International Teaching Seminars Blog

Below is an extract from ‘Fantastic Federer’ by Chris Bowers. ITS founder Ian McDermott was invited by the author to lend his opinions on Roger Federer’s rise to dominance and continued excellence in his sport.

The technique of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) was developed in California in the 1970’s. It’s designed to illustrate excatly why one person can perform a skill well while someone with the basic attributes can excel at that same skill, and then work out ways for others to emulate (or model) the successful person. The technique is used by numerous athletes in many sporting disciplines.

One of NLP’s leading authorities is Ian Mcdermott, who runs the british based initiative International Teaching Seminars. He suggests looking closely at Federer’s mentors. “Children grow up modelling,” says Mcdermott, “so Federer is going to have been influenced by his social enviroment - and one of the biggest influences he cites in his childhood was Peter Carter. Everyone who speaks about Carter talks of the inherent calmness of the man, and it’s interesting that Federer’s most significant breakthrough appears to have been his response to his outburst in Hamburg in 2001.

If you look at the phrasing he uses when looking back on that event, he is clearly disasociating himself from his angry reaction to the way he played and saying he has to change the relationship he has with his own response. And in the back of his mind was this mentor who was calmness personified. Carter’s calmness may be the most important thing Federer has modelled.

“Culturally, I think we’ve tended to become very critical of people who express strong anger or emotion after losing sporting contests. What Federer did in Hamburg was a clean response, as opposed to a muted reaction to defeat with the anger and emotions let out later and away from public view. But Federer obviously felt that this angry reactin wasn’t working for him, so he learned how to change his response. Since then, he’s operated a form of iron discipline, which we see as a calmness on court. These days there are just the occasional controlled explosions of anger or emotion when he threatens to boil over, like the time he blasted the ball away in his match at the Athens Olympics, or bursting into tears after winning the Australian Open.- When incidentally Peter Carters parents were present as his guests”.

With his experience of working with successful people in all walks of life, McDermott suggests that, having reached the top, Federer biggest challenge might only now be beginning. “To get to number one, Federer will have paid a price,” he says.

“A commitment to excellence when combined with a strong competitive streak tends to produce an extreme focus that can result in a certain unbalanced development, simply because you’re so busy putting everything into the area that matters most to you. My experience of working with successful people is that very often the price they’ve paid is higher than it needed to be. Once they come to realise that a rebalancing can take place, but this doesn’t have to result in any diminishing of excellence. I can’t help wondering wheather Federer has paid a higher price than was necessary. Where has the fun loving boy gone? Where is the prankster from the Basel tennis club who loved having fun on court but then found his concentration wandered? Perhaps if Federer were, say to rediscover a little of his on-court sense of fun in matches while at the same time not losing the bite that makes him excel, he would reclaim a fuller sense of himself. That wouldn’t just increase the accomplishment of his titles but would also make him much more attractive to fans, because people would have more of him to engage with. It would also reduce the risk of what happened with Pete Sampras happening to Federer – namely that, because he was so successful the same way, over and over again, people found that they had less to care about and even started to say he was so boring.”

Only Federer himself can know how much fun he gets from being at the top of the tennis tree. The standard facial expression he has during matches is very dour- unflinching, focused, almost depressed-looking. Only when a match ends does the humanity return, almost as if the true personality was suspended for the duration of the contest. Perhaps if he does ever find himself wondering where his next challenge lies and where he might go from here, maybe one option might be to attempt to move from being one of the worlds most watchable tennis players because of his elegance of his strokes and his inherent good sportsmanship, to being one whom people care about as well as admire- and that might enhance his appeal even more.