How Ash Barty Became the Master of Her Ego

Newsletter #31

Wahhhooooooo! Welcome!

Shoutout out to Mak, Ursula, Karena, Michael, Barnabas, Gosbo, Sirass, Paige, Angelana, Anna, Tommy, Anna, Abas, Joiners, Zoe, Rina, Stormz, Hank, Karen, Islem, Ritik and Sulman for joining this week month!

I’m back after (another) slightly longer than planned publishing hiatus. I took my first proper holiday since pre-covid, see the ‘fail of the week’ at the bottom for a funny story.

But more excitingly I ended up completely enamoured by the essay below. What started as an 800 word essay quickly ballooned into over 3,000 words as I continued down the rabbit hole. I’ve never spent more time writing, researching, drawing and searching for gif’s. It consumed me. Hopefully it shows and you enjoy.

For those who make it to the bottom, in addition to a fail of the week there’s a story from my New Years Eve.

Without further ado:

Essay: How Ash Barty Became the Master of Her Ego

There’s a Cherokee proverb about a young man who asks his grandfather about the painful struggle between the two growling ‘wolves’ inside of him.

One wolf is evil – it is anger and greed, arrogance and self-pity, ego and sorrow.

The other wolf is good – it is faith and compassion, joy and love, humility and hope.

They are both biting at one another, trying to control the young man. The young man asks: ‘Which wolf will win?’ The grandfather answers: ‘The one you feed.’

Three-time Grand Slam winner Ash Barty opens her autobiography “My Dream Time” with this proverb. It encapsulates the battle we all experience with our mind. A battle that came to define Barty’s career.

Before meeting her mindset coach Ben Crowe, Barty’s career was marred by feeding the “evil wolf”. How Barty came to feed the “good wolf” contains the secret to her rise to the best female tennis player in the world.

Impact of Feeding The Evil Wolf

Following the proverb, Barty reflects on a third round loss to Daria Kasatkina at Wimbledon in 2018.

“I feel the match flowing for me early. I’m quickly up 4-1, and a sense of entitlement washes over me… I begin talking to myself. I know I’m a good grass-court player. And I know I’m a better grass-court player than her.”

However, after a tactical shift by Kasatkina, Barty reflects:

“Tactically, the shift is minor, and only mildly surprising, yet it throws me off course. I’m too fragile to tweak my plan, too stubborn to see its flaws, too flustered to reroute my path to victory. I have no clarity in this moment, no answers, not even a process for finding some answers. All I have is a rising anger…

As the points and games fall Kasatkina’s way, I shake my head and grimace, and I backchat with my box – with my family and friends and supporters, and mostly with my coach. It’s always like this when I’m cornered. I get snappy. I’m not really saying much at all, just venting but with venom. There have been flashes like this before in other matches, but my natural game has saved me. Nothing can save me today. “

After being up 4-1, Barty committed 24 unforced errors and lost 12 of the following 16 games to lose 7-5, 6-3.

The headline in Herald Sun that evening read, “BARTY SUFFERS STUNNING WIMBLEDON MELTDOWN”.

What happened?

Barty reflects in her book “I fed the wrong wolf”.

At the time Barty was ranked 17th in the world, however she’d never made it past round three of a Grand Slam. In order to reach her world number one potential Barty realised “something needs to change.. why do I always look like I’m about to take off and then stumble? Why am I so emotionally distraught over wins and losses? Why am I not performing as well as I know I should? Why can’t I feed the good wolf?”.

Her coach, Craig Tyzzer, suspected it's because Barty didn’t believe she was good enough.

But why didn’t she believe she’s good enough? And what was the “evil wolf” in her mind?

Her ego.

An Introduction To Our Ego

No book quenched my thirst to understand the ego better than Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth”. Tolle shares how our ego is a “conglomeration of recurring thought forms and conditioned mental emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of I.“

If you’re like me after the first time I read that you’re probably thinking, what does that gibberish mean in English?

