What is confidence?

When I was Top 10 in the world, I would win around 8 to 12 matches a year that I had no business winning. Some call it luck, others call it the power of the ranking (not to be mistaken for Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog) - I think it’s confidence. The right ball at the right time, a little well-placed COME ON in the opponent’s direction for intimidation purposes and the match is yours. Of course, there’s the other side of it as well. How many matches a year did I lose when I was low on confidence?

Oh, how “unlucky” I was every time during those periods!

What’s the difference between confidence and no confidence? How can we help ourselves to move from low to high confidence (and how do we avoid the move from high to low confidence)? I don’t have all the answers, but I have some. Let’s get into it.

It’s a weird thing watching a professional tennis player lose their confidence. They are still the same player and yet something is amiss. It all boils down to one thing: The player loses their ability to trust. It’s a multi-faceted type of trust they lose - trust in their groundstrokes or serve, trust in their body, trust in the notion that everything will end well. Doubt creeps in and everything you once thought was true begins to disintegrate. Suddenly, you find yourself on shaky ground in a square of lines you thought were your protective shield.

There are many aspects that define a loss of confidence but there are three in particular that make it hard for athletes to bounce back quickly.

1.

Every single match starts to matter the world to you. Winning is a habit and losing is a habit. What that means in its essence is that a player who wins a lot also, simply, plays a lot. They get used to the nerves, the pressure, to the tension in the muscles and eventually, these things fade. They are always there but they fade, and these players function despite them. A player who loses early has a full week to think about the next match at hand. Suddenly, a match becomes about life and death. It might be irrational but it doesn’t change the fact that on match day nerves and pressure hit you like a truck and not only do you forget how to play, but you also forget how to breathe.

“If I could only win this match, everything will be okay again.”

Thoughts like these add to the pressure of the moment and to the unwarranted importance of the match. The more important the match is in your head, the higher the ledge to fall off becomes. And when you do fall, the pain is intense.

2.

You overthink. When you’re full of confidence everything flows from instinct. You know where you need to be, where the ball is going to go and strangely, it seems to always go exactly where you need it to be. It’s all felt and there’s very little rational thinking involved. You’ve done it a million times and you trust that your body will know what to do. The trust is absolute. It almost feels magical; like the stars are aligned only for you to perform at your very best.

The opposite is true when you’re low on confidence. You don’t trust your instincts because they have betrayed you in your recent past. Consequently, you try to control everything with your mind. The split-second decisions a tennis player must make during a match cannot be made by the rational mind. Something more subliminal needs to take over. Sometimes, it’s better to make a quick, decisive, wrong decision in tennis than an elaborate, late, right one. Thoughts cloud the kind of vision you need in our sport which is a glance into the near future and a firm look into your opponent’s mind.

3.

You become scared. Now, this is the tragic side of being low on confidence. Instead of playing to win you become scared to lose. You want to break free from the vicious circle of losing, of course you do, but you mainly fear this will never end, that you’re trapped in this forever. This type of thinking and its fear puts you in a place of passivity. In a sport like tennis where you can’t wait out the time, where the format forces you to win the last point, this sort of mentality makes winning on that level nearly impossible. You really seem to be trapped.

How do you get out of it?

I’ll be honest with you: it’s hard. Some never manage to come out of it again. But it is possible. The first step is to accept that you’re scared. Posturing and pretending will not cut it. You can’t lie to your unconscious - it always knows the truth. Say it out loud, I’m scared, and maybe it will loosen its grip on you.

Analyse the patterns. Is there something that keeps coming back? Do you become too passive or do you try to end the point too quickly? The most important thing when either serving out the match or trying to wrestle yourself out of a valley is to stay true to your DNA. Who are you as a player? If you’re an attacker, why are you pushing the ball? If you’re more defensive from the baseline, why are you going all out? I know that it’s easier said than done because in order to stay true to yourself you need to know yourself first. I hate to be the one to break it to you but going to Bali to meditate probably won’t help. You can definitely try, though.

And lastly and annoyingly: sometimes the path is blocked. Just like that, no reason, no rhyme. You’re just the unluckiest player alive right now. There’s nothing you did wrong and therefore there’s nothing you can do to turn it around. The good news is, bad luck is a faithless bastard and it will move on eventually. And then another poor fella will be gripped by its ugly hug.

One thing, however, remains true through centuries and epochs: you have to continue to work. On yourself, on your game, on your craft. No luck in the world will change on infertile ground. The only thing you can do for it to turn is to keep your ground fertile by nurturing it day by day. Good luck!

Things that make me happy:

Wow! Thank you all so, so, so much for all the incredibly kind messages you sent me last week. It made me so happy to see how many people enjoy my newsletters and that some of you even promised to read my 10,000 word essay on German mushrooms. THANK YOU. Every single email and comment gave me a moment of happiness and I cannot thank you enough.

Things that make me unhappy:

Last week, I was at a workplace of mine and because I had been traveling beforehand I had a huge, heavy suitcase with me. I was hoisting it up the stairs with the last strain of minus-muscle I have left when a man ran past me and joyously yelled:

“You know, there’s an elevator at the end of the corridor?”

And off he went. I would have declined help because I firmly believe that who packs a suitcase needs to carry the suitcase but the offer would have been appreciated. What would have been appreciated even more is, as always, silence.

Greetings from Stuttgart, everybody! I glint at the screen with red-rimmed eyes caused by clay courts and acute tiredness, kept alive by bad double shots of espresso and eye drops. I’ve been watching tennis, a lot of tennis, the beautiful and the ugly, about 12 hours a day. I hope you do the same, with eyes more rested than mine.

Yours truly, Andrea