​Ollie Smith says a period of soul searching that followed Scotland’s November defeats by New Zealand and Argentina was the springboard for a recent upturn in results.The Scots rounded off the first block of Nations Championship fixtures with a bonus-point win over Fiji, coming off the back of a superb away victory in Argentina and a credible performance in defeat to world champions South Africa in Pretoria.After taking the scalps of England and France in the Six Nations, Gregor Townsend’s side now look forward with confidence to matches against the All Blacks, Australia and Japan a year on from the pain of the last autumn series.”It’s the story of the Scotland team in the past few years – it’s always been the what ifs,” Smith told BBC Scotland.”We’re so close to doing something so well and it gets away from us. It’s just brought us together as a group.”If you look at how we finished the home series nearly [in November], the performances against New Zealand and Argentina, we were so close against New Zealand and we were 21 points up against Argentina and then ultimately lost.”The way that some people were commenting on us as a group, I think it really brought us closer together. We really had to look inwardly.”The Six Nations didn’t start the way we wanted to. It was a poor result against Italy but our response against England, the way we finished, playing against France the way we did and putting 50 points on them, I think we really showed the people on the sidelines what we can do and what we can do against the big nations and take it forward into the World Cup next year.”There’s a lot of good rugby to come and a lot of teams that we want to beat.”