Your Game. Your Set. Your Match.
E84: How Jasmine Paolini pressed the ESCAPE button to win one of the greatest Wimbledon singles semi-finals
It was one of the great Wimbledon singles semi-finals.Â
In the first set, losing 2-6 to the 28-year old Croatian player Donna Vekic, Paolini could have lost her nerve and thought she was on a losing streak.
"It was really tough. She was hitting winners everywhere", admitted Paolini in the on-court interview after she defeated Vekic.
As I sat through the longest ever Wimbledon semi-final in the ladies' singles tournament, what stood out about Paolini, the 28-year old Italian who won 2-6 |Â 6-4 | 7-6(8), was the ESCAPE button she had pressed.
It's the ESCAPE button I wrote about last week where I shared four ways to overcome analysis paralysis and stop the endless doom loop of 'What if?'s. 👇
How to press your ESCAPE button on the deluge of 'What If?'s
When I was at school, we learned how to write computer programmes. This was long before LLMs (Language Learning Models) infiltrated our daily lexicon. It was pretty basic. In fact, we were using "BBC BASIC". One of the first programmes I wrote looked like this
Paolini could have focused her attention on what was going wrong. She could have kept her mind on:
"Why I played that forehand too long?"
"What if I had done a drop shot instead?"
But she didn't.
Just take a look at what Paolini shared about her belief after the match:
"I was struggling at the beginning, but just repeating to myself to fight for every ball, to improve a little bit on the court because I was serving really bad. I was repeating to myself try point-by-point."
After an exhausting 2 hours and 50 minutes complete with nail-biting, rollercoaster moments, Paolini said:
"I'm enjoying and just living the present. There's no better place than here to fight. Every ball. Every point."
👉 Over to you!
If you think about a challenge you're facing, perhaps a major transition point in your work or home life, or you're sailing on a boat through choppy waters and you can't seem to keep an even keel, how has Paolini inspired you to press your ESCAPE button to avoid a doom loop of 'What if?'s, and win your game, your set, and your match?
ps If you’re an entrepreneur, a lawyer, or a high-flying professional looking to live and lead more effortlessly while winning your game, your set, and your match, get in touch and let’s have a conversation.
That’s it for this week!
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To your health and success!
Eric
...how cool to experience that match in person...and to see that self escape in the escapist art of spectatorship...and for the art to transcend escapism into inspiration...john fischer should be banned from baseball for life for taking the A’s away from Oakland...the stories that hide inside stadiums...
Isn't she adorable? I enjoyed every single point of that match. And what you write here is so to the point and appropriate: hit the escape button and focus on the here and now, minute by minute.