To explain allow me introduce you to someone:

Never-Enough Neville

This is Never-Enough Neville.

He’s a nice guy, but he struggles with insecurity.

Every day as he walks into work he can’t help but admire the expensive cars he sees and the fashionable clothes people wear. Once he gets to work he looks up to his superiors, wishing he had their job titles and salaries. On his lunch break he becomes enamored by the beautiful holidays and amazing food he sees people posting on Instagram. You get the gist.

Sadly this reinforces Neville’s feelings of inadequacy and he begins to question his self-worth.

However, rather than wallow in self-doubt he covers his insecurities by attaching to his possessions.

For instance, he finds confidence by wearing stylish clothing. Similarly, his job title and the authority over junior team members gives him a sense of self-belief. Meanwhile, hitting his monthly sales targets provides him with self-worth. Each attachment is like a piece of armour covering the insecurity he feels.

Unfortunately, these attachments only ever provide temporary relief from not feeling good enough. Without fail Neville’s insecurities surface again, hence his name. When they do, he begins to cover them up with new attachments: a new car, higher salary or winning the monthly sales challenge in the company to name a few.

However, the most crippling part of attaching to his possessions and perceived status is how he behaves whenever he loses one. To say he’s a little dramatic may be an understatement. He enters a full grief episode.

Here he is at the last sales meeting where Johnny was announced as the leading sales-man over him:

This was followed by trying to bargain with his manager on why he should have won, before going off and suffering a depressive episode. Eventually he comes to accept it.

Why does Neville behave in this way? Because to him it’s not just about the sales numbers. He sees it as a direct condemnation of his self-worth. Removing his claim to the attachment he made to the status of the best sales-man causes all his feelings of inadequacy to come flooding back.

Want to know a secret about Never-Enough Neville?

I didn’t meet him at a bar, he lives in every single person’s head. He is the “recurring thought forms and conditioned mental emotional patterns” that make up our ego. Everyone of us battle with not feeling good enough and find things in our environment to attach to as armour.

You may be thinking, “how does this relate to Barty?”.

Barty’s Battle With Never-Enough Neville

Remember how Coach Tyzzer said Ash thought she wasn’t good enough? He was right.

The “evil wolf” in Barty’s head was her ‘Never-Enough Neville’ battling insecurity. To cover the feeling of inadequacy, Neville found comfort in winning. It explains why she became “so emotionally distraught over wins and losses”. Each match felt like an existential threat to her self-worth.

Knowing this, Barty’s meltdown against Kasatkina is no longer a surprise.

After being up 4-1 she began attaching to the idea that she was a better player than Kasatkina. It’s in the language she uses in her reflection: “a sense of entitlement washes over me... I know I’m a better grass player than her”.

However, as soon as Kasatkina began fighting back, Barty’s attachment to being “better” was threatened and she entered a grief episode.

Once again it’s in the language she used in her reflection. First she went into denial, “I’m too fragile to tweak my plan, too stubborn to see its flaws. Followed by anger, “I have no clarity in this moment.. all I have is a rising anger”.

Fortunately for Barty, she was introduced to world-leading mindset coach, Ben Crowe.

In their first meeting Crowe made clear Barty attaching her self-worth to her performance was a common mistake of athletes and the negative outcomes it created were entirely predictable. He shared:

“Athletes have a bad habit of coming to understand their life story only through their career, mistaking the games we play for the people we are… If we don’t reconcile our self-worth, we tell a story of shame. We develop imposter syndrome. Or we put up ego defenses. We deny – ‘I’m not really losing this”. Denial being the first stage of grief.**

“Or we rationalise – ‘I’m not getting the advice I need from my team’. And once those excuses don’t work, we meltdown. We criticise and judge, bully and blame.” Anger being the second stage of grief.

The reason?

‘Never-Enough Neville’ has twisted the players into perceiving each match as a direct threat to their self-worth.

How To Manage Our Ego

The question becomes: How do we manage our ego? How do we silence ‘Never Enough Neville’? How do we feed the ‘good wolf’?

