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Doubt in training, confidence on game day
Overconfidence is the danger during preparation. In that phase a person is better off being, if anything, underconfident, and overpreparing.
Nobody headed into battle, or to the Olympic Games, tells themselves they won't practice today and won't train because they're going to get the gold.
On the day of execution, supreme confidence pays off. Confidence itself isn't bad. The question is when it's used.
Why do people underestimate how long preparing takes?
In a 1994 study, Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin, and Michael Ross asked psychology students to predict when they would finish their senior theses. Students predicted an average of about 34 days. They actually took about 56 days, and only about 30 percent finished by the date they had predicted. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had named this tendency the planning fallacy in 1979.
How does confidence change athletic performance?
Psychologist Albert Bandura proposed self-efficacy theory in 1977, holding that a person's belief in their own ability shapes how much effort they put in and how long they persist. Sport psychologists later tested the idea in athletes. A 2000 meta-analysis by Sandra Moritz and colleagues in the journal Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport found a positive relationship between self-confidence and sport performance.