When my brother, Derek, was in second grade, he brought home a wrestling club waiver form for my parents to sign. The school we attended (Campbellsport) had a great wrestling program, and he was excited to give it a try.
My parents were always supportive of our extracurricular activities, but they thought Derek would play basketball because it was one of my interests and one of the sports my dad had played in school. They also didn’t know much about wrestling and thought it might be a bit dangerous, so they put the waiver out of site on top of the refrigerator expecting the phase to blow over. But Derek’s interest was tenacious, and they eventually signed the waiver when he continued to ask about it.
After a year of watching the fun he seemed to be having, I joined him on the team the following season and ended up wrestling throughout high school and my final two years in college. As the years have passed, I’ve grown more grateful for having wrestled for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is having been exposed to one very specific tradition of the Campbellsport high school wrestling program:
The Circle of Champions
At the end of practice, all the wrestlers would gather in a big circle on the mats and clasp hands with the teammates standing on both sides. Our coach, Gerald “Sarge” Marking (we called him Sarge), would hike up his sweatpants and pace around the inside of the circle like a wild lion in a zoo exhibit.
He’d tell us what we were doing well as a group and what we needed to work on; explain the benefits of hard work, discipline, and belief; and offer a little motivation for any upcoming tournaments or dual meets.
Then he’d shout out a single question—and we’d reply in kind—three times in succession:
Sarge: What are we gonna be?
Us: Champions!
Sarge: What are we gonna be?!?
Us: Champions!!
Sarge: What are we gonna be?!?!?
Us: CHAMPIONS!!!
Practice would officially end after our final reply reached its crescendo, and we’d drag our exhausted bodies back to the locker room and then home for the night.
The value of belief
On the surface, the Circle of Champions might just seem like some macho, testosterone-induced motivational ritual. After all, not all of us became champions in the most common understanding of the term (e.g. tournament, conference, or state winner).
But something remarkable happens when you emotionally repeat the same words that signify the same belief over and over, every single practice of every season for four years. You build a strong sense of confidence that carries over to every other part of your life.
This confidence wasn’t that the outcome of any specific wrestling match or life endeavor would turn out in our favor, although it did arguably give us the edge in many close situations. Rather, it built a sense of intense trust—or belief—that we each had the ability to deal with whatever was thrown at us.
Either we’d win or we’d learn. And that learning would then help us to win more in the future, both on the wrestling mats and in life.
While I obviously can’t know what my life would be like now had I not wrestled and experienced the Circle of Champions, I can certainly look back at past challenges and recognize that some of my successes—and even my willingness to attempt such challenges in the first place—can be attributed to the confidence I have that, no matter what happens, I’ll be able to figure it out.
Researchers have a term for this: Agency is the belief that we’re able to take action to influence the outcome of circumstances that occur in our lives.
It’s a key ingredient of both hope and accomplishing goals.
If you don’t have agency, why even bother trying? And if you do have it? Well, the outcome of any circumstance still isn’t guaranteed, but the probability that it works out in your favor is better than zero, often by a significant amount.
Putting it into practice
Whether or not you have your own Circle of Champions experience, building or improving a sense of confidence is a surprisingly simple process. In fact, it’s perhaps so simple that it can be easy to discount or overlook.
We simply need to build a string of successes by consistently and frequently completing tasks that we intentionally set for ourselves.
What initially trips up most people is picking tasks that are either too hard for their current capabilities or too time-consuming to complete successfully on a regular basis. For example, we don’t build confidence by “following our nutrition plan 95% of the time until we reach our weight-loss target” but rather by “eating a baby carrot as soon as we get home from work”.
So this week as 2022 comes to a close, consider working on your confidence in 2023 by committing to a single, small practice or ritual that you’re confident you can and will do regularly (preferably daily) into the foreseeable future.
Make your bed. Eat a carrot. Do two push-ups. Meditate for 30 seconds. Read a single paragraph in a book. Or look your reflection in the eyes, ask yourself what you’re going to be, and then answer truthfully: a champion.