You Must Believe You Are The Best

Would you argue with this man? I wouldn't...

Legendary Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly once famously declared:

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

As with many of the great man's words of wisdom, this is an outwardly simple, yet deceptively powerful, statement. It applies to many other aspects of life too, not just the football field.
Firstly, you must have self-belief. You must believe, not only that you're good enough to compete, but that you're better than everyone else. If you don't have that self-belief, no matter how good you are, you will not become the best. Belief fosters a self-image that you're a winner, a fighter, that you will never give up and that you can overcome any adversity. You're not going to throw in the towel.
Ever.
Secondly, you must never stop working on improving, so that you turn into the player (or team—it works at both levels) that you believe yourself to be. If you don't do that as well, you're merely being delusional. If you lose or draw, or have a bad performance, you learn your lessons and work on your game to make such outcomes less likely in the future. If you lose your place in the team, you step up your game to get back in, and once you're back, you fight to stay there.
I mention all this, because it contrasts sharply with a lot of the noise that has been coming out of Liverpool FC in recent years. In particular, I'm tired of hearing about the lack of self-belief. Everyone, from the players through to the managers, seem to be overcome with being realistic.
Each new manager is only too keen to tell the media that "work needs to be done" before we can challenge for the title and to remind us that "success doesn't happen overnight". Could you imagine Shanks ever telling anyone that we weren't good enough?
This alleged realism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't think you're good enough, guess what? You won't be.
Henry Ford, the famed early 20th century industrialist who founded the car company named after him (and a couple of others that aren't), hit the nail on the head when he said:

Whether you think you can, or whether you think you can't, you're right.

Why is a lack of self-belief so poisonous? Well, for one thing, it makes the mediocre acceptable.
If there's one thing guaranteed to make my blood boil, it's when someone associated with the club says something along the lines of "we'll be happy if we finish fourth", or "a draw was a good result". Nonsense! Once you let your standards slip, you no longer have standards.
For another thing, a lack of self-belief makes you look for excuses instead of looking hard at yourself and your own performances. It becomes too tempting just to give up when an excuse presents itself. As as soon as a player gets sent off, or the referee fails to award a penalty, then everyone's off the hook and we have a good excuse for not winning. But when a winner sees a player sent off, he wants to make a statement and win with 10 men. Similarly, if a penalty wasn't awarded, they'll strive to stick the ball in the back of the net two or three times and discuss the merits of the penalty when they read the paper the following day.
A lot of this kind of "realistic" talk is simply someone covering their backside. For example, when he took the job, the first thing Brendan Rodgers did was attempt to lower our expectations by pointing out what he regarded as a lack of quality in the squad he inherited and the strength of the competition. That way, when we fail to get the success he isn't even expecting to achieve, it's not his fault so he shouldn't be fired for doing what he said would happen. Yeah right. The truly "realistic" view is that anyone who manages Liverpool and fails to achieve success is heading for the exit door, so he might as well raise expectations and self-belief instead of lowering them.
One of the ways you make sure you are the best is by winning matches and competitions. Then it's hard for people to argue with you. You do that by trying to win at everything you do. Once you decide that winning games isn't important—that a draw will do—you undermine everything. Its easy to motivate yourself when you're playing Manchester United, but you also need to fire yourself up just the same when you're playing a team from the bottom three—both games are for three points after all. Also, if you win, but were lucky or played poorly, it's important to acknowledge the fact; celebrate the win, but make sure you're not merely lucky next time out.