Strategy

Much as I love tennis, I didn't expect to be writing about tennis this week. Many of you know I played a lot back of tennis back in the day and my dear old Mum was a massive tennis inspiration. Watching Arthur Fery hold on against Grigor Dimitrov last night and keep his cool to come back from being down a mini-break in a deciding tiebreak, three hours and fifty-five minutes into a match many of us would have folded in long before, I found myself taking notes I could easily have written for a client.

For anyone who isn’t watching the tennis, Fery is 23. Before this week I think he had won one Grand Slam match away from Wimbledon, ever. He was two sets to one down against a former world number three playing on centre court for his first time, a boyhood dream of his by the way. Even after his previous epic match against Bergs which also went to five sets, the smart money wasn't on him. And yet Fery won six of the last eight points to take it 7-6 (10-7) in the fifth.

That's not just fitness, and it's not just talent. It is strength of mind. Staying true to his ambition to take this tournament as far as he can after receiving a wild card and persisting in holding his own against the talent that is Dmitrov. Despite being sixteen years older and a far more experienced player on courts like Centre Court, Fery’s opponent used his own mental resilience and experience to keep coming back, although in those last few points it seemed as if it was finally all too much as Fery simply would not give up.

I talk a lot with my coaching clients about the gap between stimulus and response — that split second where you decide whether pressure collapses you or clarifies you. Fery, afterwards, could barely find the words for what he'd just done on Centre Court. But what he did on court told its own story: he stayed in each point, in that moment, not reflecting on the three hours behind him on sets already lost, not getting ahead of himself and losing focus.

I believe that is strategy as much as it is mindset. Going the distance — in a match, in a business, in a career reinvention — rarely comes down to a single moment of brilliance. It is the accumulation of small, consistent, decisions to stay present when it would be so much easier to check out. To play the point, not the match. To make the next right call, not to be stuck in the last wrong one.

The leaders I know who go the distance aren't the ones who never doubt themselves under pressure — they're the ones who've built the capacity to notice the doubt, breathe through it, and keep choosing their next move deliberately rather than reactively. Fery did not look like a man who was beaten even when he was behind, he kept his head up and  kept going for the shots, missing one or two crucial ones which we all gasped at, yet he continued to play his game.

Wimbledon will have moved on by the time some of you read this. But the question I'm sitting with isn't really about tennis at all: when you're two sets down in your own version of this — a business, a pivot, a difficult year — what does it take to stay “on point”?