Dr. Nate Zinsser: The Confident Mind, And The Most Powerful Sports Book I’ve Read

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — This year is our ninth year of SANDCAST, which is still a shock, both to me and Tri Bourne.

And while nine years is long, and recency bias is certainly an aspect that cannot be ignored, I cannot recall an episode in recent memory I’ve been more excited about than this week’s, with Dr. Nate Zinsser.

Zinsser is the author of The Confident Mind, which occupies a singular place in my mind as the most powerful sports book I’ve ever read. The first time I’d heard of the book came when Zana Muno and I recorded a podcast, one in which she went by the title of Beach Volleyball’s Hooptidoodah Girl. Her brother, J.J., then a professional baseball player, had read the book, and subsequently recommended it to his entire team. Zana took J.J.’s copy, read it, and subsequently spread its gospel to anyone who would listen.

I listened, as did many of our listeners on SANDCAST.

To this day, amidst hundreds, if not thousands, of books read, there has never been such an observable shift in my life, and results on the court, as there is in the before and after of reading The Confident Mind. I detailed many of those tangible, observable results yesterday, writing about a powerful journaling exercise called Exercise, Success, Progress, or E.S.P. for short.

That practical is only the beginning.

It’s not that I wasn’t a confident individual as a whole. In almost all areas of my life — writing, podcasting, interviewing, competing — I’ve been confident since I alas bloomed in college, from 5’10 to 6’4. But when it came to beach volleyball, a sport I picked up in 2014 and only began to seriously train in 2016, I felt like the imposter I, in reality, sort of was. I wasn’t raised in Southern California like so many of my peers and rivals, didn’t compete for a college like so many of my peers and rivals, hadn’t gone up and down the coast and hit the CBVA circuit as a teenager like so many of my peers and rivals. I was a homegrown, self-taught player who went to YouTube University for my learning, up against guys who had been doing this for their entire lives.

When my older brother gave his best man speech at my wedding, he said, and I paraphrase: “I’m here talking to all of these guys, and it’s ‘I played at USC, I played at UCLA, I played at Stanford,’ and here is my brother, ‘Well, I studied journalism at Maryland.'”

The list of reasons for me to be confident when it came to competing as a professional in the sport of beach volleyball was comically, vanishingly small, featuring mainly one bullet point: I played a lot of sports as a kid and was a decent athlete.

That was it.

That lone bullet point was never enough to vanquish the imposter syndrome that shadowed me every time I stepped into the players tent at AVP tournaments. Who was I, this writer-podcaster Maryland guy, to be sitting in a players tent with the real professionals? I laced my writing and podcasting with self-deprecation, largely because that’s my sense of humor, but also because there was more than a kernel of truth to it.

I didn’t belong.

I knew it.

Or thought I did.

Zinsser opens The Confident Mind with an anecdote from Eli Manning, whose mindset was the exact opposite of mine. Because here was Manning, who had every statistical piece of evidence voting against his ardent belief of being an elite NFL quarterback, claiming he was as good as Tom Brady, who was the greatest then and is the greatest now. The media ate him up for it, and Manning, in his unique and signature way, shrugged it off.

The next year, he won a Super Bowl, vanquishing Brady himself.

“He had won the first victory in his heart and mind,” Zinsser writes, “which gave him the best chance to win on the field in the toughest conditions… Confidence is learned. It is the result of a consistently constructive thinking process that allows performers to do two things: retain and benefit from their successful experiences, and release or restructure their less successful experiences.”

That anecdote hit. Stuck with me like a remora. I actually had quite a bit of evidence by then that I could compete. I’d made an AVP main draw less than four years after picking up a beach volleyball for the first time. I’d beaten longtime professionals. I was learning on a decently steep curve. It wasn’t a lightbulb moment, a sudden discovering of a well of confidence that had been there all along, but there was a noticeable shift in both how I approached tournaments and how I reacted when things weren’t going my way during the matches themselves.

“Confidence is learned,” Zinsser writes. “It is the result of a consistently constructive thinking process that allows performers to do two things: retain and benefit from their successful experiences, and release or restructure their less successful experiences.”

Three pages later, he adds: “Confidence is very fragile.” A page after that: “Fighting self-doubt and building confidence is a perpetual war of attrition, not a decisive, destructive victory.”

But, armed with this book and its wisdom, I began winning the battle. Through the journaling exercise, I was, as Zinsser describes it, building my psychological bank account into, to continue the metaphor, a robust sum with cash aplenty for the inevitable downturns in the confidence market.

“Confidence has very little to do with what actually happens to you, and pretty much everything to do with how you think about what happens to you,” Zinsser writes. Everything, then, that happened, be it a win or a loss, a main draw made or qualifier disappointment, became a good thing. Loss? Cool. I learned. And that lesson would be invaluable in the next tournament. Win? Awesome. Just proves I am the player I now confidently believed I was. 

It is this confidence that was the main reason I was able to take a fifth in Hermosa a year ago, against an elite field, despite three practices the entire year, beating one player who competed in the Olympics, another who won an AVP, another who was having a breakout season, another who would finish fourth in an Elite on the Beach Pro Tour. It is this confidence that allowed me to win gold in Pompano this past December despite even less practice and preparation. I had won the battle for, as Zinsser describes it, the First Victory, in my mind, and that allowed me to win on the court.

“The First Victory begins with accepting and utilizing the connection that decades of mind-body research has established: your conscious thoughts have a huge influence on your performance by the way they shape your mood and in turn affect your physical state,” he writes. “Winning the First Victory, then, involves first becoming aware of the stories and statements you make to yourself about yourself, the dominant narrative that you use to define, reinforce, and motivate yourself, and, second, exercising the discipline to ensure that the stories and statements you do make to yourself meet the criteria we established in the last chapter for passing through the mental filter – creating energy, optimism, and enthusiasm.” 

I owe much of the back, most successful, half of my beach career to Zinsser and his book, The Confident Mind.

I’m glad, with this podcast, you might get a chance to do the same.