Self-Awareness = Power | Locker Room Power

0:00 Great players don't avoid mistakes. They metabolize them. They refuse to dwell. They bounce their emotional half. Life after an error is about 3 to 5 seconds. It's you, your mind and the consequences of your choices in the match in that moment. Hi everybody, I want to talk to you about the point after the point. Most people watch tennis for the winners. I watch it for the mistakes because the truth is simple and slightly maybe depressing. The player who handles their screw ups the best usually wins.

0:37 Imagine this. A player is serving at 5-6 in a tie break, tight crowd, sweat dripping, and he or she misses a sitter forehand by about 3 post codes. The stadium gasps, the player freezes and here comes the moment that decides everything. Do they mentally replay the miss like a bad home movie or do they reset for the next point? Tennis, as we know, is a brutally honest sport because unlike business, there's nowhere to hide, no teammates to blame, no committee to bury the decision under. It's you, your mind and the consequences of your choices in the match, in that moment.

1:16 Singles competition strips competitiveness to the bone. Individual performance under pressure is what it's all about. Great players don't avoid mistakes. They metabolize them. They refuse to dwell. They bounce their emotional half. Life after an error is about 3 to 5 seconds. Business leaders, however, can indulge in the luxury of stewing on something for months. People can call that reflection, but most of the time it's just sulking in a suit. The inner game of tennis is about a play for a player is the same as the inner game for Aceo.

1:52 Same cast of characters, out nerves, abstraction, the temptation to catastrophize, the ability to reset quickly after set back is usually the difference between winning and collapse. Lose a point, lose a deal, lose a quarter. It's the same test. Can you hold your nerve and play the next point clean? But here's the twist that very few people expect. Even in tennis, which is probably the loneliest sport on earth, nobody actually wins alone. Behind every player is essentially an army. Coaches, physios, analysts, nutritionists, people obsessing over tiny adjustments for the player to improve.

2:34 And of course the player will probably take all the credit for later. And that support network. Network is real. It's the engine of performance tennis. And although it's a solo act and the team in public is very supporter of a player because the hard conversations always happen behind the scenes in business, actually it's the same. The so-called Rockstar performer is never a solo artist thou the tip of the iceberg built by sensible people doing unglamorous things. That's why the player coach dynamic maps perfectly onto leadership.

3:10 A coach doesn't select the shots. They shape the thinking that produces the shots. The best business leaders do the same. They don't micromanage the rally. They help people become the version of themselves that can win the rally. Thinking about it, one of my favorite moments as a coach is the type of exchanges you have after a lost match, a play or storm in, muttering about bad bounces, you know, string tension, wrong, all sorts of things. And my job isn't to correct them, is to help them hear themselves.

3:43 Because once they notice the nonsense that they're talking and that they are basically feeding the wrong wolf, clarity returns and the next match usually tells a different story. Managers who learn the skill become performance multipliers. They stop talking at people and start coaching them. They create trust, not tension, and suddenly the individual sport of business becomes a partnership in performance. In tennis, even in double S where trust and communication are the the oxygen of a team, the principal same principle holds.

4:19 One badly timed shout and you're both lunging for the same ball. You see the exact same thing in companies. 2 smart people chasing a project from different ends because nobody bothered to talk. So here's the lesson to take into your next meeting. Success in sport and business rests on 2 pillars. Firstly, personal resilience. The discipline to recover fast and stay composed under pressure is huge. Secondly, performance partnership. The ability to collaborate with people who sharpen you, challenge you, and help you rise when you wobble is essential.

4:56 If you get both these things right and the wins come faster. If you get both of these things right, then the wins will come faster. Get either one wrong and you can spend your career explaining near misses. So the next time you watch a tie break, don't study the winners. Study the moments after the mistakes. That's where real champions are made. On the court and in the boardroom, please like and subscribe if you enjoy what we do here. And of course, if you want to speak to me, just e-mail me on [email protected] and I'd be happy to set up a conversation with you.

5:35 Take care. For watching Locker Room Power with David SAML. If you enjoyed the episode, hit subscribe and leave a comment on your favorite platform. See you in the next one.