Barty began working with Crowe in search of the answer.

The brilliance of Crowe’s methods is not only in how he quietens ‘Neville’, it’s how he rewires him completely.

First, let’s unpack how he quietens him.

Quieting The Ego

Tolle shares “all that is required to become free of the ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible”. To silence Never-Enough Neville we simply need to become aware of him.

Crowe brought awareness to Barty’s ‘Neville’ by asking her three questions:

1. “How do you show up when you’re nervous?”

2. “When does it happen?”

3. “What can you say to yourself in real time, the next time it happens?”

Ash reflected on the last question “what can I think that reminds me of strength, and not weakness? What can I say to myself to make me go tall and not small?”.

Or in other words, what can she tell herself (and her Neville) so she plays as the best version of herself. For Barty this became reminding herself to be “CALM, CLEAR, PRESENT, CONFIDENT & SHARP”. What Crowe describes as a ‘courage mantra’.

The essence of the courage mantra is they are words that make you a warrior, not a worrier.

Crowe shares in his Mojo Crowe course they “might be as simple as ‘I'm imperfect, but I'm worthy’ or ‘I am enough’”. These mantras are effective because they bring acceptance to Neville’s greatest fear: not being enough.

I like to think of courage mantras as “Crowey Snax”.

Similar to how ‘Scooby Snax’ are used to incentivise Scooby Doo to overcome scary situations and show up as his best detective self. “Crowey Snax” are used to feed the good wolf and help you show up as your best self.

Rewiring The Ego

However, to deduce Crowe’s work with Barty down to only courage mantras would be a great disservice. The magic is how it rewires the ego itself.

Tolle shares that the “recurring thought forms and conditioned mental emotional patterns” that make up our ego are “conditioned by our environment, our upbringing, and surrounding culture”.

Or more simply, what ‘Never-Enough Neville’ attaches to and how he reconciles his self-worth is dependent on his conditioning.

Due to a lack of education, our natural tendency is to find self-worth in exterior motivations. In our introduction to Neville we saw how he attached to how stylish his clothes were, his job title and his sales numbers.

The problem with exterior motivations is they’re outside your control. We only have to look at Barty’s meltdown to see the risks of performing from a place where your self-worth is attached to the outcome i.e. something that’s outside your control.

What Crowe did for Barty is rewire her self-worth to interior motivations. Rather than find it in winning, prize money and fame, she began to find it in her process, purpose and mindfulness techniques like her courage mantra. All things inside her control.

Now when ‘Never-Enough Neville’ inevitably began to create thoughts of self-doubt mid-match she was empowered to quieten him with ‘Crowey Snax’. Rather than suffer increased anxiety and potentially meltdown.

Crowe notes on the Dyl and Friends podcast, operating from this place “doesn't mean you’ll win the situation. What it does mean is you’ll bring the best version of yourself to the dance floor. And that's the only expectation over any of us”.

Or in other words, finding self-worth in your interior motivations doesn’t guarantee a win. But it does increase the likelihood you perform at your best which ultimately increases your chance of winning.

There’s no better example of this than Barty, who after never making it past round three of a Grand Slam, won the French Open in 2019 and the US Open in 2021.

However, as she pondered retirement, as an Australian, she had one more desire: to win the Australian Open.

Barty The Master Of Her Ego

Crowe often references Joseph Campbell’s “Hero's Journey” and, true to form, Ash faced one last crucible moment for her tennis journey to be complete.

After convincingly winning the first set against Danielle Collins, 6- 3. Barty found herself down 5 - 1 in the second set.

Three years ago in a third round match at Wimbledon, a similar situation caused Barty to implode. Now she was on an even bigger stage where the stakes couldn't be higher: a Grand Slam final on her home soil. How would she respond? Which wolf would she feed?

She reflects in her book, “Before I can blink I’m down 1-5 and spectating, and I don’t know how I can get back into this contest…”.

