Behind the Result

Striving to master the outcome obsession

By Paul Dent. LTA National Coach, Tutor For The Performance Coaches Award (PCA)

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So why behind the result?

A tennis match itself provides little personal information about individual performance beyond the result. There are no marks for the style of a player’s backhand or serve percentage! It involves head-to-head competition and challenges your self-worth as 2nd place is first highly public loser. As such it is important that we do not equate relative achievement to winning or losing.

These two characteristics of the game can breed fear of failure….if we do not combat it.

One of the major inhibitors to striving to master the skills of tennis is the outcome obsession. The outcome obsession as the name suggests, refers to an over emphasis with the outcome, that is to say, the result of the match. I remember a story from one of our country’s most successful performance coaches. When watching his player compete against Tracy Austin in the last sixteen of the US Open, he became overly anxious about the outcome of the match. He commented that his emotions and thought processes were so wrapped up in the outcome of each point and ultimately in the result of the match that he was unable to clearly see what was going on in front of him. He consequently found it difficult to offer any accurate and meaningful constructive feedback to the player after the match to move them on as a player. After this experience he vowed never again to become overly concerned with the match outcome and ensured he would always ‘look behind the result’ to enable him to see the bigger, long term picture.

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