Doubts and High Performers

It is the beginning of the new year, and after the year like the last year was, we hope it better be a better one.

No room for doubts, a lot of room for hope.

Hope is great... and almost no one likes doubts. Most people feel uncomfortable having doubts, and don't find them productive. Doubts equal uncertainty and we don’t want uncertainty in our lives.

But for the best performers, doubts are an important part of their journey.

Having doubts is an essential part of being an elite performer, an elite athlete, or in my profession, an elite tennis player.

Doubts will help us to perceive and understand different situations correctly, help us to make appropriate decisions, and to follow up with the most effective actions.

More importantly, doubts will help realize the purpose of, and need for ultimate daily performance, be it in practice, recovery, or just normal daily life. They will, hopefully, push us to get a little bit better every day.

Doubts help businessman and elite athletes alike learn a valuable lesson for everyday life - that without pushing ourselves outside the zone of comfort and getting better every day we may never get better than the others.

And this uncertainty - are we good enough - is the reason for doubts in the first place.

As elite performers, doubts make us look for new avenues, new methods to develop and improve ourselves, our team, or our business.

They also make us postpone parts of our life that are not a priority, forcing us, sometimes, to put on hold our life as it is, sometimes demanding the ultimate sacrifice.

All with one purpose - not just to be the best we can be, but to be better than others, to prevail now and in the future!

So, embrace doubts... just don't forget to act on them. They help us improve, they can help us thrive, they make us humbler, and most importantly, they make us human.