Ah but you need practice as well as belief. I'd have to bow down to the greatness of anyone who managed to do one successfully in only a couple of tries.

If taking a break hasn't helped then I'd start looking for anything that had changed since I was close. The only thing you mentioned was that you now believed you were getting worse, so looking at how confident I was would just be the next thing I'd try. Like you said, you were close so there can't be much wrong with what you are doing.