In tennis, we often talk about a good loss in a match.
What that means is you play the match and you do your best, and yet you still lose.
If you lose, you move on and don’t get too worked up because you made the right decisions, you handled the pressure moments well, and you’re satisfied with your effort.
The result might not be what you wanted, but the intention was correct.
This is what we call “focusing on the process, not the result.”
In the 2025 Wimbledon, there’s been a high number of men’s seeded players losing in the first round.
Some complaining about burnout and mental fatigue.
Alex Popyrin, an Australian player ranked in the top 20, lost to a player who had a ranking of 461.
Normally, this would have been a routine win.
When interviewed, he spoke about being numb. He was indifferent to the result. Not a good place to be.
Zverev also lost in the first round and spoke about “lacking joy on and off the tennis court and feeling alone.”
These issues affect people in other professions as well.
I see the same situation with salespeople.
Salespeople who pride themselves on working hard all the time, and then suffer burnout or leave the industry.
Often the sales managers have no idea what’s going on with the individual. Usually, it’s a comment such as “They don’t seem to be motivated to pick up the phone and make those calls!”
Often, one of the causes is the focus on one thing only — the result.
This is often the thing that management focuses on as well, and the desire for salespeople to deliver the result can have a catastrophic effect on the salesperson and the business.
There needs to be a number of other areas that the salesperson needs to focus on, which have the reverse impact on the mindset of the salesperson. If they can, then they’ll start to have fun — in their job and in life itself.
If your identity is supported by success and only success, when failure appears you are probably going to struggle to deal with it and struggle to focus on the process.
Think about it this way — Federer, Nadal and Novak kept on winning for over 20 years, and they could have retired a lot earlier. But what kept them motivated to keep going?
