Nate Zinsser

Directed performance psychology at West Point for nearly thirty years, working with cadets who will be responsible for other people's lives before they are twenty-five.

The Confident Mind treats confidence as a constructed asset rather than a trait: built by deliberately storing successes, protecting the store from the mind's habit of dwelling on failures, and rehearsing the desired state before the event.

Zinsser holds a doctorate in sport psychology and the material is drawn from athletes and soldiers, so the register is direct and unsentimental about how much of it is repetition.