Brainz Magazine Exclusive Interview
Founder and Chair of the Mouratoglou Academy, Patrick Mouratoglou is the most influential coach in tennis. Nicknamed “The Coach”, he is the gold standard on the international circuit. After a successful start to his career with a number of high-level players, he became Serena Williams’ official coach back in 2012. This was a decisive moment in his career. The “Dynamic Duo” had been together for seven years, and went on
to make some of the greatest history in tennis.
“We are accountable for our players’ achievements, and it is up to us to take responsibility for them, both in victory and defeat.” - Patrick Mouratoglou
How do we implement the ability to “unlearn something“?
Two things to say, we are the creation of all the experiences we have gone through in our lives. This reveals whether we are good at something or not, a positive experience or a negative experience. An example would be if you were to give a speech, if you believe you are bad at giving a speech, you will give a bad speech, you convince yourself you’re not good at it, you verify throughout your life if you are good at something or bad at it. To create a positive experience you have to have some confidence, as a coach, it's my job to build confidence and I do that by hard work and creating little wins every day, if I exercise for 30 minutes every day I am winning, when we stop doing something we know we are failing, we have to win something every day. We go back through previous experiences but with renewed confidence.
We also have to reflect on our choices and decisions. We need to change our perspective, we need to understand and listen to the self-feedback without finding excuses if we want to learn a new way. Failure gives us information which helps us learn and grow.
Why is self-esteem important in the process of personal and professional growth?
I think it's the key element. I love this quote:
"Where talent is a dwarf, self-esteem is a giant". By Jean Antoine Petit Senn
When you have self-esteem you’re not scared, you don’t find excuses, you can be reflective and have the right attitude to make adjustments and improve. Most of the people who don't work super hard don't do it because they are afraid of failing, they talk themselves out of it. People have wrong behaviours to save that little bit of self-esteem.
When self-confidence is strong, you don’t have those fears which make you adopt those bad attitudes and behaviours which impact your performance.
Why is “assuming we know nothing“ the best way to learn and grow?
When people ask me how I have become so successful, I always say it's because I knew nothing. Successful people are those that speak little but listen the most. We all need to listen and be ready to learn and observe and understand others' behaviours. When I was a kid I was the shyest person. I couldn’t connect with people, I was very afraid, and I was listening and trying to put myself into other people's shoes because I couldn’t ask them myself. I learned to listen, look, observe, and detect things which would give me feedback on their emotions, this was very valuable and helped me a lot. When I started coaching tennis, I did not do a diploma, I knew nothing, I didn’t know how to speak to a player or what they needed, but I learned how to build trust and the importance of building trust and getting to know your player or client. Give people a chance to express themselves. We need to learn about our people and the environment we are in.
How do we continue to do the right things when we don’t seem to get the right results?
Very interesting question, I am in a business where the only thing that matters is the result, to either improve rankings or win tournaments and the only way to measure success is to measure the results. We need more than improvements, we need to win. We either win or lose. I believe it's the same in business. We have to have a vision, we have to give ourselves time but we also need to have signs that point we are going in the right direction. In my business, if we lose too much, it will kill you. Of course, we need to be patient but we have to win to feed the confidence and to make us believe we can win again and again, make the changes and continue to win. You have to combine both the improvement and the result of winning.
We need tangible signs which say we are heading in the right direction, we need to make tweaks and adjustments and adapt our strategy when our results are giving us feedback where perhaps we need to continue to adapt.
How and why is it important to “trust the process"?
First, the confidence between the coach and the player needs to be strong, you can’t just give advice without first learning the needs of the player and then establishing a relationship with the player, they need to trust you 100% in order for the relationship to work, the first step has to be to build that relationship to 100% trust, then they will give themselves fully to the project and to what you re trying ti implement as a coach. It’s important to show humility and teachability to admit when you may get it wrong a coach, it's important to protect the player and that we grow and work together, that we focus on the team, when the team dynamic gets strong then it becomes powerful. We then build the strategy out of the process of knowing the player and building that trust, being vulnerable and responsible, it's easier to trust the process when we are honest in our own assessment and holding ourselves accountable for improving and achieving the desired results.
For more info, follow Patrick on Instagram, Twitter and visit his website!
