If at first you don't succeed....

I've been waiting for a few months for the time when I would be able to write this particular blog. Earlier this week the event I'd been waiting for happened...Andy Murray won his first Grand Slam tournament.

A British educational writer, W E Hickson, was the person who was credited with writing:
'Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try, try again. If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again.'

And at his fifth attempt at winning a Grand Slam, he was indeed, successful.

But perseverance alone will not turn failure to success. Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That was why, after being the runner-up in three Grand Slam finals since 2008, on New Years Eve 2011 Andy Murray appointed Ivan Lendl, a former world number one and winner of eight Grands Slams as his coach and mentor.

Apart from the fact that I'm an avid follower of tennis (I even prefer it to football!), I'm also delighted that here is a very high profile example of how coaching and mentoring can have a huge impact and achieve outstanding results.

So it is with high hopes and expectations that in a few days time I start my course to gain professional qualifications in coaching and mentoring. Lots of other courses I looked at only cover coaching. Although coaching and mentoring are different, they work very well in tandem, as long as you are clear on when and why you use each of them. From Andy Murray's perspective being mentored by someone who also had been runner-up in his first four Grand Slams, he will have been able to discuss their shared experience and understand how Ivan Lendl was able to progress. A coach's job is to listen, question, challenge and listen again and help the person being coached to come up with the answers themselves.

I'm sure that this is just the start of even greater success.