch a baseball.

Once you take that natural talent into performance or competition with others at the same or higher talent level, you need two things – to train and perfect that skill, and find a way to deal with your reaction to increasing pressure to perform.

Whether it’s fear, nerves, butterflies, or whatever, you need to find a way to the bottom line – give your best performance when you need it the most.  In baseball, that’s where guys get superstitious, listen to music to get up or to come down, do whatever is needed to get ready for a game.

The next part of the process is to experience success and failure.  In baseball, have great games and get the worst beatings you can imagine.  Both experiences become yours, both are necessary, and contribute to confidence as you can draw strength from success and draw strength from the fact that you can get back to form from any bad game.

Then, you reach a place where the performance becomes art, the zone, magic, or whatever name you give it.  It’s where the performance flows, it comes through you, it’s goes beyond confidence – it’s so good, you know what will happen before it happens.  You’re awareness expands, you see everything, it flows.  I’ve had games where I knew exactly where the ball was going when I pitched it and where it would be hit before it happened.

There’s a quote in the movie The Matrix – “Are you saying I can dodge bullets?”, “I’m saying when you’re ready, you won’t have to”

Confidence may be back in the process where a performer is still finding a way to overcome the obstacles to the best performance when it is most needed.  There is a space beyond that which is difficult to describe except maybe to say it’s performance without resistance.  A performer needs confidence to overcome resistance.  Without resistance, the performance just flows as it should.

Don’t be afraid of any part of the process.  It is all for your benefit.  I’ll meet you all at the place past confidence where you perform without resistance.