I was watching another episode of The Playbook on Netflix, this time with Patrick Mouratoglou, who is Serena Williams coach and some other amazing tennis players. I loved one of his rules : “A good lie can become the truth”. He says to push someone and to give them more confidence you need to sometimes dare to lie as their coach and when they believe your lie because they trust you this may become the truth. What he says is that sometimes as a coach you need to be so confident that your athlete is able to realize something even before they are able to do it. For the under-confident Serena at Wimbledon in 2015 this goes from being fearful of going to the net, to becoming a beast at winning net points in the matter of two weeks.
This is not the only great part in this episode, he also speaks about the danger of emotions. To have emotions is not a problem he says but to let them make decisions for you, this is wrong.
And it made me think about the decisions I made based upon emotions and I agree with him, we should try to find a “zero point” before we take decisions. Or at least try to go to this Zen moment where you can feel about what you want and also think about it.
But off course sometimes you do not have the time and you decide based upon an emotion. The last decision I made that went totally wrong because of the emotion is the one to break harder with my mountainbike. I felt I was going fast and I doubted my skills to handle my bike in this difficult situation and my emotions took over. Fear took over and I decided to break harder, something I should not have done, the little breaking I was doing would have been good enough probably not to hit the fence…
Today we are 7 weeks later and even though I still regret this decision I made, I can only agree that every pro was once an amateur, every expert was once a beginner. So I will continue to dream big and even though my positivism stays, I get more and more realistic that my first Roc du Maroc might not be in 2021 but 2022….
