What We Can Learn from Nick Kyrgios and his Mindset Shift

Nick Kyrgios stated in an interview, “Then, I don’t know, I just tried to just look at my career. I was like, I feel like I’ve got so much left to give to the sport. That’s it. I just trained hard. I just put my head down. Look, let’s get in shape, better shape, first of all. Let’s see, like how it goes.
He went on later to say… “I was just really sick of letting people down. I feel like I’m making people proud now…”
I wrote about Nick Kyrgios and taking a sport psychology perspective on his mindset earlier this summer. What’s interesting about this quote is it ties into his mentality. This is only a portion of what Nick Kyrgios had to say about the shift in his career. To summarize, he mentioned struggling mentally, being selfish, and starting to feel bad for letting important others down.
From a sport psychology coach standpoint, something changed in his life. He recognized something to where he gave more thought to what really matters to him.
In tennis (or really any sport), we can get caught up in things outside of our control. We rely on the uncontrollables to motivate us and build our confidence. When in reality, the uncontrollables aren’t reliable… because they are outside of our control!
It’s so easy to get caught in the uncontrollable chaos because our society puts heavy weight on these things. Society increases our belief that we have control over the uncontrollables. On top of that as humans we crave to control everything.
The truth is we can’t. Sport psychologist and sport psychology coaches often say, “Control the controllables.”
How does Nick Kyrgios and his tennis career tie in? Well, first he was willing to acknowledge what was going on for him. Now this took time. This does not happen in the blink of an eye for an athlete.
Once he realized where his focus was and how he was going about life, he began to make changes. He tapped into his why. Your why is your purpose behind playing. What are you passionate about? What do you love about the game? What do you want to stand for when you perform on court? This is something that is within our control. Even better you get to choose your purpose. No one else.
Another change he made was putting his head down and working hard – preparation. Preparation is within our control! There are many areas we can prepare for in sport – physical, technical, tactical, and mental.

Takeaways:

• 1. Acknowledgement is key and takes time.
• 2. Tap into your passion.
• 3. Prep – Train in all areas of sport.
• 4. Focus on what you can control.