The Ball is Always Right
December 3, 2009
Life is always interesting because you can learn profound lessons in the most unlikely situations. In this case, it was from a tennis lesson during a corporate retreat.
My company offers a wide variety of programs to help organizations improve their performance and effectiveness. By far, my favorite is the “Learning to Fly” corporate retreat, where we introduce leadership and customer skills in the morning and reinforce them in the afternoon on the flying trapeze at Club Med.
During a program I held there a few weeks ago, I arrived a day early to make sure everything was set up properly for the attendees who would be arriving later in the day. When that was done, I headed over for the tennis workshop to try and resurrect a tennis game that has seen very limited action for the last few years.
As luck would have it, I was the only person there, so I got a 45-minute private lesson. As fate would have it, the instructor was a tyrant. No, really, he was! He ran me all over the court because he claimed that I wasn’t shuffling my feet enough when he hit the ball right to me; that I wasn’t shifting my weight properly; and that I was off balance when I hit the ball. (I can assure you that none of these claims were true.)
After a few minutes, I got with the program so he began hitting the balls closer to where I was standing so I could work on the mechanics of my stroke. By mistake, he hit one ball farther away then the others, and I watched it go right by me.
He got annoyed at this (remember, he was a tyrant) and asked me why I didn’t go after the ball. I told him that he didn’t hit the ball where he was supposed to. He laughed at this and said, “No matter where it’s hit, the ball is always in the right place. If it doesn’t come where you expect it to, then you need to move to the ball, otherwise you’ll lose the point!”
And although he was only talking about tennis, his statement had implications that reached far beyond the game.
How many times in life are we faced with a situation where things don’t go the way we expect them to? Where a situation at work unexpectedly complicates our jobs? Where we’re thrown a curve that dramatically impacts our personal lives?
And when this happens, our initial reaction is to just stand and watch, dumbstruck, as it happens, complaining that this wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out, just as I stood and watched as the tennis ball passed by me just out of reach.
Mistake or not; intentional or not; fair or not; when the ball is hit out of reach you have two choices: you can stand there and do nothing, or you can adapt your strategy to the situation and move to where the ball is and give it your best shot.
Remember, the ball is always in the right place. Whether you win or lose depends on how you meet the ball.
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