Research Brief: The Research Behind Confidence Coaches

Confidence is a skill, not a trait. If we were born with confidence, then Tom Brady wouldn’t have had to visit University of Michigan’s associate athletic director every week to “master his insecurities and fears,” and Tiger Woods wouldn’t have had a clinical psychologist as a caddie while an amateur. Elite athletes have long known that to do their best, they need to bolster the mental side of their game. Why shouldn’t the rest of us do the same to improve our own lives?

The lessons and training that sports psychologists and cognitive behavioral therapists use can help anyone to see their strengths, believe in their capabilities, and treat themselves kindly in the face of adversity. These are pillars of confidence that can be applied to everyday situations, and importantly, will help our children in an age when being confident is harder than ever.

One innovation in confidence training developed by sport psychologist Dr. Kate Hays and her colleagues is called confidence profiling. Based on Bandura’s self-efficacy work, the confidence profiling process seeks to identify each person’s unique sources and debilitators of confidence. Everyone finds confidence in different ways and needs confidence in different situations, so a completely personalized approach ensures that an individual’s confidence goals and training plan are relevant to their experience and context. It’s a process that has been used successfully by Olympic medalists, world-record holders, and World Cup winners; and those same psychological skills training methods have even been adapted for use with kids.

The same way a gold-medal swimmer might rate confidence in their kicking form at a 3 out of 10, and work on ways to get that to a 6; a kid might identify that their confidence in working out arguments with their friends is at a 3 and make a plan to get that to a 6.

The difficulty (until now) is that most kids haven’t had access to these lessons, even though all kids can benefit from them. There just aren’t enough psychologists in the world, or hours in the day. But new technologies are making it increasingly possible to democratize confidence coaches, whether it’s using AI to train chatbots or providing parents with the guidance they need (spoiler alert: we’re doing both).

Confidence coaching has been proven in the research literature and on the podium. It’s time that we give all kids a chance to learn and practice the confidence skills most important to them, whether it’s in sports, academics, social interactions, or for personal growth.

Confidence is a skill, not a trait; and it’s no longer a privilege either.