June 3, 2025

Every week, I sit down to reflect on the events of the week, extract their lessons, and gameplan how to apply those lessons toward greatness and growth. It’s a system that has always worked for me, it can work for you too.

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Where does real confidence come from?

Sitting in the stands in Munich, witnessing an all-time performance from Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final against Inter Milan, I found myself thinking a lot about confidence.

I was a part of teams that always played with a lot of confidence, like this PSG squad. I played with a lot of confidence myself, over a long period of time, thanks to a lot of practice, self-reflection, and support from people who helped me understand where I needed to get better in order to be the best I could be. I was fortunate that my confidence on the field also fed other areas of my life. It helped to create a foundation for growth, resilience, and success.

But it wasn’t until I got older that I started to really contemplate where confidence comes from; how you build it; and how you keep it.

REFLECTION

It’s obviously been a wild ride for Paris Saint-Germain over the last two years. They lost three of their star players—Messi, Neymar, and Mbappe—who were also some of the greatest scorers in all of international football, maybe of all time. Yet, it’s hard to think about their departure as a “loss”, especially now, in retrospect.

Despite all that talent, as a team they didn’t look like they played with a lot of confidence together. And nobody seemed to understand why; possibly not even the people inside PSG’s organization. No surprise, those teams never reached their full potential: out in the semis of the Champions League last year, out in the Round of 16 each of the two years before that.

This season, they were all gone. What was left was a youth movement. The average age of the starting 11 was under 25 years old. For most squads, in most sports, if they lost this kind of firepower, it would almost be a guarantee that they’d take a step backward, maybe even head toward full-on rebuild.

Not this team. They are everything you’d want in a champion. They’re quick, aggressive, accurate, unselfish, and most importantly they play with ridiculous confidence.

For such a young team, you wonder, where does that confidence come from? I would argue it comes from a high degree of, what I call, “conscious competence”: You know you’re good, and you know why you’re good.

LESSON

There’s one sure-fire way to create confidence: displaying competence when it counts. That means coming through in the clutch; performing well on the biggest stage; being able to deliver; succeeding when people are watching.

Except confidence is not static or permanent. It’s not a tattoo. Once you have it, you don’t just get to keep it. You have to build it up and reinforce it. You have to control it, not leave it up to chance. That comes with doing things consistently well. It comes through practice, rehearsal, doing the same things over and over again, and learning from your failures until you know that you can do what you need to do, the right way, every time.

The quality of your confidence—its sturdiness, its depth and breadth—depends almost entirely on the kind of competence you have displayed to earn that confidence in the first place. Is it conscious competence or is it unconscious competence? What I mean is, do you know why you’re good or do you not?

For most young athletes, many of whom are naturally talented, their competence is always unconscious. They are good, they are talented, they just don’t know why they’re so talented. Ironically, this usually gives them great confidence. And why wouldn’t it? If all you do is win and you’re great your whole life, what’s to say it would be any different in other areas of your life from day to day? Anyone who has spent time around great high school teams or young athletes who’ve won state titles, you know how those kids can feel themselves at times. They just seem to be better than everybody else.

But that confidence can be brittle. Eventually, they’ll have hardships. They will lose and need to find some resilience. Those losses will come to better players, average players, sometimes to teams that are pretty bad. And that’s when the questions start to creep in:

Am I as good as I think I am?

How could we possibly lose to that team?

What’s wrong with us? With me?

If you don’t have answers, that usually means you don’t know why you’re good, and you also don’t know what your weaknesses are. You may try to regroup, to snap a losing streak or even up a series, but you don’t even know what to do in order to make that happen. Now you’ve made the possibility of success a total crapshoot, a guessing game. And that’s when confidence starts to crack and any resilience you might think you had starts to crumble.

People who are consciously competent—meaning they know they’re good, and they know why they’re good—have an unshakeable kind of confidence. They’re not afraid of losing. They’re not scared, because they know they have the skills to improve and the necessary self-confidence to help them through failure. They know where they’re not great, which means they know how to bounce back and how to win when they don’t have their best stuff, or when they’re overmatched, or when things aren’t going their way.

APPLICATION

You need to learn how to develop conscious competence. It’s an invaluable skill whether you play sports or not. It’s important at every level, because we spend our lives in some kind of team-like organization—on the field, at home, or at the office. If you want to win, to succeed, to be happy and fruitful, you can’t just leave things up to chance. You also can’t be satisfied with knowing only why you are good and what you need to work on. You have to know why your team is good and where they’re weak. You need to know the same thing for each member of your team. It’s a version of self-scouting, like I talked about back in February.

We lost Super Bowl 52 to the Eagles 41-33. The very next year, we won Super Bowl 53 over the Rams 13-3. In one game, I played very well and we lost. In the other, I didn’t play as well and we won. But the fact is, we did what we had to do—what we knew we could do after learning from our failure the previous year—to win as a team. That’s ultimately what matters, because it’s the kind of thing that gives you confidence to know that you will always, eventually, find a way.

We were a confident team, a consciously competent team, because we asked the right questions of ourselves as individual players, as units, and as a team as a whole. We surrounded ourselves with humble leaders who were never afraid of hearing the truth. We were relentless (and ruthless) self-evaluators. We had the humility to accept the things we were bad at, and the hunger to work to improve them. At the same time, we had the wherewithal to acknowledge where we were good and why we were good at it, then take real confidence in those competencies as pathways to victory.

Anyone can become consciously competent, in any aspect of their lives. Just start by asking yourself: What am I good at? Why am I good at it? Am I getting better? What helped me get good? Am I doing more or less of that than I used to be? Then ask anyone who knows you, who you trust, to help you understand your answers better.

The legacy of my Patriots teams is defined by the confidence we built atop our commitment to conscious competence. We strived to be great, and to know why we were great, so that we could more effectively learn from our failures, improve our weaknesses, and continue to get better. If PSG takes a similar approach, they will be a force to reckon with for seasons to come.

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