Marta Kostyuk Explains How She Controls Associating Her Results With Her Self-worth
Marta Kostyuk on how she’s able to stop herself from falling into old habits & associating her results with her self-worth, ‘I understand where my worth is coming from. And it’s not coming from being a tennis player’
“You’ve spoken in recent months about the work done behind the scenes in therapy to separate the results from your own kind of view of yourself. You’re in such an incredible run at the moment winning so much. Do you ever feel that kind of risk of maybe falling into old habits where you do associate your results with your own kind of self worth?”
Marta. “Good question. I don’t think so, because I’ve done a lot of very deep work on understanding myself on a very basic human level… Understanding where my worth is coming from. And it’s not coming from being a tennis player. So I think that helps to separate it in a way. I told Sandra before my 3rd round and 4th round, like, I know I’ve done a good job already here. I’m very happy with my progress on grass. Just generally how I feel on the court. No matter how this match ends today, I’m still gonna be happy and I’m excited for the American swing. I try to go into every match with this type of thinking. For sure different things can happen in life. Something can happen, I can go back into old habits. But I’ve worked really hard not to do it. I spoke about it in Paris. I said changing these habits was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to experience or do. For me playing tennis is much easier than doing this. Because it takes much longer to get better at. It takes much more work, much more self awareness. It’s the same thing when you have huge success when you’re young and a lot of new things happen to you, and you have no idea how to deal with it. Once you know what it takes to get there, once you’ve done it a couple times, you kind of know what to expect a little bit, and of course it makes things probably less exciting, but more stable. I think it’s the same here. I’ve been falling down a lot of times in my life and going back to old habits and old reactions. So I don’t know. But we’ll see [smiling].”
