Discover your life aquatic

Top 3 Ways to Boost Your Swimming Confidence This Year
By Peter Scott and Tyler Zetterstrom

Part 2 of 3 - Develop Inner Confidence

Welcome to the second installment of our three-part article series on boosting your swimming confidence this year.  If you haven’t read part 1, be sure to have a look before reading part 2.

In part 1, we looked at how to analyze your goals and break them down into milestones in order of importance with detailed steps to accomplish each one.  The value of doing this was to be focused in each moment of practice, rather than distracted by the expectation of achieving the larger goal.

The Key to Long-Lasting Inner Confidence

Once you have identified which steps you need to take first in order to accomplish the most important milestones that make up your overall goal, you’ll want to feel that you are up to the tasks you’ve set out for yourself.

Ask yourself, how important are you as a contributor to achieving regular progress in your swimming.  What ideas and tools do you have to offer yourself that will supercharge your practices?

Swimmers tend to underestimate how much they can contribute to their own progress when it comes to ideas for improving technique in the water and choosing strategies for success.  Instead, we find that most are inclined to rely on the authority and experience of a coach.

There is nothing wrong with getting great advice and technique coaching from someone who has the expertise.  However, if you put the responsibility entirely on your coach, then you miss out on an essential ingredient for creating confidence:  your intelligence and deep knowledge of your own mind, body and learning style.

In our experience, we see swimmers make breakthroughs all the time and yet fail to take credit for them.  Consider the effect that this has on you.  If each time you make a discovery you give your coach or a system of swimming all the credit, you miss an opportunity to build confidence in yourself as a swimmer.  This definition is important.  A swimmer is someone who swims with the intention of getting better.

What is that definition for you?  Do you call yourself a swimmer or do you feel you are fooling others if you were to claim that title?  Do you feel you need to swim a certain distance or speed to be called one?

The truth is, if you find yourself in a pool, doing drills, practicing skills, or swimming back and forth, you are a swimmer.  The more important question for achieving your goals is whether you ENJOY swimming and feel CONFIDENT about the swimming that you do.

Without taking credit for your own breakthroughs and the important role that you played in each one, you can easily forget how far you have come in you swimming.   What happens next is that you develop a sense of failure and of being stuck at a certain level that has no basis in fact.  Your motivation and excitement for swimming suffers.  You become less interested in revisiting those feelings of struggle and wasted effort.  You practice less.  You go to the pool but feel embarrassed to have people watch your stroke. And guess what happens?  You lose the essential elements that a swimmer gets from swimming: enjoyment and confidence in what he or she is doing in the moment.

Don’t let this happen to you!

So from now on, to boost your confidence and motivation, keep track of the little things and the big breakthroughs that contribute to your forward progress.

But I need a coach to help me!

Now, you might think that up to this point you haven’t really come up with significant advancements on your own.  Maybe now, you might have sat down down and tried to come up with a list and got stumped.  That’s okay.  Don’t let that discourage you.

From now on, take note of any moment when you had an idea, tried it out and it made a difference.  Take care to note both successful and failed ideas.  Finding out what doesn’t work or feels worse is often just as important as discovering what works better for you.  It helps increase your body awareness in the water, which is an invaluable asset in swimming.

Keep track of the advancements and discoveries in a training log.  When you look back after a whole year of doing this, you will be amazed to see where you came from and how improvements came at a steady rate.

As the undeniable evidence mounts for your very real progress, you will find that you have new motivation and excitement for swimming.

A swimmer who enjoys practice and has confidence in their approach is one who knows that they can rely on themselves to make significant breakthroughs.  Imagine how much more fun swimming would be if you shared in the success you had achieved.  The satisfaction of creating your own success is long-lasting and sweet.

The Key Points

Build up a history of your own successes and breakthroughs.  Keep track of everything, from the smallest details to the most obvious milestones.  This will do wonders for your confidence and result in better swimming.

What You Can Do Now

Here are some ideas for the kind of things you should be keeping track of to continue building your confident swimming:

• Improvement and experiments in how you approach your practice, training and learning

• How you made a technique focus point work for you

• Reaching any milestone you have set for yourself, especially simple milestones you can achieve in one session at the pool.

• Discovering new awareness of your body in the water

• Moments of flow in your practice (feeling in the “Zone”)

• Moments of newfound comfort in the water

• Brand new ideas that you came up with and tried out

• Swimming experiences that have become inspirational 

This week, each time you go to the pool, commit to writing down at least two examples of something from this list in each practice. Remember also to go beyond technique and skill and look at how you approached your practice from an emotional, mental or psychological perspective.