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What’s in this newsletter?

• 📖 Confidence Defined: Understanding confidence as belief, not just a feeling.

• ☯️ The Two Athletes – Overconfidence vs. under-confidence and what they teach us.

• 🐛 The Inchworm Concept: A powerful framework for building consistency and real confidence.

• 📈 Practical Applications: Five steps to grow confidence and improve performance over time.

The Idea: Confidence

This is the sixth and final Newsletter in our series on Maximizing Performance. In it, we will discuss our work with athletes. If you’ve missed our previous installments, we’ve listed them below.

1. Commitment vs Contentment: What Elite Performance Looks Like (Link)

2. The Framework for Evaluating Performance: How do I know how I’m doing? (Link)

3. Addressing Fear: admitting what is causing you to view performance wrongly. (Link)

4. Finding Your Purpose: How to discover and lean into your “why”. (Link)

5. Defining Drift: How to get better at handling adversity in performance (Link)

This week, we take you through the final of our four-step process that we take coaches, athletes, and performers through establishing, maintaining, and maximizing a plan for:

1. Fear ✅

2. Purpose ✅

3. Drift ✅

4. Confidence ✅

This week, it’s “Confidence”.

It’s like a spell. Athletes talk about it like they know when they have it but have no idea how to regain it when they’ve lost it.

We talk about how to build it. Just scroll through Twitter; plenty of coaches talk about reps building confidence. In a post-game press conference, you can even hear an athlete talk about it nearly daily.

But what is it? What do we misunderstand about what confidence is? How do we know when we have it? And how do we build it?

And this week — we have a case study to point to! Below are two golfers from UGA, Carter Loflin and Buck Brumlow, talking on the Dawglegs Podcast about our work with them as we take them through the exact process above (12:00 - 16:00).

☯️ Two Different Athletes:

We will discuss the nature of confidence by using a hypothetical athlete (or rather a few of them) that every coach can relate to.

We will spoil the point of this section first. Confidence is overrated.
At least, confidence in the way that most talk about it.
It’s not a feeling.
It’s the belief you can maintain regardless of how you’re feeling.

Think about these two athletes. We’ve all coached these two or led them on a team.

Athlete 1:
The athlete is over-confident to the point of near delusion. They think they are way better than they are. There’s a gap between how they feel and their skills.

This type of confidence doesn’t help the athlete perform better. All it takes is for that athlete to reach a level where their skills are tested to be humbled. Confidence doesn’t predict success.

Athlete 2:
The athlete is way better than they think. They undermine themselves. They assume they’re not going to win and can only focus on the small things they did poorly instead of seeing the 95% they did well.

Again, how we feel about our game doesn’t always indicate how we will perform.

Here’s the idea:
It is prevalent to think that confidence comes before you perform well. But that creates a dangerous assumption. It assumes that you can’t perform well without confidence. Or rather, if you don’t have it, you won’t perform.

It’s important. But it’s not as important as you think.

Sure, will you reach your peak performance without confidence? No. But performance isn’t about how often you hit your ceiling. Performance is about consistency.

How you feel doesn’t tell the story of your performance. Your results over time do.

🐛 The Inchworm Theory of Performance

We want to explain more about what we mean above using a theory called the Inchworm Concept, which we are borrowing from Performance Coach Jared Tendler.

The inchworm, seen above, stretches its body straight, anchors the front, bends from the middle, and then moves the backend forward.

Think of a bell curve and on the bell curve is the range of your performances.

You have your performance's bottom or “floor” towards the left side. That’s when you’re not at your best. It’s you or your team’s performance on your worst day. The right side is your absolute best. It’s your ceiling. It’s how you perform at your best. The direct middle of the curve represents your average.

If you took a snapshot at a point in your career, that is your range in performance. We often only think about the right side—how to improve our best. But real improvement moves the entire curve to the right.

The inchworm perfectly illustrates this movement.

Think about your first year coaching or working in an athletic department. Think about the more complex decisions you can make more quickly—the tasks you can execute. Think about how much more effective your practices are. How many conversations with parents, donors, and recruits you’ve had. You’ve logged hundreds of reps. Your bell curve doesn’t look different today than when you started. It’s moved entirely to the right.

Your average in Year 1 is probably the bottom of your range in performance now, if even that!

The inchworm also beautifully illustrates that the thing that extends your ceiling is pulling your bottom range of performance towards the middle. When you work on eliminating your “worst,” it actually allows you to extend the top range.

It’s a beautiful picture of development.

