The power of belief

By David Bradshaw

You can achieve virtually anything—
if you close your mind to the possibility of defeat.

SOMETIMES, watching tennis at championship level, I feel it’s like a graphic representation of life’s struggles.

Tennis is the most gladiatorial of all non-contact sports. It’s all about the will of one player to beat another. (It’s no coincidence that BBC Television used Hans Zimmer’s music for the movie Gladiator in the lead-up to its coverage of the Wimbledon finals.)

Obviously, talent, ability, and sheer tennis playing genius come into the equation, but when we’re talking about players at the top of their game, we can take that for granted.

What I find fascinating about the game is the psychology that lies behind it. I thought about this particularly back in 2010 when two players, Tomas Berdych from the Czech Republic and Samantha Stosur from Australia, then ranked No. 13 and No. 9 respectively, knocked out the reigning champions Roger Federer and Serena Williams at Wimbledon and Paris. 

Amazing

It didn’t really matter that ultimately they didn’t win the championships, in that they’d already achieved the near impossible: they’d beaten the top players in closely fought, knife-edge thrilling matches which had everyone watching on the edge of their seats.

Tomas and Sam may not have thought of it this way, but the finals were in a way something of an anticlimax. They already achieved amazing things. They beat the world’s leading players—because they believed they could.

Clearly, Berdych went into his match believing he could win. But Federer no doubt expected to win. And the same thing applied to Sam Stosur’s encounter with the apparently unbeatable Serena Williams. 

So belief won out over expectation in both cases. 

Or did it? 

The dividing line between the two mental states may be wafer thin, and is quite likely to alter in the course of the encounter. And according to author and quantum theory expert Phil Gosling in his book Luck Engineering, “Expecting something to happen is more powerful than willing it to happen”.

And in the matches under discussion, who’s to say that, for whatever reason, the two “underdogs” expected that something amazing was about to happen . . .  

My two thoughts on watching these matches were (1) you can achieve anything that’s physically possible if you believe you can, and (2) beating a world leader is more significant than winning a competition.

It was just that nobody expected Berdych or Stosur to win against the world Number Ones, players who had repeatedly won Grand Slam tournaments. As I listened to the commentators, I was struck again and again by the way in which they assumed that the result would be a foregone conclusion, no matter how well the challengers were doing in the early stages of each match.

It was soon clear that the two challengers had their own agenda, and that was to win, no matter whom they were up against or how formidable their reputation.

They both believed in their power to win the matches.

If Berdych and Stosur had any doubts about their ability to triumph over superior players, it’s almost inevitable that the results would have been different.

It’s true that there have been other dramatic outcomes recently (such as Steve Darcis against Nadal and Sergiy Stakhovsky against Federer, both at Wimbledon in 2013, but these were freak results, unlikely to be replicated). It’s the two matches in 2010 that stick in my mind.

Dramatic

There’s a book called The Inner Game of Tennis, by Timothy Gallwey, a professional player and instructor who—according to the book description—“has produced dramatic results among the amateurs and pros he has trained”.

The book came out in the early 1970s, and you can still get a copy from Amazon.

Gallwey explains how to overcome mental obstacles, improve concentration and reduce anxiety for better performance at every level.

The summary on Amazon goes on to say that the inner game “is that which takes place in our mind, played against such elusive opponents as nervousness, self doubt and lapses of concentration. It is a game played by our mind against its own bad habits.

Replacing one pattern of behavior with a new, more positive one is the purpose of the ‘Inner Game’.”

I should confess at this point that I’ve not read the book, but then I’ve no intention of becoming a tennis player. It’s the philosophy behind it that interests me. What we’re aiming at in this blog has a lot to do with the inner game of life—and the principle is exactly the same.

I’d be surprised if the similarities between this and what Timothy Gallwey talks about in his book aren’t greater than the differences.