Yesterday’s post introduced patience as something considerably more active than waiting. We can continue practicing, training, and making deliberate choices while accepting that the benefits of those actions may take time to come to fruition. That definition creates another problem. If we are going to give something time to work, we also need to resist changing it before we have learned anything useful.
Tennis players are chronic tinkerers. When something is not working as well as we would like, changing something feels productive. A stroke technique adjustment might be followed by an equipment change, which is followed by a different practice routine. Before long, several variables have moved and we have very little idea how to evaluate the efficacy of the individual tweaks.
The systems engineering process that underpins my day job (with ideas that regularly spill over onto this site) discourages this sort of experimentation for an obvious reason. If several variables change at approximately the same time, isolating cause and effect becomes difficult. Tennis will always be considerably messier than a controlled experiment, but the same problem applies. If we keep modifying the system while trying to evaluate it, eventually we lose the ability to determine whether the original change helped.
This becomes especially problematic because many changes initially make performance worse. A technical adjustment can feel awkward precisely because we are trying to replace a familiar movement with one that has not yet become automatic. Conditioning and strength training induce fatigue long before the gains have been achieved. A tactical change may require a lot of repetitions before we become comfortable using it in a match that matters. Evaluating results too early can produce a perfectly accurate observation that nevertheless leads to the wrong conclusion.
That does not mean every change deserves unlimited time. A bad idea does not become a good one simply because we remain committed to it for six months. There should be some reason for believing the intervention makes sense in the first place, along with an idea of what improvement should eventually look like. Patience becomes useful after we have made a reasonable choice, not as a substitute for making one.
This is also why the expected timescale matters. If I change my toss location on a serve, I may be able to evaluate some aspects of that change fairly quickly. If I begin strength training aimed at improving the power on my backhand, expecting meaningful progress after three workouts would make considerably less sense. Different interventions need different amounts of time before the results tell us much.
There is also a connection here to September’s discussion of results-oriented thinking. A single successful outcome did not prove that a decision was good, and one failure did not prove that it was bad. The same caution applies when evaluating change. Early results are still results, and they remain vulnerable to normal variation. Patience gives us the opportunity to accumulate enough evidence that a pattern has a chance to emerge.
This is one reason I increasingly think of changes as experiments. An experiment begins with some idea of what we are trying to accomplish. We make an intervention, observe what happens, and eventually decide whether the evidence supports continuing, modifying, or abandoning it. The useful information comes from allowing that sequence to unfold. Constantly introducing another variable makes the experiment much less informative.
None of this requires tennis players to maintain spreadsheets or establish formal test protocols every time they make an adjustment. It does require enough discipline to remember what we were trying to change and enough patience to avoid declaring success or failure before we have much evidence.
Sometimes the best response to uncertainty is another intervention. Sometimes it is another observation. Knowing the difference is difficult, but Friday’s definition of patience gives us a useful starting point. Continue doing the work. Pay attention to what happens. Give the evidence enough time to accumulate before deciding what it means.
Tomorrow we will pull much farther back. The same tendency to demand quick feedback that interferes with a technical change can also shape the way we approach an entire tennis life. Some of the choices that matter most will not pay off this week, this season, or perhaps even this year. Playing the long game requires being comfortable with that.
