Confidence in the Corner

One of the unanticipated delights of the transformation into a confident man for me has been the affect it has had on me as an ice hockey player. It is perhaps illustrative of any and all aspects of my life but it is a particularly interesting one for a number of reasons.
I have always been a fairly average player and played a fairly unobtrusive role on my teams, both on and off the ice. But in the past few months I have watched a change come over me: I take more chances with the puck for example. And I know why I did not before, I always had a feeling that not only was I likely to make an error but that everyone knew I was not very good and they were all sort of watching me. That feeling was so fundamental to my game for so many years that I did not really even know it was there until after it was gone.
And the transformation does not stop on the ice. In the dressing room I have become more of a leader, a conversation starter a decision maker. Again I had always taken a secondary or even tertiary role, and had not really noticed the fact or knew why. It is only by taking an active and a leadership role that I now even recognise how passive and meek I had been before.