How the Power of Gratitude Helps Us to Keep Moving Forward
Despite setbacks or facing future uncertainty
Note: this may be my last article on Medium for a while, as I must dedicate myself to finish a book I’ve tried to write for thirty years. To all my friends, thanks for all the good times we shared on this site. I edited out a lot of the sports data to make it a quicker read.
The thing that separates champions from the rest of us is how they deal with adversity.
If you ask any rational person what they would do if they fell into a hole, they would say, “climb back out.”
But for those of us dealing with depression or anxiety, the unconscious response is, “Keep digging.”
According to the Psychology Today website, “Gratitude is both an emotion and a dispositional trait. In both cases, gratitude involves a process of recognizing, first, that one has obtained a positive outcome and, second, that there is an external source for that good outcome.”
Gratitude might be the most important and least understood psychological trait of a world-class athlete. We are distracted by the superficial displays of screaming and chest pounding during matches. Gratitude is only displayed for a few minutes during the post-match interviews when the players thank their team.
Scientific research has only begun to examine the health benefits of gratitude. “The Psychology of Gratitude,” published in 2004, was the first major work I found on the subject.
Anders Ericcson’s theory of deliberate practice indicates that every practice repetition counts because it is a form of stored data in your brain’s hard drive.
Mental and emotional reactions are stored data, too, so the way we deal with adversity can help or hamper our ability to persevere and finally overcome our greatest obstacles.
In his breakthrough research on relationships, psychologist John M. Gottman, Ph.D. discovered a simple practice that could predict if a married couple would end in divorce: how often each person gave their partner positive feedback.
He found that successful couples gave twenty times more compliments than criticisms.
Twenty times!
He referred to the trust and goodwill built this way as an emotional bank account.
His finding is consistent with other psychological research that proves how much more losing hurts than winning feels good.
Feeling gratitude is a crucial skill. Without it, there can be no celebration.
Every time you celebrate an accomplishment, you make a deposit in your emotional bank account. The more deposits you make, the happier you feel about your progress, the more confident you feel about your ability to perform under pressure, and the easier it is to bounce back when things go wrong.
After I crashed and burned on the circuit, it took many years for me to understand how much my inability to appreciate each step of the journey hurt me.
I couldn’t see the bigger picture.
Despite helping hundreds of players for over twenty-five years as a coach, I never helped myself. While writing this book, I still framed my life as a tennis player as a failure because I choked badly.
(NOTE: I left my Freudian slip in this manuscript as a teaching moment. Did you notice it? When I referred to what I did as a tennis player, I wrote “life,” instead of career. When we define our self-worth by what we do, our performance suffers. Tennis is challenging, but it should be fun, not a matter of life and death.)
As I write this chapter, it’s time for me to finally express gratitude for the success I did enjoy and warn you about the trap I fell into.
In May 1973, I played my first tournament at age 17. By November 1976, I represented the defending NCAA champion UCLA Bruins in a prestigious invitational tournament. In September 1980, I beat the number 88 in the world in the quarterfinals of a small tournament in Massachusetts.
After our match, my opponent asked me how I did at the U.S. Open. He had lost to Ivan Lendl — an eventual #1 in the world and winner of 8 majors — in the second round. In retrospect, the question was a sign of respect for the level of tennis I played in beating him on his preferred surface, indoor hard courts.
However, I was embarrassed by the question because I had been denied entry into the qualifying for having no ATP singles points. Sarcastically, I told him I didn’t get into the qualifying because I “wasn’t of sufficient standard.” (The excuse given by the tournament director for not filling the 128 qualifier draw.)
It’s a wonder I didn’t have more back problems, considering how many chips on my shoulder I used to carry around with me.
The critical issue here is that I was always focused on the negatives instead of being grateful for and able to celebrate the positives.
I fell into a trap that you may have felt, especially in these days of intense social media pressure.
Relative Deprivation is the opposite of gratitude and it kills our motivation and success rate.
In 1949, Sociologist Samuel Stouffer identified the phenomenon of relative deprivation based on interviews with soldiers who felt that other people got unjustly promoted faster than them.
Author Malcolm Gladwell addresses relative deprivation in his book, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” and in a lecture called “Why You Shouldn’t Go to Harvard.”
In a nutshell, it’s the idea that big fish in little ponds are happier and more successful than bigger fish who feel small because they are in a massive pond surrounded by giant fish.
In the book, he cited a study comparing the number of academic papers published by students who graduated from different schools.
Data showed that the top 10% of non-Harvard graduates published academic papers at a rate equal to the top 20% of their peers at Harvard. Only the top 10% of Harvard graduates accomplish more.
In his “Don’t Go to Harvard” lecture, Gladwell looked at the high failure rate of kids who pursue a STEM degree. The study compared students from Hartwick, a small liberal arts college, and Harvard. Data was collected on the SAT math scores of incoming freshmen and the percentage of students who succeeded in earning a STEM degree from each school.
