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.

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 twenty-four unforced errors and lost twelve of the following sixteen 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.

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 enamoured 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 this 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.

However, 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’s compelled to cover them up with new attachments: a new car, a higher salary or winning the monthly sales challenge in the company.

But the most crippling part of his need to cover his feeling of inadequacy with attachments 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 the reality.

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 attachment to being the best sales-man causes all his feelings of insecurity 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?”.

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.

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:

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.

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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