Confidence Solutions

Confidence is not something you can fake on a football field. 

Confidence is within everyone, but how do you bring it out when it is low and the pressure is mounting?

That, in turn, gives you the confidence to try another risk. Each risk is taking you out of your comfort zone.

Look at some of the Spurs players at the moment and they are playing within their comfort zone, while others are prepared to take a chance. Serge Aurier was staying within his comfort zone, possibly as a result of his disciplinary record this season and giving away goals.

He is still miles ahead of Kyle Walker-Peters as a right-back though as he is the only full-back we have on the right who gets into advanced positions. We need him to regain his confidence.

2. Adopting a positive outlook and rallying behind a noble cause. Utterly essential to confidence, you can't be or portray or restore confidence if you are negative or have a negative outlook.

Fans who are negative are just making Spurs' position worse, they are acting against the club and team's best interests.

Sir Alex Ferguson would create a siege mentality within his squad as if the world were against them to instill the will to fight and overcome adversity. Confidence soars when the individual or group embarks on a mission with an honorable purpose that they all genuinely believe in.

That is one option for Mauricio Pochettino.

3. Let mistakes go, don't fret about them, just move on. Easily said, not so easily done. Fans want to dwell on mistakes and they take that attitude into the stadium. It then doesn't take much for them to lose confidence and stop supporting the team which transfers itself to the team and compounds the problem.



4. Keep getting up. If you stumble and fall as Spurs have been, you get up and fight again. You do not give up, you learn more from failure than you do success and you learn more about the individual.

Failure mentalities give up, failure mentalities demand Pochettino is sacked and replaced. Successful mentalities support the club, support the manager, understand the problems, see solutions as opposed to tossing toys out the pram and starting again.

Dwell on mistakes and you'll go backward.

5. Don't let perfectionism stop you from trying. Well, we demonstrated that last season, we were nowhere near perfect but we tried all right, so much so that we got to a Champions League Final. Our league form fell off because we concentrated on it, our eye went off the ball in the Premier League as we had Champions League football for the following season all but sewn up.

Fear reduces effort so if a player fears something will not be successful (a pass) he will not try it. What is the point of a player making a mistake if fans get on his back and make matters worse? Better for him not to try and not make the mistake in the first place!

Unfortunately, that is the thought process the Twitterati promote.



6.Trust. If you don't think you can succeed then you can't. A few players at the club tried to engineer moves and are no longer committed to Spurs. We should have moved them along and we didn't/haven't. Therefore we have rather tied Mauricio's hands and some fans (the usual constant complainers) are blaming Pochettino for that.

That shows a rather limited thinking process, there is no one person to blame or one thing to blame. Each player is an individual. Christian Eriksen wants to show the club it should have sold him for peanuts and has deliberately gone into his shell to prove his point. Not a nice way to treat the club who made you and shows he has no respect for supporters.

Pochettino has built one team, he can build another. Success curves bend both ways, we are currently in a dip, but there will be an upturn. If you don't have trust as a supporter you cease to be a supporter, you are an advocate of change, not support.

7. Past and Future. While you don't let the past dictate your future, you can use past experience to help your future. Any player going through these tough times and coming out the other side will be more confident and a better-rounded player to deal with any future dip.

If however, you have a squad who have not had to fight through something like this then they will not know how to handle it and you are just repeating a mistake instead of learning from it.

Now is the time to have confidence in yourself, trust yourself and go for gold. Each time we score a goal, take a lead and lose it, the harder it gets. 

I can see positive signs and don't think we are a million miles away from turning things around and let's be clear, Pochettino isn't going anywhere.