They found the attrition rates for the kids in the bottom third of their SAT math scores were almost equal. A mere 17.8% of the bottom third of the Hartwick students got their STEM degree. Harvard students dropped out even more, with only 15.4% of that group earning a STEM degree.
Here’s the crazy part. The bottom third of the Harvard students averaged 581 in Math, while the top third of Hartwick students averaged 589 in their SAT math scores.
In other words, the “dumbest” Harvard students were just as gifted as the smartest Hartwick students. So why did 55% of the top tier Hartwick students get their STEM degree, while only 15.4% of their intellectual equals at Harvard graduate with a STEM degree?
When we form self-assessments based on those in our specialized group, we invalidate our talent and all the years of work spent to master our craft.
What are the odds of someone making the kind of leap I did in seven years? I played out a Walter-Mitty-like dream for 99.9% of the tennis-playing world. Yet I was ungrateful and unsatisfied with my progress.
All the guys I traveled with and practiced with — guys I considered at my level — climbed into the ATP top 200. When I couldn’t maintain that level under pressure, it killed me.
In the old days, I was devastated if I lost to someone I thought I should beat. Even worse, I wasn’t as objective as I am now. I would have considered losses against guys at my level a bad loss.
I took no joy or confidence from playing well if I thought my opponent was weaker than me. In my mind, those matches didn’t count because I was supposed to win. And if I played poorly and won, I was angry and disappointed by my poor play.
Because I only appreciated good performances against top opponents, I was rarely happy. And how can you gain confidence if your emotional bank account is usually empty?
After beating a top 100 player, my expectations climbed higher. Instead of building confidence, my best wins set me up for a fall of even greater proportions.
The Mathematics of Celebration
In every tournament, there is only one winner. That means everyone else will lose at some point. Half the players won’t win their first-round match. In a Grand Slam event, a player needs to be ranked in the top 100 to gain entry into the main draw. At the Masters 1000 level, we are talking about players in the top 50.
That’s a lot of losing for the creme de la creme in the tennis world.
How do these players cope with the down periods, especially when they get stuck in a losing streak? Without the power of gratitude and celebration, players couldn’t survive life on the circuit.
If we use a standard bell curve to grade a typical player’s performance, 10% of the time he would bring his A-game. A good performance earning a B would happen 20% of the time. An average or “C” performance happens 40% of the time, with the player scoring a “D” 20% of the time, and an “F” 10% of the time.
I studied the record of a top-200 player who played some big tournaments and a lot of smaller events that gave him the chance to play a lot of matches. Here is a distribution of those matches, broken down by the opponent’s level.
Better opponents (ATP top 150): 2–4
Equal opponents (#151–250): 8–3
Weaker opponents (#251–500): 10–8
Much weaker opponents (below #501): 10–0
Imagine how it would feel if we celebrated every good performance without judging the quality of our opponent.
With a record of 30 wins and 15 losses, if we based his mental state on winning, 67% of the matches would yield a positive experience.
And that doesn’t include all the times he might play well but lose to someone who plays better that day.
The champion’s journey is not easy. Every story is filled with adversity, but somehow, the greats pick themselves up off the ground and come back, no matter how devastating the loss.
They can do it because they build up their emotional bank account by celebrating every success.
How can you learn to harness the power of gratitude?
One method is to address the reasons you feel unable to celebrate. Are those negative patterns the result of childhood trauma? If so, therapy can bring old wounds to the light so they can heal.
A second way is to fake it until you make it. Gratitude is both an emotion and a factor in forming our personality. If you practice gratitude and try to celebrate your success along the way, eventually those positive emotions will feel more real.
Finally, use a journal to document your journey every step of the way, regardless of the results. With time, you will have a record of your total progress, instead of making those negative short-term comparisons with the best people in your specialized group.
I feel sympathy for writers and artists. There are no circumstances where one can “win” a game with explicit rules. Every external success is determined by the subjective response of readers, editors, agents, and publishing companies.
However you need to treat writing as if it is a sport.
For people in the non-sports world, the focus can still must be on process.
Can you meet your writing goals every day? Can you consistently market yourself? Are you submitting your work constantly, regardless of how many rejections you receive? Do you search out feedback through a coach, class, or writing group?
By keeping a journal, you will see a record of your how well you have met your goals. Be proud of the discipline and courage it takes to keep going in the face of difficulty. Appreciate the art you have created.
Remember, the question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
The question is not “if a tree falls in a forest and less than an arbitrarily desired number of people — determined by the tree’s current popularity and mood at the time (was the tree in a particularly needy place in its life at the moment it fell?) — hear it, did it make a sound?”
Once we have reacted to our writing, the story exists, and it is irrelevant if no one else reads the story.
Here’s to better goal setting.
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