News

Persistence in competitive sports

Decisive, positive action in apparently hopeless situations

Persistence is an Attitude!

One of the greatest tests of the competitive powers of any player is the capacity to stay in the court and to not give in to the 'obvious' fact that you are steadily losing the game. In tennis you never  know what is going to happen next. Your (apparently) invincible adversary may fall out of their zoning level of performance and become all too fallibly human again - and perhaps begin to make a long series of unforced errors!

The history of Jelena Dokic shows two very important aspects of competitive tennis: Firstly the enormous personal damage that can be done to tennis players by controlling, interfering and domineering parents; and secondly, she shows the deep powers of recovery from such damaging experiences by showing her resilience and by working with her talent, motivations and capacities for persistence.

At the recent Australian open she came from being number 187 in world ranking to challenge and beat some great players and getting to the last 8. Two years ago she was lost in the rankings beyond the 500’s. She managed to reappear by dipping into her personal resources of fitness, concentration, staying positive, and continuing to fight even though falling behind in the encounter. In these weeks she has shown one of the most interesting ‘comebacks’ that we have seen in tennis for along time.

In the past years her battle was to extricate herself from her relationship with her father and her disabling depression so that she could start over and begin to play the kind of tennis that her talent allows. It is often a crucial career phase for young players to be able to overcome their historic but limiting family contexts and to liberate themselves from the often damaging and constricting ‘family games’ that we see happening around talented young players. This career transition is necessary to be able to rebuild a viable personal life and professional career. Very often there are many players who never manage to achieve this, and who remain trapped within very negative emotional relationships where exploitation, manipulation, control, and emotional blackmail are the norm. Where the players fail to make this crucial transition they frequently develop symptoms – both psychological and somatic – which in the end can ruin both their tennis career and their personal lives.

To understand ‘persistence’ we need to see how it is generated out of  -

(a) our strong desires,

(b) our commitment to what we have chosen to do, and

(c) our decisiveness in the actions that we need to execute in order to achieve our objectives. When all of these factors are well balanced, we find ourselves accelerated towards the realisation of our ambitions.

Note that ‘persistence’ does NOT mean always knocking yourself out and trying too hard. It can also mean taking a gentle and easy approach to your next task. It means taking a CONSTRUCTIVE ATTITUDE to whatever is the task at hand – and this can mean engaging in the task also in a leisurely, calm and measured manner. It means staying focused and concentrated and alert. So persistence does NOT necessarily mean ‘making big efforts’, because sometimes such effortful strivings are counter productive: A common example here is when you want to get to sleep because tomorrow you have a big match, but sleep won’t come! We know that the more we ‘make efforts’ to get to sleep the more we can’t ‘drop off’ – because going to sleep is one of those transitions that we cannot ‘make’ happen, and any efforts to ‘make’ sleep come are doomed to be only frustrating.

So persistence involves knowing that you are in a ‘time zone’ – that it is going to ‘take time’ in order to get from where you are now, to where you want to be. No amount of forceful efforts are going to speed up the process. Just think of the queue at the airport check-in desk. There are always anxious people who start queuing up even before the airline check-in staff have opened the desk. Not only that, but they begin to press up against the people in front of them, chafing their heels with their baggage trollys, and generally making an uncomfortable space for one another – as if all of this queuing and pushing could in some way ‘speed up’ the time necessary for the check in process.

So one of the secrets of ‘persistence’ is having a good sense of the timing necessary for our aims and objectives, and being able to recognise the differences in Social Time, Body Time and Psychological Time! We live in these three different time dimensions, and our optimism and positive attitudes in training and development depend on knowing which time we are working in, and where we are in the time development process of each dimension. But more on that later!