How to have the Winners Mindset

Rodger Federer has gone viral this week after giving a commencement speech at Dartmouth College where he talked about failure and overcoming adversity.

It was fascinating as his mentality can be summarised as "Let it go"

Essentially, people who succeed know they will lose again and again and have learned how to deal with those losses. With 20 Grand Slam singles championships throughout his career Federer knows a thing of two about mental resilience.

“When you’re playing a point, it has to be the most important thing in the world,” Federer said. “But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you. This mindset is really crucial, because it frees you to fully commit to the next point, and the next point after that, with intensity, clarity and focus.”

“The truth is, whatever game you play in life, sometimes you’re going to lose. But negative energy is wasted energy,”

In the 1,526 singles matches he played in his career, he won almost 80%.

But he only won 54% of those points across all those matches.

"When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.”

Mental Resilience

So how do we build mental resilience?

Quite simply, developing a short term memory around negative outcomes. By fixating on the losses, small or big, we encourage self-criticism and pessimism, this can prevent you from moving forwards, prevent you from taking risks. You might think this negativity can be used to motivate you but in reality it's often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Letting go of painful or frustrating feelings doesn’t necessarily mean suppressing your emotions, either. Allow yourself to experience your feelings and let them flow through you - Yale School of Management lecturer Emma Sepp?l?.

“Let the emotions wash over you like a wave that comes, keeps you underwater for a bit, but eventually passes so you can resurface and take a breath of fresh air,” Sepp?l? wrote. “Note that fully experiencing the emotion doesn’t mean fully?expressing?it during its peak.

The point here is that by experiencing your emotion, you process and digest it. You’ll communicate better once you’ve taken those steps.”

Federer echoed that same advice: Take the time you need to recognize and process an upsetting situation before putting it behind you, he said.

“You accept it, cry it out if you need to, and then force a smile,” Federer said.

“You move on, be relentless, adapt and grow, work harder, work smarter.”

You can watch the full speech by clicking here on YouTube