Feb. 19, 2024   (7-min read)

The ambitious individual can stumble over their own effort. When we’re overly attached to where it is we’re going, we become overly-dependent on the mind’s power to guess or assume what it will take, how it will be, or how it will look.

But the truth is, it always and only unfolds.

Really, it’s only through excessive analyzation, a taking of the sport too seriously, a consequence of over-training, that we begin to over-rely on this kind of “cause and effect” thinking. When this thought process isn’t informed with the fresh flow of the moment, we lose an alignment with the unfoldment of the point. We become a fraction of a second too late, we “arrive” ahead of schedule to an easy put-away and choke. The mind compulsively considers the previous and next points, siphoning precious attention away from the body, inducing an involuntary state of fight-or-flight, continually weakening the mind/body connection.

Our effort is best spent anchoring this mind/body connection, allowing our full ability to be available to the various demands. The demand of the sport is high enough without us putting the pressure on ourselves to conjure the future. We desire to do something highly complex, yet we’re jumping in and out of the present like it’s hopscotch. 

Like a microscope moving in and out of focus, the loss of clarity is critical. All action becomes fuzzy. It loses precision. It loses accuracy. It loses efficiency, efficacy, and worst of all, it lacks authenticity. It becomes stale, rigid, and unable to make the micro-adjustments necessary to meet each new ball. The subconscious, the body, is frozen in stress, and the conscious mind, the intellect, is stuck in overdrive. You’re redlining in 1st gear, thinking it’s the F1 Championship, just to realize you’re cruising down the PCH.

Play, performance at its peak, is natural, easy, spontaneous, and free-flowing. Everything else is athletic dogma created to motivate the pretender.

Another element this “cause and effect” thinking brings into play is “fault”. A word built-in to the vocabulary of tennis and responsible for the unnatural levels of self-criticism and regular outbursts of anger and frustration. If it’s your responsibility to “cause” success, that means you’re equally at fault when you “cause” failure. It’s a slippery slope solely relying on our power to make it happen. Maybe artists know best that genius moves you, you don’t move it. It don’t need credit, and it don’t take blame. Genius creates. No comparison, uncontained.

Only a body that’s in perfect harmony with a mind that’s actively and consciously perceiving the point as it unfolds can actually execute with its full capability available at its disposal. It’s almost silly to think this is the consequence of effort alone. 

It’s our own reverse engineering mental process that interferes with the far superior, inherent, intuitive, and even instinctual ability to create on demand, in and through the moment, as it unfolds. You think “self-belief” is a thought process? No, it’s the opposite. Trust is an inner knowing, that’s built on and flows from a system with integrity, a mind free from judgment. 

Most of what we’ve been taught is backwards, we use the mind to reverse engineer the outcome we desire. And we use the effort of the body to get to that future outcome. When the key is using effort to be physically present, so the mind is free to create in real time.

If your desire is the future, you chase from an empty place. If your desire is present, that’s intention, and your creation is falling into place.

This whole mess is because success was assigned to the future. And so, we’re unconsciously driven by what we lack in the present. But the more we want the outcome, the less present we are to play at the necessarily level to produce it. Life itself becomes an immense effort to get what we don’t have, or get rid of what we have and don’t want. Keeping the mind in a vicious circle, chasing its own tail, wildly busy resisting the untapped potential in the moment because it’s preoccupied with an outdated idea of the future.

You cannot resist the moment, and play this point. You don’t plan success, you become success. You don’t get past what’s wrong, you re-write what you’ve learned to call it. The point is a question, and you are the answer.

MLK once said, “Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Perhaps a rearticulation of Einstein famously saying, “you cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Or perhaps my favorite from Captain Jack Sparrow, “the problem isn’t the problem, the problem is your attitude about the problem.”

This wisdom is more commonly heard as “the problem is the possibility”, or “the obstacle is the way”. The problems you encounter are nothing more than the resistance you hold. Keep your mind open to the unfolding flow of the present point and the perceived problems vanish. Leaving you nothing but stronger.

The point here is that you cannot reverse engineer true performance. The point rewards those willing to surrender to the present. To leave behind all preconceived notions, agendas, motives, ideas, assumptions, techniques, strategies, tactics. And gain the fearless freedom to flow with the full force of how far you’ve come.

Thousands of years ago it was written, the meek shall inherit the earth, and the humble shall inherit the court. Or something like that. Anyways, Mr Matchpoint says… have the courage and vulnerability to reveal the genius who simply speaks when the mind is silent, and remains silent as long as the mind speaks. 

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Mr. MatchPoint is run by Complete Performance, a digital based company offering professional-level performance coaching to competitive tennis players worldwide.