How Could a Missed Backhand Unlock New Confidence Levels?
The Subltle Power of Making Mistakes.
In the beginning, tennis was nothing different than a workout session. With time though, it evolved into something more profound, slowly carving out its own significant place in my agenda.
Today, a Sunday morning spent running after a fluffy yellow ball is like a therapy session for me, but way cheaper and with a ton of red clay in my socks. Right after breaking a sweat on the court, I’m now used to gather some thoughts and put small flags on top of newfound questions. It clears up my future plans, and still remains an amazing workout — especially at summer, under a roasting Italian sun.
In between the white lines of my local club, I eventually got a grasp on the fact that good mentors are not for granted. They are rarer than rare.
Actually, sometimes you may cross paths with really bad ones, and if you’re not mature enough to stomach some negative talk you’ll end up thinking within their limitations. When you do realize how a bad mentorship tricked you into pushing the brake pedal on your progress, it doesn’t feel neither great nor miserable.
If I had to describe it, I would borrow David Foster Wallace’ short tale:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says:
-Morning boys, how is the water?
The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes:
-What the hell is water?
As a kid, I used to play tennis twice a week, and it felt like absolute shit. Whenever I walked out to the court, I carried the weight of any inevitable mistake I was about to make. That was my water, and it was so attached to my skin I couldn’t distinguish anything apart. For me, the world just looked like so, and it couldn’t be any different than that.
Until one day.
The Match
Strangely enough, it took off with at a decent pace. By saying strangely, I mean that everybody who ever saw me play knows that I’m the slowest starter to ever pick up a racket. By saying everybody, I mean my poor doubles’ partner.
I was serving great, moving my feet in a way that was vaguely comparable to a real tennis player and, for once, feeling my backhand drop-shot without abusing it.
For the record, I didn’t change anything but one simple detail, although you have to promise you’re not going to giggle as I say it out loud for the first time:
I stepped onto the court thinking that I was coached, or better, possessed by ATP player Grigor Dimitrov. Yes, I actually imagined there was a little Dimitrov giving me directions and rooting for me.In reality, I just needed something within myself to say out it loud: a Ratatouille mouse directing each shot under my baseball cap, making me feel confident inside the court. And for obvious reasons, that couldn’t be my usual voice, as I was not accustomed to think as a confident player, or a confident person in general.
There’s an old picture of me dressed up as Superman with a patch on the head: I was 6 and I just fell from the stairs a few days earlier. As funny as it looked back then, in my mind I was convinced I was Superman’s personal assistant, and it was my responsibility to behave as such. 20 years later, here I was doing the exact same thing on a tennis court, imagining I was guided by Grigor’s composure and competitiveness.
And it was working.
However, while I was doing good, it doesn’t take a professional coach to figure out that my tennis was still a tiny bit less solid than the one of my “alter ego”.
The Switch
As scripted, I started making mistakes.
When I heard the sound of my shanked backhand hitting against the net, I knew the magic was over. But I was wrong. It was just starting.
Because for the first time in my life, I was not even remotely ashamed of making a mistake.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to hit that ball differently, but it was just a natural part of the game I easily overcame by focusing on the next point. Not only my confidence was unbroken, but I was also free to risk more and relieved of some enormous weight.
I felt safe
This is what confidence gifts you in the first place: it makes risk taking feel so good, even when you shank it up a little.
The Aftermath
After that match, I started to carry a bucket full of old balls to every session, and proceeded to hit a lot of bad serves. The laughs from the back fence were suddenly transforming into the perfect frame to my efforts. When the balls started lending in over and over again, they timidly evolved into words of encouragements.
For sure, one of my favorite moments of a tennis match is passing the stroll at the end. While you try to make the clay into a smooth red sheet, there’s a chance to mentally lay down and enjoy your progress. Some days though, you just want that same stroll to swipe away the signs of your mistakes and give you another, brand new opportunity to succeed. Whether you love tennis or not, you might think of a habit, or even a person, someone who acts as a stroll that flattens both your successes and failures into a brand-new day.
That’s called unconditional support. That is also called being a great mentor. And it’s even better if you can find it within yourself.
P.S.
While the story of the single match that flipped this perspective around and turned on my confidence overnight is way more cinematic, that day was just the click sound of a gigantic light switch I had been pushing since way before, when I first got the feeling that I could swim in a different water. So please remember, your match point could be hiding somewhere behind the corner of your improvement journey.
