The Blessing of Confidence

I’m not sure why, but I learn a lot of personal lessons when playing sports. I played coed indoor soccer for the Gunners today and started in the goal. I’d played the other team before, and they had some good players—some guys who shot hard. In fact, one of the first shots I actually got a hand on was a sizzler that I tipped up to hit the crossbar. It stung my left hand badly, but I refused to shake it or give any sign that it troubled me at all. I just put a confident look on my face, and kept going.

Late in the first half, the other team got a penalty shot. One player, their best, one-on-one with me. He’s a nice guy, a finesse player. He would be going for a corner, and had the skill to put the ball wherever he wanted. I came out, he shot. I figured he was going to go lower left corner (he’s right-footed), but he went high left. My left hand came up and popped the ball away, much to his surprise. Stopping a penalty shot is an uncommon occurrence, so my spirits soared, and nothing else got past me.

At the half I switched out of the goal. We were up by one with three and a half minutes left. I was in the box, glanced at the clock, and said to John (one of our best players), “When Mike comes in, you should take my shift.” John’s faster than me, better at all aspects of the game. But he looked at me, smiled and said, “I’d rather you go out and play your usual hard-nosed defense.” And when I did get out there, I played really hard. John’s words echoed in my head on one specific play which broke up the other team’s last scoring attempt.

Today’s game reminded me of the lesson of Confidence. I first heard it articulated by Ron Wolfley (four time Pro Bowler who had a ten year career in the NFL). He was talking to a group of high school football players and he told that that if you have confidence, if you tell yourself that no one else on that field is better than you, and you hold that belief in your heart, you will be unstoppable. If you have confidence, if you believe in yourself, then you banish that sort of self-doubt that will undercut anything you try to do: in sports, in work, at school, or in writing.

Several years ago, at the end of the Age of Discovery novels, Bantam dropped me. They no longer wanted to work with me. That shook me to my core. I began to doubt whether or not I’d lost it. Those books had been tough to write. Memories of that struggle—combined with Bantam’s rejection—really had me wondering. Then going a couple years without a contract, well, that didn’t help much, either.

And yet, I kept going. Manly Wade Wellman had said it very well: “Only you believe you can write. If you quit, you just make the opinion unanimous.” During the same time that I’d had trouble writing those novels, I’d turned out some of my very best short work. I picked up a variety of writing gigs here and there, both for publication and for internal consumption with some clients, and I kept turning out short stories and proposals for novels. This was also the period when I concentrated on figuring out this digital publishing thing. In that respect, Bantam’s dumping me was probably the best thing that could have happened for my long-term career.

I have a lot of young writers—and not so young but beginning writers, or writers whose careers have gone into remission—ask how you keep going after getting pasted in the mouth time and time again. And I tell them there are two things, two key things, to keep you going through anything:

1) Find something to love about what you’re doing, and follow that seam the way you’d follow a seam of gold in a mine.

2) Have confidence that you will succeed.

And what if you don’t have confidence? Fake it. Paul Ekman’s work showed that if you were to set your face in a confident expression, you would actually feel more confident. Do it. Don’t talk down about your work. Forget the self-depreciating humor and comments. Don’t play yourself down hoping others will lift you up, lift yourself up and make others feel better about themselves. Fake it until you no longer need to fake it, and then keep building on it.

Confidence is how you win. Give yourself that blessing, and your dreams will come true.