ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how confidence “works” in sport, exercise and performance settings. The strongest source of confidence is performance, and all athletes experience performance decrements at times. Self-confidence is the belief that one has the internal resources, particularly abilities, to achieve success. Three main conceptual approaches have been used to study and enhance confidence in sport and exercise settings: self-efficacy theory, sport-confidence and robust sport-confidence. Self-efficacy, or confidence, is constructed through a complex process of self-persuasion. Building on self-efficacy theory, R. S. Vealey developed a conceptual model of self-confidence in sport and companion inventories to measure the key constructs in the model. Several inventories have been developed to measure the sport-specific self-confidence termed sport-confidence. The Trait Robustness of Sport-Confidence Inventory is an eight-item Likert scale formatted assessment tool for robust sport-confidence. The Sources of Sport-Confidence Questionnaire was developed to measure nine sources of self-confidence particularly salient to athletes in competitive sport.
