Motivation is a mood.

It arrives when it wants to and often disappears precisely when you need it.

Confidence is different.

Confidence is evidence accumulated through repetition.

As an Army artillery officer, I believed we were capable of coordinating aircraft without requiring an Air Force officer inside our tactical position to do it for us.

We were already calculating and coordinating live artillery fire. With the correct training, there was no reason Army officers could not safely direct aircraft onto a target as well.

I made the argument repeatedly and in writing.

Eventually, I was selected as part of one of the first groups of Army officers placed on the Joint Terminal Attack Controller course. The qualification would allow us to control live aircraft without an Air Force controller beside us.

On testing day, my palms were sweating.

I was tense, intensely focused and conscious that every calculation, instruction and piece of timing had to be correct.

There was no room for motivational language. Aircraft, explosives and people on the ground do not care how confident you feel.

The work had to be right.

I passed and went on to complete hundreds of missions. In time, I became the Chief Army Instructor as the course began being delivered specifically for Army personnel.

Two years after that first pressured assessment, our forward observer group was climbing towards an observation post.

We were preparing to control a pair of F-111s, each carrying three 2,000-pound bombs.

Before we reached the top, the aircraft reported a mechanical problem.

The mission was off.

We turned and began moving towards our night location.

Then the call came through: the aircraft would be on station before sunset.

Twenty-four minutes.

We were roughly a kilometre from the observation post. My commanding officer turned to me.

You are the only one who can make it in time. I want that rock formation at the top of the hill moved. Have you got the target?
Yes, sir.
Then why are you still here, Lieutenant Ellul?

Carrying a pack weighing approximately 50 kilograms, I turned and moved up that hill as quickly as my body would take me.

I reached the observation post with seconds to spare.

There was no time for a formal target brief, so I used a wagon-wheel talk-on—circling the aircraft while identifying geographical features until the pilot's eyes arrived on the target.

The first aircraft delivered perfectly.

The second followed ten seconds behind and struck the same target.

Twelve thousand pounds of high explosive, delivered onto the designated position.

Then I packed up and ran back to rejoin my group.

My commanding officer said only:

You're the only one who would have made it. Well done.

On the testing day two years earlier, my palms had been sweating.

Now, under greater physical pressure, with almost no preparation time and nobody beside me to take over, I simply completed the mission.

The difference was not motivation.

It was hundreds of repetitions.

Confidence is what remains after you have performed the same difficult task so many times that pressure no longer gets to decide who you become.

The first time, your palms sweat.

The hundredth time, you move the rock formation and run back to your unit.