Issue 04: What Confidence Actually Runs On

What Tennis Teaches Us

Confidence in tennis is easy to mistake for believing you're going to play well.

But real confidence is quieter than that. It comes from knowing what you can rely on when you're not playing your best. The serve you can still find under pressure. The pattern you trust when a point gets tight. The standard you know how to return to again and again.

It also comes from understanding your game as it actually is — your strengths, your limitations, what is within your capabilities. Not chasing perfection, but knowing which parts of your game you can count on. Less certainty about what will happen, more certainty about what you can do, on days good and bad.

An Idea Worth Borrowing

Performance researcher Steve Magness spends a good part of Do Hard Things taking apart the idea that confidence is something you summon before doing a hard thing. His conclusion, after looking at how it actually develops: true confidence is founded in doing the work, and when that work is done in the name of getting better rather than proving something, confidence grows gradually as a result.

That flips the sequence most of us assume. We think of confidence as belief in yourself. Magness's read is the opposite — do the specific, repeatable, occasionally boring work first, and the confidence shows up because you built it, not because you found it somewhere.

What Caught My Eye

In the 1990 US Open quarterfinals, a 19-year-old Pete Sampras went two sets up on Ivan Lendl before watching Lendl take the next two. Sampras had let one of the game's most experienced champions back into a match he'd nearly won.

Sampras, in his autobiography A Champion's Mind, described the voice a competitor might hear in that moment: Don't panic, but this is kind of scary.... Play safe... play aggressive... forget your game, listen to me; we've got to do something!

“It's true what they say about winning being a habit,” he wrote. “Once you open that Pandora's box of doubt, all kinds of nasty things come flying out.”

He continued: “In the end, it was my game that got me through that situation, not my heart or my mind.” Neither organ, he added, had intervened to screw things up either.

Sampras won the fifth set 6–2. The confidence wasn't a belief that nothing would go wrong. It was knowing that his game was there — and not letting doubt get in its way.

— Simona