Three questions to stay successful after the greatest coup of your career
How do you manage to remain successful after the greatest triumph of your career? Tennis insider Marco Kühn has the answer ready.
by Marco Kühn
last edit: Mar 19, 2021, 09:50 am
You worked towards this one goal for ten years. You skipped dates, avoided parties and subordinated everything to this one goal. You have become an expert in the fitness field. It would be no problem for you to give a course in nutrition. You have achieved your big goal: You have finally become club champion in your tenth attempt.
You bathed in the applause of the club members at the award ceremony. You went home with pride and experienced a previously unknown feeling of happiness. It is a noise-like state. Oh, and you reacted very modestly when people congratulated you. But inside you danced sirtaki for joy.
Two weeks later nobody cares anymore.
During these two weeks the spirit of your success catches up with you. During this time it robs you of the energy that gave you the motivation to train, to do without and to "keep going". Now you are standing on the court without this energy. What is more: You no longer have a big goal in mind. You feel small, defenseless, and personally attacked by the expectations of others.
At this point I could also write that you lose in rows against weaker opponents and after a match you don't know how these defeats came about in play.
We'll save that. Instead we get the mental "Ghostbusters" and see how you drive away the ghost and get back on the road to success. To do this, we ask ourselves three embarrassingly simple questions. The answers to these questions can put you back in the mindset you had before the biggest coup of your career. With the difference that you now know the evil spirit and have grown in character from your experience.
Let's get started.
Question # 1: Who am I?
There are numerous characters who do not have any ideals or values. You hop from one train to the other. Always on the way to supposed success. When they arrive at the "train station of triumph" they don't even know who they are.
We know this phenomenon from musicians who make rock today and hits tomorrow and end up in rehab after their first and only hit.
After your greatest coup at the latest, you should ask yourself who you are. A useful tool for this is history. Your story. Because your career is a story. You are the hero of this story. Sometimes you have to fight against terrifying monsters. At another stage in your story, you are the outsider who shows it to the envious. It is important for you to know which character strengths and weaknesses characterize the hero figure in your story.
Find out who you are And why you want to be successful. To train your motivation, to eat healthily and to do without many things must have a healthy origin. The worst possible motivation is to want to be successful because you want to prove it to others.
A healthy motivation is realizing your inherent potential. This motivation has no end goal. It is thus - under certain circumstances - never used up.
When you begin to review your story, you will be able to draw a future. This process brings you that much closer to the core of your character.
Question # 2: where am I?
After the greatest success of your career, you are missing a new goal. You don't know where you are You don't have a map to orientate yourself. It may be that reaching your goal did not meet you as you imagined. This is the ideal time to start drawing a new map.
You have reached a new point in your career. With the "Who am I?" Question you found out who you are and what your motivation is. Now you connect these two points with each other. You think about what goal your motivation can lead you to.
Here are some ideas:
- Increase in consistency in the match
- Improvement of the mental match preparation
- In-depth analysis of defeats
- More rest between rallies
- Better attitude to matches that are unimportant on paper
- Improving awareness of the opposing game
These ideas give you an advantage: They don't just lead you to a great triumph in a tournament. They improve you as a complete tennis character on the court. You don't set yourself short-term, but long-term goals. You decouple your goals from individual triumphs and set your athletic development as the one big goal.
The trick: the stronger you become as a player, the more success you will have.
Question # 3: Where do I want to go?
Setting goals is a sensitive child. Are you acting too roughly, it screams. If you are too dear, it will not develop. So it has to be another idea. Let's take as an example that you want to be number one in your club for the next five years. Then you start to train even harder and you are "in mode" again. It can be fatal if you rely too much on this goal. Then you make the same mistake you made before your triumph at the club championships.
What can you do? Find out which adversities you have to remove from the road to success on the way to your goal. This could include:
- Cope with devastating defeats
- phases of doubt
- Motivation holes
- Unexpected private problems
- injuries
In the next step, you set your big goal to be able to solve exactly these adversities. You are preparing yourself mentally for real problems that could stand in the way of achieving your goal.
By taking this step, you develop a mentality that prepares you for any kind of setback. In addition, you gain new energy that you lost after your great success.
Where do you want to go You want to become the player who achieves his goal despite unbelievable adversity. You want to become the character that nothing can stop. You want to go there.
What can you learn from these three questions? A great triumph can give you a bang for your career. But if you draw the right lessons from it, you can achieve much higher goals with a stronger character.