The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance

Confidence is a sense of certainty about your ability, which allows you to bypass conscious thought and execute unconsciously.

If you’re having a bad day, CHANGE YOUR MIND and have a good day!

When the fear of making a mistake is in your mind, you become cautious instead of assertive, reserved instead of intense, overly analytic instead of natural and flowing.

success in any field—be it sports, the arts, business, science, and certainly the military—requires both confidence AND competence.

Everything else can be taken from you, but this power to choose what you think, what you remember, and what you believe about yourself is untouchable.

There is a curious tendency in our modern world to overidentify with our shortcomings and even define ourselves by our mistakes, presumed limitations, and all the things we can’t yet do.

it doesn’t matter how much “failure” you’ve experienced if you decide to respond to it constructively.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

a sense of certainty—that feeling of having complete faith . . . about your ability—that you can do something or that you know something . . . which allows you to bypass conscious thought—so well you don’t have to think about it . . . and execute unconsciously—so you perform it automatically and instinctively.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win. —SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

The ideas and thoughts we maintain about a situation (“I’m not built for this” vs. “I am right for this”) constitute the “prophecy,” a prediction about what will happen (“It’s gonna suck” vs. “I’m gonna crush this”).

be comfortable when you’re nervous?

Confidence is that feeling that you can do something (or that you know something) so well you don’t have to think about how to do it when you’re doing it. That skill or knowledge is in you, it’s part of you, and it will come out when needed if you let it.

How

Strive for perfection, but don’t demand it.

Confidence,” he says, “isn’t the absence of doubt, it’s the way you respond to doubt.

confidence has relatively little to do with what actually happens to you, and pretty much everything to do with how you think about what happens to you.

Most of us were “socialized” by well-meaning teachers, coaches, and other authority figures who encouraged us to find our place in the world and comfortably fit in rather than build the self-confidence that would help us stand out.

Breathing for Warriors,

It’s the person who has done enough preparation, who has developed enough competence, and who then decides to feel totally certain about that level of competence, whatever that level may be, who has the best chance of bringing home that A grade or making the team. So how do you know if you’ve done enough? Simple: if you can perform the sport skills consistently in practice, or play the tough part of the piano recital alone in your home, or answer all the practice test problems when you’re with your study group, then you’ve probably done enough.

Lieutenant Colonel Jonas Anazagasty couldn’t agree more. “Confidence,” he says, “isn’t the absence of doubt, it’s the way you respond to doubt.

a sense of certainty about your ability, which allows you to bypass conscious thought and execute unconsciously.

of his life in a wheelchair or walking on artificial limbs. “I decided right there that I would never feel sorry for myself,” John told me years later. “I told myself that I was going to have a great life.

accepting the fact that being nervous really means you’re getting ready to be at your best?

Put bluntly, it doesn’t matter how much “failure” you’ve experienced if you decide to respond to it constructively. And sometimes maybe “responding to it constructively” means you ignore it altogether.