How to Make and Break Confidence

If you’ve ever walked into a team review wondering which clip will make you look stupid, you already know how confidence gets crushed. We talk about coaching confidence through the most common tool coaches use and misuse: feedback. When reviews become a public list of everything that went wrong, players don’t just feel corrected, they feel exposed. And once fear shows up, learning slows down, decision-making tightens, and team culture quietly deteriorates.

We unpack why so many coaches default to negative film sessions and how it often acts like a safety blanket: “I’ve told them.” But telling isn’t coaching. We dig into what repeated sideline commands like “get organized” actually reveal about your training environment, and why nitpicking random details you never coached can erode trust fast. Then we flip the approach and focus on positive reinforcement, exemplars, and psychological safety as performance tools, not soft options.

You’ll leave with a clear, usable framework for better performance reviews: only review what you previewed, start by showing athletes doing it well, and avoid dragging players for one-off mistakes unless they’re part of a recurring problem. If you coach, teach, lead a team, or parent an athlete, these small shifts can change how people respond to pressure. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a coach you respect, and leave a quick review. What’s one thing you’ll change in your next review session?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Midweek Reflections episode. Today's episode is a little bit about how to coach confidence. And probably we're also probably doing it with the concept of how do you destroy people's confidence? They're two ends of the same spectrum. And if you go too far one way, you lose confidence. And if you go the other way, you can gain confidence. And the context I'm going to talk about this today is how we give feedback. And the way you talk to people as a coach or and as a person in general creates or breaks confidence. And that's a particularly relevant for coaches because we are in the business of giving feedback. And sometimes that feedback is constructive. And most of the time it's constructive. How do you get better? And sometimes you have to point out what didn't work. But the way you do that can have a massive bearing on the confidence levels of the person you're delivering it to. So I just wanted to raise a common thing that I've seen in the last little while, which has come up, which I just wanted to highlight. And it and it came in the form of a review. I watched a team's review where they watched clips and they watched 15 clips, and every single one of them was

Framing Confidence Through Feedback

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a negative clip. And all these clips were about all sorts of different things, of which I hadn't seen any talked about in the week leading up to the game. Yet these were all reviewed and reviewed quite harshly. Can't be doing that. This is shit. That's poor. You need to be better at that. That's rubbish. Those were the kind of sentiments, which is a very, very common way that coaches give feedback, particularly in reviews after game in the next training session. So why do we do it? Why is that such a common thread that coaches go through games and pull out all the negative stuff, all the little micro things to show their players, to tell their players in a public setting like that? Why is that? And part of the reason over my long time of coaching is it's a bit of a safety mechanism for coaches. A lot of the time you feel like if I've shown everything possible to be shown, I'm exalved of all blame if it's not done on the weekend. I've told them. That phrase is a coaching phrase. Whenever you catch yourself saying it, you need to actually turn

When Reviews Turn Into Takedowns

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the finger back on yourself. If you're saying, I've told them and they're not just not doing it. I've told them to do this, this, and this, and look, they just don't do it. They're just not good enough. Those sort of cues, that is your red flag as a coach that you're not coaching as well as you should. Because telling isn't coaching. Telling people to do something is not coaching people to do something. For example, if you're on the sidelines yelling out, get organized, team, come on, get organized, get ready. If you're having to say that consistently over and over again, you are not coaching people to be organized. You're not coaching them to be ready. And I would suggest your training sessions don't reflect that at all. It's a massive tell for you as a coach. Also, when you are critiquing every little thing, you're losing the real value of what you're saying. Every little nuance that you bring up that you haven't spoken about or referred to previously, that you're now bringing up out of nowhere and uh critiquing and giving someone negative feedback in a public setting is drawing away from the respect and trust people have in you. What's he gonna say? Gee, I don't know what this person is gonna do. And I think that's a really big miss that a lot of coaches use. There is a massive benefit and there's a lot, a lot of psychological stuff around highlighting the positive in the what we do, highlighting the exemplar. It's actually a funny concept that a lot of coaches actually miss is that when we are doing a review, when we're giving feedback of a team, how often do we actually highlight the things we do outstandingly well? Hey team, I just want to show us nailing what we said we were gonna nail. Have a look. We talked about getting this wide passing this week to go one, two, three, four passes to width. And look at this example, how well it's done. Everybody back in place, turned facing up, square hands, balls out in front, one, two, three, four. How good is this? Look, and look what it leads to. You give that one example to start off a feedback session, and your team is in. They're like, yeah, yeah, we did do that. You talked about it leading up to the game, you did it in the game, you reviewed it positively afterwards, and now you've put inside brains exactly the behavior you want to be seeing on a regular basis. And when you do it with that positive construct, it's more likely to stick. It glues in the mind. It creates those