However, rather than let her ‘Never-Enough Neville’ focus on the outcome Ash reflects “nothing rested on perception or emotion or momentum. Everything rested on process and mindset and belief. CALM, CLEAR, PRESENT, CONFIDENT & SHARP.”

Through this mindset Ash didn’t fall victim to a grief episode, she devised a new plan, focusing on something she could control:

“I tell myself that if there’s a ball that I’d hit with a backhand 65 percent of the time, I’ll run around and hit it with a forehand – and I’ll do that again and again and again. Why? Because if Danielle looks over the net and sees me hitting forehand after forehand, she’ll think she’s doing something wrong. She’ll think she needs to do something different – something extra – and that’s when she’ll make a mistake.”

For those who don’t already know the ending, the headline in the Herald Sun the next day read:

ASH BARTY WINS TITLE, BREAKS 44-YEAR OLD WOMAN’S TITLE DROUGHT

Barty won and with it proved she was the master of her ego.

Authors note: Anything in italics throughout the blog is a direct quote from Ash Barty’s autobiography “My Dream Time”.

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Fail of the Week

Like every snowboarder who’s too much of a coward I don’t go near big jumps. I know my circle of competence and like my wrists the way they are. But when it comes to going off a big jump into an inflatable bag, sign me up. All of a sudden my fantasies of doing a backflip come to life.

I couldn’t have been more excited when I realised the snowfield I was at had one. Nervously, I walked up the stairs to the top of the jump. There was five kids all aged around ten lined up in front of me. The first one went off, then the second, the third etc. Assuming once the fifth one went I’d be next up I waited patiently.

However, by the time the fourth kid went off, the first kid made it back to the top, then the second, then the third and rather than line up behind me they all pushed in front. At first I didn’t have a problem with this assuming the attendant would maintain decorum and invite me to the front upon the fifth kid jump.

But he didn’t so then the first kid, second kid and third kid etc all went off again. And once again by the time the fifth kid went to jump they all pushed in front of me again. And once again they all went off while I stood there wondering why such barbarian behaviour was being accepted by the attendant.

After the third time, I called my mate who was down next to the inflatable bag essentially saying “we should come back another day and let these kids have fun”. My mate promptly replied “mate, stop being a pussy and bullied by a bunch of 10 year olds and push back in”. I couldn’t find fault his logic so I mustered the courage and did exactly that.

After finally attempting my backflip, I’m getting off the inflatable bag and my brother comes running over and goes “Dude! Chris Hemsworth (aka Thor) is sitting right there”. Here’s the shitty photo my brother took while doing the ‘pretending to be on the phone’ trick:

Anyways, turns out some of the kids pushing in front of me were his kids. Long story, story short: I got bullied by a bunch of mini Thors.

Highlight of my New Years Eve

This New Years Eve my friends found themselves in lavish locations like Hawaii, Fiji or the beautiful coasts of Australia. Rather than twiddle my thumbs in Sydney with my dog Buey (sorry Buey). My cousin and I decided to keep my Granny company down the South Australian coast.

After a marvellous fish and chips dinner we had four long hours to entertain ourselves before the (not so) famous Goolwa fireworks.

Never one to find myself bored, my cousin and I quickly found ourselves playing Putt-Putt around the living room. It didn’t take too long for the place to represent a Holy-Moly venue with everything from bean-bags, family photos and shoes used as obstacles.

After about an hour (and a few drinks later) we found ourselves more confident in our ability and no longer satisfied with only hitting the ball along the ground. We did what any (not so) great golfers would do after a few beers and decided to introduce aerial shots.

Conscious of our Granny’s well-being we provided her with a helmet hat to protect her from the very unlikely case that my cousin hit her.

Not one to make the same mistake twice and risk hitting Granny’s other tit we upped her protection for my shot.

The video speaks for itself but it’s fair to say I couldn’t believe my eyes when this happened first go:

Until next week,

Cheers,

Nic Hurrell

https://rudder.life/