Confidence is the momentum of life

A lesson from a flow trail and a narrow street in Bordeaux

One loud bang on a narrow street in Bordeaux drained years of confidence out of me in a matter of minutes.

On a flow trail, the ground is never still under your wheels. It’s very different from road cycling because having to maintain balance and momentum over roots, rocks and irregular terrain requires much more full body activation than riding on smooth pavement. It’s also very different from downhill mountain biking because it’s not as fast and as risky.

It’s a happy medium for me, as it has allowed me to get exercise in a way that is less punishing on the body than running, and less boring than riding on the road or worse on a bike trainer.

But it’s not until recently that a lesson from mountain biking struck me as very applicable far beyond biking — to almost any activity, physical or not.

Momentum

When trail riding, the terrain can often be undulating. A few hundred yards of a slight downhill is frequently followed by a few hundred yards of a slight uphill.

I was recently riding on a trail that I have ridden many times before, but I rode two loops in two very different modes. My first loop was a warm-up loop so I didn’t go particularly fast on the downhills and as a result I had to pedal a lot harder to go uphill. On my second loop I was trying to go as fast as possible so I went faster on the downhills and as a result I didn’t have to pedal as much on the uphills.

This isn’t surprising. Momentum is a real physical phenomenon and so more momentum at the bottom of the hill means less need to provide additional energy to get to the top of the hill. What struck me on that day was how having momentum at the bottom of the hill not only changed the amount of effort I had to put into going uphill but it actually completely changed my experience of the entire trail. The trail went from being a bit of a slog to actually being a flow trail where I got a chance to work on my cornering technique, my braking and my overall bike handling skills.

Something else happened with the momentum of the first few downhills on that second lap. Successfully going through a few turns at this new pace gave me confidence. That confidence motivated me to continue gathering momentum, which started a chain reaction that had me pushing through the whole lap.

I had to be intentional to create my initial momentum, but very quickly thereafter the momentum kept building on itself and it felt more natural, instinctual even, and less forced.

Confidence

That relationship between momentum and confidence made me reflect on what the equivalent of momentum might be for the rest of life.

It’s confidence.

Confidence, in any new field, is something that we have to be intentional about cultivating. And it’s also something that feeds on itself. It might be hard to be confident about speaking a new language at first, but once you start learning the language and start speaking it, you incrementally build confidence and eventually get to a point where you naturally speak it, even if you might not be fully fluent. But you have to stay with it long enough to get there.

You don’t absolutely need momentum to start going uphill. You can start from a dead stop. It’s just going to take more effort, take longer time, and be less fun.

You don’t absolutely need confidence in order to engage in whatever activity you’re trying to engage in. You can stumble your way around, doubting yourself at every turn, and finish the activity through sheer determination. But it will take more effort, more time and be less fun.

But unlike momentum, confidence applies to many, if not all, areas of our lives. Cultivating confidence, then, is not about optimizing a single activity or even set of activities. It’s about setting a foundation that applies to a broad swath of our lives.

And once you’ve cultivated it, confidence has a way of going quiet. You stop noticing it. It stops feeling like something you built and starts feeling like something you simply are. That’s the part of it I hadn’t examined closely, until a recent trip forced me to.

Confidence is brittle

I recently went on a hiking trip in the Pyrenees with my son Rafa. We rented an RV, drove to the south of France and camped for a few nights.

As an avid RV’er, I didn’t think twice about it when the RV rental place said they needed to put us in a bigger RV because of availability issues on their side. I had cultivated my “camping confidence” over several years of owning our own RV and traveling all across the US with it.

When I took the rental RV back to my parents’ house to park it overnight before we left the next day, they both thought it was huge, and were somewhat surprised that I would consider taking such a big vehicle into the twisty mountain roads of the Pyrenees. It started to make me realize that maybe I was taking my comfort level with this adventure a little bit for granted.

But then Rafa and I got on our way the next day. We drove south towards the small village where our campground was supposed to be, and faced the first driving obstacle of the trip. The GPS took us down a narrow one-way dead-end and forced me to reverse the RV several hundred yards. Which I did, and it further built up my confidence.

We then arrived at the campground to discover that our camp site was actually too small for our RV, and I had to reverse park into the space at an angle to make it fit. I was able to do that as well, with Rafa’s help as a spotter, which buoyed my confidence even further.

This continued over the next few days, as we drove to different trail heads through very steep, very curvy mountain roads. Tough driving conditions, but we took our time, pulled over regularly to let faster cars pass us, and ended up finishing the stay with no driving incidents. Well, almost...

On the way back to the RV rental place, I had to drop Rafa off in Bordeaux, where he was catching a train to continue his trip in France by himself. We had to wake up early to drop him off at the train station, and give me enough time to make the drop off time for the RV several hundred kilometers north of Bordeaux. Driving the narrow streets of Bordeaux in the faint light of the early morning, I suddenly heard a loud bang. I had hit the side of a van that was parallel parked on the street without its mirrors tucked in. Their fault, my fault — it doesn’t matter.

The noise was unmistakable. I had hit something. So I stopped and went to check the damage. All things considered, it was pretty minimal. Their mirror was completely busted, but the rest of the van was untouched. The RV had barely a scratch. My confidence ended up being the biggest casualty.

We quickly left a note with my contact information, and hurried back on the road because I had an RV drop-off time to make. We’ve since worked everything out with the insurance company and the owner of the van, and all is back in order for them.

That morning, after I dropped Rafa off at the train station, I had a few hours on the road to reflect on the accident and sit with how it made me feel. The most surprising thing I made a note of is how it felt like all that confidence I had built over years of driving my own RV across the US, and all that time I had spent on this very trip further reinforcing it, was for nothing. I still failed to see the parked van’s outstretched mirror. And, more importantly, I still felt like suddenly my parents’ hesitation at the size of the RV made sense. Suddenly, in what felt like just a few minutes, I abruptly couldn’t take for granted anymore that I would have the confidence to rent an RV I had never driven before, to go to a place I had never been before, to navigate narrow mountain roads and go on a new adventure.

Having that very visceral feeling of doubt suddenly creep up in me made me realize how brittle confidence can be. I couldn’t believe how quickly it left me in those moments. And I was surprised at how overwhelming the doubt, or even fear, was in those moments.

Luckily the accident was minor and the rental company’s insurance was great. So once I was sure everything was taken care of, the doubts subsided, and I’m now confident again that I could take another trip like this. But the observation of how brittle confidence can be has stayed with me.

At all times.

At first I told myself the accident had only derailed my confidence for a little while, the way a big root or a tight turn slows your momentum on the trail for a few seconds before you pick it back up.

But that’s not what happened. A root slows you down. A crash stops you completely, and leaves you rebuilding your momentum from a dead stop. Bordeaux was a crash.

And that’s the part of the metaphor I had missed. Momentum isn’t only the thing that builds on itself and carries you through. It’s also the thing that can be taken from you in an instant. One root too big, one turn too tight, one mirror you didn’t see. The flywheel and the fragility aren’t two different stories. They’re the same property seen from both sides. Anything that can compound can also collapse.

So confidence is not manufactured or earned, and it is not permanent once won. It has to be cultivated, over time, all the time. It will be challenged, and now and then it will be shattered.

But here’s what the trail teaches that the fear doesn’t: you can start from a dead stop. It just takes more effort, more time, and it’s less fun. So you get back on the bike, you start pedaling, and you gather your momentum again. At all times.