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 . . .  

A motivational success story

By David Bradshaw

THIS is the story of a horse trainer's son. The father would go from stable to stable, race track to race track, farm to farm and ranch to ranch in the course of his work.

As a result, the boy’s high school career was constantly interrupted. When he was a senior, he was asked to write a paper about what he wanted to be and do when he grew up.

He wrote about his dream in great detail. He drew a diagram of a 200-acre ranch showing the location of all the buildings, the stables and the track. Then he produced a detailed floor plan for a 4,000-square foot house that would sit on the 200-acre dream ranch.

Two days later he got his paper back. On the front page was a large red 'F' with a note that read, “See me after class”. The boy with the dream went to see the teacher after class and asked, “Why did I get an 'F'?”

The teacher said: “This is a completely unrealistic dream for a young boy like you. You have no money. You have no resources. You need a lot of money to own a horse ranch. You have to buy the land. You have to pay for the original breeding stock and later you’ll have to pay large stud fees. There’s no way you could ever do it.”

Then the teacher added, “If you rewrite this paper with a more realistic goal, I’ll reconsider your grade.”

The boy went home and thought about it long and hard.

Finally, after sitting with it for a week, he turned in the same paper, making no changes at all. He wrote in the margin: “You can keep your 'F' and I’ll keep my dream.”

The boy was Monty Roberts, creator of the “horse whispering” concept and author of several books on the subject. He was telling this story sitting in his 4,000-square foot house in the middle of his 200-acre horse ranch.

“Don’t let anyone steal your dreams,” he tells people.

“Follow your heart, no matter what.”