Looking to level up your self-confidence in the water? Here are eight tips for increasing self-confidence for swimmers.
Self-confidence is an important part of every swimmer’s training and competition performances.
A lot of times, swimmers can look back at a specific swim meet, practice, or stretch of training and tangibly feel how their self-confidence impacted their swimming…
For better or worse.
And while we know that self-confidence is important, it’s not as clear how swimmers can reliably improve upon it.
Whether you are looking to dominate some personal best times, leave nagging doubts behind as the big meet comes up, or just want more consistent self-confidence during the course of the season, these tips will help you build lasting self-confidence for faster swimming.
Let’s dive in.
Self-Confidence for Swimmers
Swimmers can generate powerful self-confidence in several ways, including:
- Treat self-confidence like a skill.
- Focus on what you control.
- Measure and track your swimming.
- Set short term goals.
- List your self-confidence sources.
- Adopt a challenge-based mindset.
- Surround yourself with support.
- Work hard and strive for improvement.
Next, we will look at each tip in more detail, and offer some actionable advice for how swimmers can increase self-confidence for improved swim practices and better performances on race day.
1. Treat self-confidence like a skill.
Like other skills in the water, like your technique, dolphin kick, or lane rope pulling ability, self-confidence is a skill that you can actively work on.
Swimmers tend to hope for self-confidence on race day or accept that they aren’t naturally self-confident, and as such, will never have it. Like talent or genetics.
And while there will always be swimmers who exude it more naturally, self-confidence can be developed with consistent effort and intentional practice.
2. Focus on what you control.
Self-confidence is that hard to pinpoint but unmistakable feeling that you are going to be successful and perform at a high level in the water.
What makes it even harder to corral when you need it most is by making self-confidence reliant on things you don’t control.
Meet conditions. How other swimmers perform. What people on the interwebs are saying about your skillz and talent.
By focusing on the things you control in the water, stuff like your work ethic, the mindset you choose to have when you show up to practice, getting your butt to training more often, you give yourself a chance to build free-range self-confidence.
Tip: One days when self-confidence is low, write out a short list of things you do control and things you don’t control to refocus your concentration and energy.
3. Measure and track your swimming.
There are a lot of reasons and benefits to logging, measuring, and tracking your swim training.
Gives you an inventory of your training. Track best times, splits, and results in training. It’s also a tool for self-confidence.
How?
By recording and noting moments when you crush it in the pool gives you a library of self-confidence boosters that you can revisit in the weeks and months ahead.
Saving those moments and preserving them on paper when you perform at a high level in training (and competition), you give yourself a long trail of evidence that justifies high levels of self-confidence.
4. Set short term goals.
Short term goals are particularly handy for self-confidence building for swimmers due to the long length of the swim season.
By breaking up that big season-end goal into short term goals, whether by training block, month, or week, you give yourself more opportunities to build legitimate self-confidence.
Checking off those short-term goals gives your confidence an electric shock. And using short term goals like a series of ladder rungs will help you climb towards that big goal more quickly.
5. List your self-confidence sources.
Building self-confidence becomes a lot easier once you get to the root of make you feel confident!
Spending more time doing things that make you confident.
Seems simple enough.
But typically, when I ask swimmers what gives them self-confidence, it’s stuff like:
- “When I win!”
- “When I go a best time!”
- “When I have a great practice!”
Those are the obvious answers. But what are the actions, beliefs, habits, and routines that develop self-confidence for real that lead to the personal best time/win/great practice?
The problem with hanging self-confidence on an excellent (albeit more rare) result like a PB or dusting your biggest competitor, is that self-confidence will naturally plummet when you don’t go a PB.
So get under the hood of those confidence boosting swims. What led to those swims? Consistent training? Being more focused in training? Eating better? Going to bed sooner? Doing the little things right in the pool?
While the PBs and the results get all the shine, it’s those day-to-day sources of self-confidence that give swimmers the fuel to crank out the performances in training and competition.
6. Adopt a challenge-based mindset.
We face a lot of opponents in the water, including the swimmers in the next lane, mastering the perfect shave-down, and dealing with pre-race nerves.
The sweaty palms, racing thoughts, and runaway nerves can crater our self-confidence and performance before we’ve had a chance to get up on the starting block.
One tool to keep self-confidence running high is stress reappraisal. By reframing competition stress and anxiety as a “challenge” instead of a “threat” swimmers can trigger a more efficient physiological response, including higher anaerobic power output (Wood et al., 2018).
Remind yourself that competition is supposed to be fun, nerves are normal, frame the nerves as excitement instead of confidence-eroding stress, and let your self-confidence take the lead.
“I get just as nervous behind the blocks at the Olympics as I did at my first competitions as a five-year old. I take deep breaths and give myself positive affirmations all the way until my races are over.” – Jessica Hardy
7. Surround yourself with support
Building self-confidence may at times feel like a solo journey, but it doesn’t have to be. Thomas et al., 2022, noted that elite athletes cited coaches, teammates, and parents as sources of long-lasting self-confidence.
This social support is crucial to help you navigate the off days, be a voice of reason when things aren’t progressing the way you like, and to celebrate with you when you inevitably crush it.
Build a constructive relationship with your swim coach by sharing goals and seeking feedback. Lean on teammates and be a source of confidence for them, creating a positive loop of self-confidence. And lean on family and close friends for support, whether it’s just emotional support or a quick pep talk before a big, pressure-filled swim meet.
A strong support network creates a buffer against stress and self-doubt, allowing self-confidence to flourish.
The ”away from the pool” social network can also be a potent reminder that you are more than the times you put up on the clock, freeing you to swim with a clear mind and confidence.
8. Work hard at practice and strive for improvement.
The reality about self-confidence is that it’s really hard to fake. It’s earned.
A study (Hays et al., 2007) with Olympic and World champions surveyed them, asking about their sources and types of confidence.
All the usual suspects were there, including confidence about achievement (e.g. winning), having excellent tactical awareness, ability to manage nerves and pressure, and having a solid support team behind them.
But one of the primary sources of self-confidence was simply the work they’d done in practice, both mentally and physically, to prepare themselves.
I know this isn’t the overnight answer or fix most swimmers are looking for, but the difficulty of consistently showing up, putting in the work, and continually aiming for improvement, in matters small and main set, will help you build iron-clad self-confidence.
And because it’s the harder route, fewer will accrue the confidence-boosting benefits of showing up and getting after it each day at practice.
Which means:
- Make the most of each day’s training opportunities
- Work backwards from your ideal in competition and prepare accordingly
Self-confidence, that rock steady, walk-out-on-the-pool-deck-like-The-Terminator kind, is built in training.
Work hard and train smart and self-confidence will follow.
ABOUT OLIVIER POIRIER-LEROY
Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national-level swimmer, author, swim coach, and certified personal trainer. He’s the author of YourSwimBook, a ten-month logbook for competitive swimmers.
He’s also the author of the best-selling mental training workbook for competitive swimmers, Conquer the Pool: The Swimmer’s Ultimate Guide to a High-Performance Mindset.
It combines sport psychology research, worksheets, anecdotes, and examples of Olympians past and present to give swimmers everything they need to conquer the mental side of the sport.
Ready to take your mindset to the next level in the pool?
Click here to learn more about Conquer the Pool.