Teach With Exemplars And Positives

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channels in the cerebellum, and it's more easily repeatable because this positive associations associated with it. No one's in fear in that review. No one's sitting there going, Oh, I do hope no one pulls that out on me or highlights any little random thing that I did wrong. They're walking in going, right, what have we done well? Yeah, that is good. And the confidence of the whole group lifts. If we can get one person's confidence up, has this contagious effect on a group. That's the way groups roll. So I would suggest a great outlook that you do with your reviews is a five to one ratio. Let's make let's show exemplars of things doing well. If we said, for example, we wanted really fast line speed and to hit them behind the gain line, show the f show three awesome examples of that to start with. Then if you said you also wanted the guys on the inside or girls on the inside to be really active, show that as well. And then on the fifth one, say, here's a little work on that we spoke about that we can just tidy up. Could be this little point. Then you've got a really nice balance between raising confidence, raising confidence. And when people are receptive and they'll they're enjoying things, and you throw in a little constructive thing done well, it's more likely land. There's no fear there. It's like, yeah, yeah, we can add that, we can build on that. That they're loving what they're doing. And this is kind of the context which I put back to uh parenting and teaching young children. And the example I often have is primary school teachers. I love watching the way primary school teachers talk to young children. And that's the way I think all coaches should talk to all of their athletes. It's it's a journey that these teachers are on. They're creating this positive, confident thing because part of primary school teachers is trying to create this love of learning, the desire to be there. If primary school teachers just took on this mentality that everything's wrong and that shit and don't do this, the little kids would sit there in fear and they would shut up shop, they wouldn't put their hands up, which primary school students are absolutely brilliant for. They would go into a shell and they would lose all confidence in the learning process. And so primary school teachers by nature are creating a positive journey. They're creating confidence. And you go into any primary school park classroom, you ask a question, and the hands that go up will be every single one in that class. And as we go through life and schooling particularly, by the time we get to the end of your school age, you ask a question and one

Lessons From Primary School Teachers

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or two hands will go up. Slowly over the that educational journey, you lose that confidence to put your hand up and ask questions and get better and have confidence in the classroom for whatever reason. And we as the coaches, teachers, those that stand up in front, we have a massive part of that journey. And your review and the way you talk to people can create or break confidence. So that's massively important for our profession. So I want to leave you with three little things you can think about adding into your reviews, the way you give feedback to people, particularly after games when there's a bit of emotion on the table. And here they are. Number one, only review things that you previewed. I think that is an absolute must do. If you've said you want to be good at the breakdown this week and do it a specific way, show those things. Review that aspect. Because if you're then starting to review how uh you kicked and you haven't talked about at all, people sort of throw their hands up in the air and go, well, okay, yeah, these are all valid points, but do you want to coach that first? Do you want to inform us that this is part of what you're going to be reviewing? If you review just the things that you talked about, players can understand it. It gives good context. We talked about it, now we'll review it. It closes the circle out. And when you do review it, number two, make sure you show the exemplars of doing it well. Humans enjoy watching themselves do things well. When you do something well and someone goes, oh, that was awesome, keep doing that, you're more likely to do it. So show these things publicly. Sometimes as coaches,

Three Review Rules That Build Confidence

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we get so like obsessed with the negative of all the things we did wrong, we forget the amazing things we did well. And it's not always just the amazing things. Sometimes it can just be a fantastic improvement. You can say, team, remember how when we started doing this, we couldn't get two passes in. Now look, we're doing six. Now, ideally we want to get to ten, but how amazing growth. In just two weeks, we've gone from two to six, and I look forward to when we get to ten. Keep it up, we're on track. And that creates that confidence that we want. Number three on your reviews is try avoid showing just a random one-off thing unless that one-off thing is part of a bigger epidemic. Something that's that's happening over and over again. So if you're showing something random, let's just take, for example, um speed to ruck. Let's just say someone's slow, we miss it, and we get turned over. If that's a one-off and that didn't happen for the rest of the game, maybe think about not showing that one. If it happened 30 times in a game and would and 15 of those were turned over, I think that's an important place, whether you've said it or not. It's an it's an epidemic now, and that's something you can show. And when you do show it, it doesn't have to always be a negative thing. If you've never said it before and it's you're worried it's gonna be an epidemic, just be casual about it to start with. Raise it first. Hey, and this is something which appeared, team, which we need to correct. We didn't talk about it, but this is slowly creeping into a game. Then you s sow the seed to for your training, which you'll then put a lot of work into it. Right, this is something we want to focus on. The next game is when you can review it and review it with a bit more heart and soul and importance. And then you go back to those points. They are team, some little things which you can do in your reviews, which will help hopefully just highlight to you how you can create and also make aware of how you can break confidence in teams just by the way you review and the way you talk to people. Go well. Look forward to chatting to you next week.