This article has been written by Ryan Maron, Assistant Coach to the Netherlands national cricket team, VRA player coach and Director of Ryan Maron's Cricket School of Excellence in South Africa.

Are you making the muscles in the head work as hard as those in your body? The consistent finding in Sports Psychology research is the relationship between levels of confidence and success.

But confidence only comes from quality practice and quality preparation: The knowledge that you have trained as hard as or harder than anyone else.

How do you achieve this feeling? Everyone is different, but these 6 tips could help you on the path to finding what works for you.

Write down your strengths (technical, tactical, physical, mental and skills). Stick this list somewhere it can be seen and add to them where possible. This will remind you of the positives of your game.

Look at people who you admire within and out of cricket. What makes them so confident? Ask yourself how you can reflect their actions in your own game.

Focus on the positive things you got from every practice or game, even if the overall result was not good. Think about why things have not gone well and what you can do to change it.

4. Keeping a diary of training

Write down all the technical, mental and physical work you do. If you refer to it regularly you can see what is going on and how you are improving. Your memory is always less reliable than you think.

5. Recall your good performances

As soon as you achieve something write it down. Include how it felt to succeed. Regularly recall these performances in your mind like a video. It is important that they recall the feelings associated with that performance because that will make it more likely to happen again.

6. Think through skills and situations

This aids familiarity and builds confidence because you have met such issues and situations before. Take the time to plan out ideas in your head and think through solutions to problems. It helps to have a good support system to bounce ideas off.

Mental skills are like technical ones: They take time to develop. However, if you take the time and build your confidence it can have a bigger effect on your game than any skills coaching session.

Photo credit: scaglifr