What Comes First Confidence or Winning?

I had the pleasure to work with Scott for a year, we always had good talks about the mental part of the game and he was always very patient to teach me all he could so I had to ask him to write something for us. He wrote a series called Learning How to Win, and here it is.

---

– Learning How to Win

Do you remember the age old adage about the chicken and the egg? Isn’t it the same with confidence and winning? They are both fit into the category of a paradox that leads to a path of confusion. And although the mind puzzles are thought provoking and a fun conversation with friends, my contention is that they are a waste of time to think about, when there is work to be done.

Yet the word confidence and its meaning have been correlated so heavily with winning and losing that it is almost a mainstream postulate (fact) that people rely on to describe why they performed the way they did. Almost as if it were an accepted variable in the formula of success – Confidence + practice + fitness conditioning + strategy + experience + luck (luck is a whole other discussion for another day) + other = winning/success.

Let’s look more closely at the conundrum of confidence as it may relate to the outcome of our performances. Even Marriam-Webster has success tied to confidence in their first two definitions of the word:

1. a feeling or consciousness of one’s powers or of reliance on one’s circumstances – had perfect confidence in her ability to succeed

2. the quality or state of being certain : certitude they had every confidence of success

I would like to offer a different approach to winning and success, one that does not lead, typically, to a provoked emotional response when things don’t go the way you expect them to go – the experimental method.

The prime method of inquiry in science is the experiment. The key features are control over variables, careful measurement, and establishing cause and effect relationships. An experiment is an investigation in which a hypothesis is scientifically tested.

So then, the key is to understand what a hypothesis is.

a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.

Therefore we must make a game plan (hypothesis) based on variables that we know about a situation or opponent, add in what we know about ourselves (strengths and weaknesses), create a system of measurement and evaluation, take a deep breath and then “grip it and rip it” as my coach used to say. In other words, just start playing and see what happens, evaluate the cause and effect of what happens, adjust, readjust, stick to this process and navigate your way to improvement and success every time you play.

Creating Your Own Performance Evaluation System

In the above paragraphs of this article I discussed the relationship between confidence and winning and concluded that building a habit of winning is best developed by using the Scientific Method and proposing a hypothesis (game plan) each time you go out to compete. Once a hypothesis is created the next step is to improve your ability to coach yourself, to see what a coach would see and then make the necessary simple adjustments to your game plan that will allow you to perform better as you go.

Learning how to better understand why you performed the way you did during your performance takes time and needs a basis of comparison – a standard by which to compare how you performed to how you would have like to perform; hence, the development of your own Evaluation System. So, how would you like to perform? Try this simple exercise to find out:

- STEP 1

o Identify your Ideal Performance State (IPS) using visualization to remember your best performances. For the purpose of this exercise, just pick one performance that stands out among the rest. In the future you can use the same process for any performance that you remember.

- STEP 2

o Understand what visualization is. Simply, it is focused daydreaming. Closing your eyes and remembering as many details from a past performance that you can and learning to see them in even greater detail.

- STEP 3

o Find a quite relaxing place. Sit in a comfortable chair making sure that your posture is straight and your arms are relaxed and resting on your legs.

- STEP 4

o Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breathing. At first, just pay attention to how you are breathing normally; how the air comes into your nose or mouth and how it exits. How your chest rises and falls with each breath.

- STEP 5

o Use a 3 count breathing technique to focus your breathing even more. Inhale through your nose for 3 seconds. Hold that breath for 3 seconds. Exhale that breath slowly through your mouth for 3 seconds. Repeat 10 cycles or until your attention is completely on your breathing and your body is more relaxed.

- STEP 6

o Breathe normally and shift your attention to the location of where your best performance occurred. Review, in detail, specific elements of the location. What city was it in? What did the surroundings look like? What were the courts like – clay or hard? What color were the courts? Did they play fast or slow during your performance? What was the temperature that day? Etc.

- STEP 7

o Shift your attention to being on

the court during the performance and ask yourself a few more questions. What were you wearing that day? How were you feeling – excited, calm, happy, nervous, …….? What was your heart rate during the performance? What was your breathing tempo – short quick breaths, or slow deep breaths?

- STEP 8

o See yourself performing. You chose this past event as one of your best. You need to bring your attention to the things that happened in this performance that caused you to select it as your best, and then seek to understand why they helped you play your best.

That is basically it, using visualization to identify the elements that caused your best performances. Once you understand the things that help you perform your best, then it is simply a matter of repeating those elements again and again (see Part 3 in this series on rituals and routines) to achieve the performance state that you want.

Often, it can feel, for the inexperienced athlete, that ideal performances are random, and in the beginning phases of competitive development, they can be; but as we develop our abilities and get closer to mastering our skills we realize that our best performances are not random, they are managed and calculated. And when we allow ourselves the freedom to enjoy what we have trained so hard to do we learn that playing in the ZONE, as someone has termed it, is not out of our reach.

The goal is to train ourselves to be completely present in our performances. To pay attention to when our mind drifts to things that hinder our performances and don’t help us stay present; and not to fight ourselves when things don’t go the way we expect them to go, but rather use the Experimental Method as described in Part 1 to quickly reset, and pay attention to what happens next.

On a next opportunity I will present Part 3 of Learning How to Win that will focus on rituals and routines that will help us repeat our best performance over and over again.

---

Scott Del Mastro is the Director of Tennis and Operations at Club Med Academies, over 20 years of coaching experience, worked with ATP,WTA and ITF players. Bachelor's degree in Psychology and masters degree in Sports psychology both from San Diego State University. Also created 360 Degree Tennis Complete Performance Program, a system that addresses all the developmental aspects of a tennis player.

Learn more about Scott and where he works on the website: www.clubmedacademies.com | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ClubMedAcademies/