Bounce back Konta’s mind coach on finding strength in defeat
Johanna Konta’s mind coach tells Jim White how you can become mentally strong – and bounce back from any defeat
Those looking for a sound financial investment might be wise to put some money on Johanna Konta winning a grand slam title within the next two years. Britain’s number one woman tennis player announced herself to the wider sporting public when she made it to this year’s Wimbledon semi-final. According to those who know her, having got so close to being the first British female to win at the All England Club in four decades, the 26-year-old is determined to complete the deal and take a trophy home to Eastbourne.
There is a simple reason that Konta is a good bet to go on and write her name on the winners’ boards: there is no one else around as adept at turning failure into success.
“I think Johanna is the best I have seen at processing defeat,” says Elena Sosa. “She knows exactly what is needed to move on quickly, and what you need to take from failure to become better.”
Sosa should know. Konta’s “high performance psychologist and mental coach”, this is the woman who helps Britain’s great tennis hope with the cerebral side of her game. The good news is, many of her methods can be easily adapted to the non-sporting world. For those of us for whom failure is a regular occurrence, Johanna Konta offers a model of coping. “She has worked very hard atfinding strategies that work for her,”says Sosa. “She is a really resilientathlete, a really resilient human being.”
For anyone after an easy fix, however, there is just one slight drawback in the Konta approach: such mental strength did not come easily. Her overnight success entailed long, long evenings confronting – and learning from – the kind of defeat that is part and parcel of sporting life.
“There is no magic switch. I have no set of tricks I can give you,” says Sosa. “When you are playing sport, the most important muscle is the one between the ears. How you deal with different scenarios is the key to whether you win or lose. Johanna has been exercising that muscle. Now we can see at Wimbledon a lot of comments from opponents and media about her mental strength. But this is not something that comes simply. It is the product of hard work. Nothing comes without work.”
It was training her mind alongside her body that transformed Konta from an average, journeywoman player marooned in the lower boondocks of the world rankings into a top-10 contender. Her interest in mental development began in 2014 when her playing coach recommended speaking to the Spanish life coach Juan Coto.
After a series of discussions, the two of them came up with an approach that would help her maximise her inherent talent for the game, beginning her rocket-fuelled ascent up the world rankings. She would speak to Coto regularly, exchanging ideas, checking methods, working on systems. Everything was going swimmingly until November 2016 when, to Konta’s immense personal distress, Coto took his own life.
In February this year, Coto’s practice associate, Elena Sosa – who won’t be drawn on his death – was engaged to join Konta’s team and continue the process that her colleague had started. “We were talking the same language,” she says. “I had known Johanna for maybe 18 months and I was aware of the work Juan was doing with her. We just took it up from there.”
With a masters in psychology from Barcelona University, Sosa had been working with sports people for a decade when she first made regular contact with Konta. What impressed her was how quickly the young Briton had understood what was required.
“You can tell when you talk to her she is really aware of the mental side,” she says. “At all times when you are playing sport you have to be in the present. You cannot dwell on the past or worry about the future. You have to focus absolutely on the present.” Sosa helped Konta come up with a variety of ways to do just that: mindfulness, breathing exercises, words. According to Sosa, words are everything.
“You have to be aware of what you are saying to yourself. We have a conversation with ourselves going on
‘You cannot dwell on the past or worry about the future. You have to focus absolutely on the present’
all the time: you can’t do that, you’re going to fail. The tools you need to learn are the ones that allow you to convince yourself you can do it. Positive language is everything.”
You can hear Konta’s language of process and positivity in every post-match interview. And when she is in action, her concentrationenhancing routines are equally evident: her odd, praying mantis service routine is typical. It is all, Sosa suggests, part of ensuring she targets the things she can affect.
“We tend to focus on things we cannot control. In sport that might be the weather, or the surface. In business it might be the economy or politics or our colleagues. We are naturally inclined to make excuses. We have to concentrate on what we can do.” And it is here that one particular element of the Konta method could apply to us all: taking time, every day, to analyse events Everything goes very quick in tennis,” says Sosa. “You don’t have long to reflect. So you have to make sure you put time aside… immediately. Because if you don’t, you maybe go into the next tournament making the same mistakes.”
This is what Konta did after her defeat to Venus Williams at Wimbledon: she sat down and, with laserlike attention, broke down the defeat, working out exactly how she might be able to improve. “That is easier to do when we fail,” suggests her life coach. “But you have to do it when you succeed as well. If you have had success you need to make time to think about what you have done. If you are feeling fit, you can’t say: ‘Oh I don’t need to go to the gym any more’.”
Brian Moore, the former England rugby player and now columnist for this paper, believes that the biggest difference between sport and the rest of life is that sport is entirely judged in black and white – you either win or you lose – whereas life is a matter of negotiating endless grey areas. But Sosa does not see it like that – some 20 per cent of her clients are business people, and she sees huge similarities between the world of performance sport and working life.
“You have to accept what is going on,” she says. “If you refuse to acknowledge it, you won’t deal with it. Acceptance is very important. It is the first stage of moving on.” And embracing failure is key to that. “Don’t forget about it, analyse it. Work out how you can deal with it. Resilient people take failure as a positive, it will make them stronger. Look at Garbiñe Muguruza; two years ago, failing, in tears on Centre Court as she loses in the final. Maybe that was what helped her win the title this year.”
This year Garbiñe Muguruza, next year Johanna Konta. That is how you deal with failure.