Choose to Be Optimistic

posted on: August 30, 2023
author: Brian Lomax, Ed.D.

At the beginning of a tennis match, you don’t actually know who will win. Based on rating or ranking, you may be able to make an educated guess as to who will emerge victorious, but there is no guarantee of that outcome. It is uncertain. How you feel about uncertainty, in tennis and in life, will probably have an impact on your disposition about the outcome of your matches. Are you optimistic about your chances of success, or are you pessimistic? Do you deal well with uncertainty or does it make you anxious?

Thinking of the Future

Optimism and pessimism are dispositions or inclinations toward future events. The optimist chooses to believe that good things are possible and that there is hope. The pessimist, on the other hand, tends to emphasize adverse circumstances and expects the worst possible outcome. These two dispositions help us to explain what we think is going to happen in the future. The term for this in psychology is explanatory style, and although that term is usually reserved for your mode of explaining events in the past, I believe that you can also apply explanatory style to how you view future events.

“The pessimistic style…is more likely to be aligned with a player’s need to be right. Pessimism is easier to be right about than optimism. Failure is much easier to be right about than success.” -Helen Emms, from Achieving Peak Performance in Tennis

When you consider the differences between optimism and pessimism, there don’t seem to be any real benefits to being pessimistic about the outcome of a tennis match, yet many players unknowingly choose pessimism in their approach to competing. Why is that?

The Pessimistic Approach

Pessimism is often used as a cure for uncertainty and the anxiety that accompanies it. For instance, when you compete, the result is uncertain/unknown. This can be uncomfortable for many people, and it is likely why so many athletes get nervous prior to competing. You don’t know what could happen. What if you lose? What will happen then?

Pessimism reduces the discomfort of these feelings because it brings more certainty to the situation – the certainty that you will lose and/or perform poorly. The more you focus on negative outcomes, the more likely they are to occur. The more excuses you make for why you won’t perform well, the more likely you won’t perform well. And after the competition is over, you can say, “I was right!” So, pessimism satisfies your desire to be right and it alleviates the discomfort of uncertainty. Unfortunately, pessimism also sabotages your ability to enjoy what you are doing, to learn from your experiences, and to become the best athlete you can become. Being a pessimist in this sense means you are not being competitive.

Through pessimism, you are denying yourself the experience of doing the best you can. How can you be personally satisfied at the end of a match if you know you didn’t do the best you could?

Experimentation and Experience

Experimentation and experience are important in life because they drive true learning. It is important to remember that “supposed negative outcomes” from your experiments are not final in nature. Such outcomes are part of the journey, and in fact, should be seen objectively as data rather than judged as negative. Perhaps you learned more about what doesn’t work for you.

Seeing results as being more important than they truly are is part of the fear associated with competition. It’s part of the threat to your self-esteem. Yet, it’s that fear that is blocking you from attaining your true greatness. The experience is what matters. The journey is what matters. You can’t truly know anything until you’ve experienced and lived it. Muster the courage to try.

Choose to Be Optimistic

It’s for this reason that I think being optimistic takes a lot of courage. You don’t know what could happen in your match, but you accept that reality and choose to give it your all. You’re truly putting yourself on the line.

Being optimistic doesn’t mean believing you will win, but rather that you can win and/or that you can play well. It also doesn’t mean thinking that nothing adverse will occur. That’s being a Pollyanna. Optimism involves realism which is demonstrated by your knowledge that difficult circumstances will occur during a match, and that you can handle them.

From a fans perspective, the uncertainty of outcome is why we love watching sports. We don’t know who is going to win, and that is what makes the performances exciting. For athletes, that uncertainty can be uncomfortable for some and exciting for others.

The Path to Self-Knowledge

As protagonists in sport, having the courage to embrace the excitement of uncertainty and to have an optimistic outlook throughout is a path to forging mental and emotional strength. It takes training to embody this perspective, and that training may be harder for some players than others because it depends on the nature of the training environment. If the training environment emphasizes winning over learning and mastery, it will be much harder to do what I am suggesting. Therefore, it’s necessary to encourage yourself to be experimental with your physical, mental, and emotional games with the objective of learning through doing.

The player who is open-minded and willing to try anything that they think will help them be better will be the one who has the most self-knowledge and will be able to better master themselves in life. That’s freedom. That’s success.