Building your own overtaking confidence - deliberately

Confidence is king in karting. Here's how to build it yourself

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Building confidence is an extremely difficult thing to do, because it’s like a perfect catch 22.

Lets say you don’t have the confidence to make overtaking moves. The obvious way to build the confidence is to practice overtaking.

BUT, if you can’t make the moves in the first place how the hell can you practice!!

You can hardly practice doing something that you don’t have to confidence to do in the first place, right?

So, that’s the basic impossibility of confidence building…. that’s why working on confidence is so hard and needs some real thought.

Lack of confidence in racing is your instincts saying ‘wait a sec….’

Confidence is another way of saying what you think of yourself. It’s like the part of your brain that weighs up ‘what you believe you can do’ vs ‘your doubts’.

It’s a judge….

So, with overtaking, which is where confidence problems manifest the most, here’s how the judge works:

What I can do:

• I’m faster than this driver

• I can brake late

• I’m a skilful driver

• I know the track

• My kart is good

Self-doubts

• Can I brake late without locking up and spinning

• Will they turn in on me?

• Can I even get round this corner on this line?

• What if I spin, will I lose more places?

• I might crash

• Christ this is scary fast

Now, All the judge has to do in this situation is look at the balance of what you know you can do vs your doubts and decide:

Nah, lets wait a second before committing to this…..

It doesn’t have to say no…. It can just say ‘let’s adjourn court for the day and think it over.’

And suddenly the move is off - in a split second.

So, the driver here doesn’t actually chicken out - instead the driver says ‘hmmm, let me just size this up…’

In that hundredth of a second the move can’t be done, too late. You hesitate and can no longer make the move.

To convince your internal judge to say yes, you need to stack so many ‘I can do it’ facts, that it can overwhelm the doubts instantly

Here’s where the term self-efficacy comes in… Not a great term I know, but it’s so effective it’s outrageous!

For whatever reason, the term ‘self-efficacy’ is an absolute nightmare to say, and even harder to understand. The psychologists behind the terms don’t explain it very well, and here is the book all about it.

I read it so you don’t have to - 500 pages of it!!

It’s massive, and really hard to understand the basic concept even after reading the whole bloody thing.

So, I won’t drag you through all that, and will give you the lowdown fast, so you can use it. Even if I get it slightly wrong, so long as it works who cares!

This works a treat with my drivers, so lets go

Self-efficacy means your own opinion of how well you can do something in a very specific situation.

In karting, for example:

I would say at overtaking in a real race, into a tight bend, against a good driver, I’m a 4 out of 10.

So, really it’s just about rating yourself. Thats it.

The trick to building your confidence up, to make overtaking moves without hesitation, is to break down the process into what makes a move work.

Those are the things you need to practice, AND be able to rate yourself very highly.

Then your internal judge will get overwhelmed with so much positive and REAL evidence of why you can make moves, it will have to immediately vote YES. No hesitation, no weighing up…

It just says:

Yeah of course! make the move now! Why are you even asking me? We want to win mate!

How does it work in the real world? Break it down and maximise the parts.