By 2019, Virat Kohli had scored 70 international centuries in cricket. He ranked second, only behind the great Sachin Tendulkar’s 100 centuries. Kohli was a run making machine. He played his best while chasing and had made India win a lot of matches.

But then, he went through the biggest slump of his career. For the next 1020 days, he made zero centuries! Runs dried up for 3 years. His confidence was gone. And people were doubting if he was past his prime already. If he should make room for someone else.

How did Kohli lose his confidence? And how did he get it back?

Most people don’t understand what confidence actually is. What’s going on in your brains when you feel confident?

Confidence is your expectation of success. 

It’s your brain’s predictive mechanism. Your brain assesses past experiences, skills, and your perceived ability, then projects a likelihood of success. When this likelihood is high, you feel confident. When it’s low, you feel hesitant or anxious.

But Kohli had only gained more experience. And his technical skills and ability had not degraded. So why had he lost confidence?

Because confidence is not real. Confidence is built on faith. 

In Latin, “con” means with. And “fidere” means Faith. Confidence literally meant “with faith” – it literally meant you having faith in yourself to achieve success.

Self belief is essential to feel confident. And when self belief breaks down, confidence is lost. 

• Confidence is not based on the task at hand.
• And confidence doesn’t stem from your abilities.
• Confidence is a perception. Stemming from self belief.

Robert Rosenthal shows this with his pygmalion experiment. When teachers were falsely informed that certain (randomly selected) students were intellectual bloomers, their teachers’ belief in the students went up. And as a result, those students’ self belief bloomed and they performed better than their peers. Nothing had changed, except the belief.

Borrow belief.

In the 2024 T20 Cricket World Cup, Kohli was struggling. He had scored just 75 runs in 7 innings. He even went and spoke to the coach if they would want to replace him. But the coach Rahul Dravid said that he has confidence that Kohli would perform during key moments.

And that’s exactly what happened. During the finals, Kohli scored the highest number of runs and was man of the match for India. Just like those students performed better when their teachers believed in them, Kohli’s self belief was restored when Dravid believed in him at his lowest.

Confidence is not found. Confidence is created.

During the finals, Kohli found himself opening the batting. And he was fortunate because the first two balls he faced were loose half volley balls that he could strike for four runs . Two poor balls helped him get his form back. Kohli scored 76 runs – more in one innings than he had scored in the entire world cup!

Fluency helped him get his mojo back.

Fluency helps create confidence. Because fluency reduces mental resistance and makes performance feel effortless. When an action becomes fluent, it moves from your prefrontal cortex to your basal ganglia: Conscious effort moves to automatic execution. 

Smooth execution signals to the brain that your actions are reliable. Hesitance disappears. Self belief is strengthened. Confidence surges.

But how can you create fluency when you are struggling?

You focus on small wins. You do it with the 90% rule: lower the difficulty till you cannot fail. Pick a goal and reduce the bar so that there is a 90% chance of succeeding. 

Then let each small win rewire your brain and create this confidence loop.

James Clear, the best selling author of the book Atomic Habits had set a goal for himself: just write one sentence a day. He lowered the bar so that it was impossible for him to fail. This created the momentum he needed to write his best seller. There was zero resistance and hesitance in his brain. He had confidence to write every day.

How Kohli fixed the 3 year slump

Sometimes, the problem is much deeper. The more you try to create fluency, the harder it becomes. The attempt to build self belief itself leads to anxiety. Which is what happened to Kohli. The harder he tried to get out of bad form, the worse his performance became.

Because self belief is tied to how your brain processes fear and rewards. During a slump, your brain’s fear centre – the amygdala – becomes overactive. You start second guessing your every action. 

At the same time, the brain’s reward chemical – dopamine – is tied to anticipation. When you expect success, dopamine fuels confidence. But when failure becomes a pattern and repeats a few times, your brain stops associating effort with reward. You burnout and lose your natural rhythm. 

So when Kohli found himself in such a prolonged rut, he did the unimaginable. 

Kohli didn’t touch a cricket bat for one whole month!

Consistent failure had turned self belief into self pressure. Kohli was always stressed when he went out to play. His amygdala was constantly firing on the field. He found no joy while playing. And so, he decided to completely reset his brain.

By taking an extended break, and removing cricket from his life – his anxiety went down. His brain disconnected from the negative feedback loop.

He found that sometimes the best way to regain self belief is not to push harder. But to take a step back and reset your neural pathways. Then slowly restart with fluency building activities again.

By taking a month long break, Kohli could come back fresher. After 1021 days of drought, he hit an international century again!

Action Summary:

• Confidence is a product of self belief. Self belief is shaken when your brain feels a disconnect between effort and reward. Shaken self belief leads to mental resistance and double guessing every action.

• The way forward is to find fluency. Start with actions where you cannot fail. Allow your brain to rebuild the connection between action and reward.