The implications are profound. Success isn't just about achieving new heights; it's equally about reducing how often or far we fall into our lowest states. By focusing on lifting our "worst days" closer to our "best days," we achieve greater consistency and confidence in our abilities.

This is confidence. It’s your ability to believe in your growth. Be entirely ok with the place you’re at today because you believe in where you’re going. And you know that with the results you’re putting in, the learning happening, the middle of your bell curve will inevitably move past most others.

Confidence is knowing that the middle of your bell curve is better than the field. And if it’s not now, it will be because of your ability to grow.

@beliefbykredi

Kobe Bryant missed three crucial shots, but instead of feeling defeated, he reflected, learned, and came back stronger. Build self-belief... See more

📈 Confidence as a Process, Not a Destination

One of the most profound implications of the Inchworm concept is that confidence, like the inchworm’s journey, is never complete. There will always be new challenges that stretch us further and force us to recalibrate our weaknesses. Instead of viewing this as a sign of inadequacy, we should embrace it as the natural rhythm of growth.

Confidence is built not in the absence of doubt but in learning to carry doubt with us as we move forward. It is the resilience to face our "C-game" moments, which are essential stepping stones toward our "A-game."

Practical Takeaways: How To Build Inchworm Confidence

1. Contentment Comes First: Contentment precedes confidence in performance. It’s a lot easier to view your performance correctly through a lens of confidence when you know and believe a result doesn’t impact who you are.

2. Clarify Your Range: Get explicit about the far left and right sides of your inchworm. What’s your best? What’s your worst? How can you measure it and track it?

3. Biggest Obstacles First: Remember, pulling your bottom range towards your average allows you to extend the right side of your inchworm. Work on eliminating the lower end of your range of performance first.

4. Embrace Small Wins and Reframe Failures: Like the inchworm’s tiny steps, small improvements in weaker areas compound over time. Instead of letting failures diminish your confidence, see them as opportunities to pull the back end closer.

5. Anchor in Process: Confidence thrives when you trust your process, not just your outcomes. Focus on the habits and systems that guide you.

Conclusion: The Inchworm’s Gift

The beauty of the inchworm lies in its humility. It doesn’t seek to impress with leaps or bounds; it simply moves forward, bit by bit, grounding itself in the belief that progress is enough. Confidence, too, flourishes in this steady rhythm. It is not about being perfect but about showing up, stretching forward, and pulling everything we are—strengths and weaknesses—along for the ride.

By adopting the Inchworm Concept as a lens for confidence, we can break free from the illusion that we must always project strength. Instead, we learn to embrace the messy, incremental process of becoming, trusting that each step, no matter how small, brings us closer to the confidence we seek.

Team Talks

One of the significant topics coaches ask us about is messaging.

Chances are, if we see a Head Coach’s name pop up on our phone, and they’re in-season, they want to share where their team is in their season and ask how to craft a message to maximize performance.

We know you’re tired of scrolling through YouTube, Instagram, and X (Twitter), looking for a motivational video that you hope and pray will resonate with your team.

We were asked so much that we created a more permanent solution.

And that’s Team Talks.

What are Team Talks?

Team Talks are short, 10-minute-or-less videos to use with your team, focused on mindset, leadership, and performance. They’re evidence-based ideas with stories to capture your team’s heart. Each video comes with an exercise to make the lesson stick. They are used by state, conference, and national champions. We have Team Talks on:

• Adversity

• Accountability

• Teamwork

• Discipline

• Mindset

• Elite Performance

There are currently 18 (the length of a typical season). We will build the library over the next few months to have thirty-six.

Team Talks set you up with the right message at the right time for your team.

And for a limited time, we’re offering them a 25% discount. Get Team Talks today.

The Culture Playbook + Cohorts

Coaches have access to a lot of coaching content. What they lack are systems.

The Culture Playbook is 10 leadership ideas with the exercises you need to install the ideas and culture into your program. It’s the exact system we use to help coaches build their programs around mindset, leadership, and performance. We’ve used it at schools like Oklahoma, Mississippi State, and Florida State.

Since the Culture Playbook was released almost a year ago, nearly 1,000 coaches have purchased and are using it for their programs.

You can get it for your program today.

Culture Playbook Cohorts

We are offering Culture Playbook Cohorts if you’re interested in exploring the Culture Playbook on a deeper level.

We’ve had a few dozen commitments over the last week and aren’t starting with very many cohorts, so reserve your spot today!

Monthly Calls + Powerful Content + Practical Application + Community = Accelerate Your Growth

If interested, simply DM Seth or Kevin on Twitter.