Venus Williams has spent the past three decades as a professional tennis player – and the sport has completely consumed her life.
“As an athlete, as a tennis player, you’re playing 10 months a year – what balance is that?” Williams exclaims.
She first turned pro in 1994, going on to win a total of seven Grand Slam singles titles – including Wimbledon five times. While her competition schedule isn’t quite as intense as it used to be, Williams, 44, hasn’t retired from pro tennis just yet – last year marked the 24th time she competed in the US Open.
She last played tennis on the world stage at the Miami Open back in March, saying: “Then I took some time off the court to do all kinds of things – I’m like, I need to go back to tennis so I can have some time to myself!”
Nowadays, her endeavours outside tennis include an interior design company and a plant-based protein shake brand called Happy Viking. In June this year, she even walked in the Vogue World fashion event in Paris wearing a custom outfit made of upcycled tennis bags.
Looking back at her past few tennis-free months, Williams says: “I think even this year I definitely pushed too hard, and it left me feeling very unmotivated, even though I had stuff to do.”
She says she’s never got to that stage before, and it was “a big learning experience for me”, spurring her to think about “what maybe I could have done better looking back”.
One thing Williams has learned from her years on the pro circuit? You can’t keep striving for a sense of equilibrium that likely won’t come.
“That’s how I came up with [the idea] that, OK, I’ve got to find a moment in every day for some kind of balance, instead of waiting for this elusive moment somewhere off in the future that’s quite foggy.
“Well, guess what? You don’t have to wait. You can find it today.”
She might have a lot of other projects on the go, but tennis fans shouldn’t worry too much, with Williams asserting: “I’m not done with the racket yet.”
“At this point,” she continues, “It’s about picking and choosing places I want to be. Last year I really wanted to play in Miami – home – because I hadn’t played there in like five years.
“It’s nice to be in a place where I can pick and choose, but my game is always at a high level. Even if I’m not on tour, I always keep my game quite high.”
The game certainly misses her and her sister, Serena – this year’s Wimbledon championships was the first to not have either in the women’s singles draw since 1996. The sisters remain close, even if Williams jokes about how “it’s not nice for the little sister to beat the older sister all the time!”
Tennis “never gets old”, Williams enthuses. “I always watch the tournaments as much as I can – it’s hard to sit in front of the TV, and a lot of times by the time I have time at like 11pm it’s a replay, but it’s still fun to watch all the competition.”
But for Williams, success isn’t about the amount of Grand Slams she’s won. For her, “Number one is happiness. If you are not happy, nothing feels good – nothing feels successful or happy when you are sad inside.”
This ethos is reflected in her new book, Strive: 8 Steps To Train For Success, which breaks down all the ways you can unlock success, whether that’s through diet, exercise, the people you surround yourself with, mental health and more.
Another key indicator of success, she says, is health. “Being able to live your dreams or have that opportunity to go for it, that’s a huge part of happiness and wellness,” she says.
“I think a lot of people really overlook that.”
This was really challenged when Williams was diagnosed with autoimmune disease Sjögren’s syndrome a decade ago. According to the NHS, this is ‘a condition that affects parts of the body that produce fluids’.
Williams writes in the book: “Finding out I had an incurable autoimmune disorder – one that flares up unexpectedly, causing pain, numbness, and fatigue – was one of the hardest things to accept, especially when my career expects me to be at my physical best.”
Today, Williams talks about the condition with her signature sense of humour. “Who gets diagnosed with a disease that starts with ‘S’ and ‘J’, you know?” she jokes. “First of all, how do I pronounce this?”
But she continues on a more serious note: “It definitely made me look at things differently. Even when it was hard to look at things differently, just to focus on what I could accomplish instead of what I couldn’t.”
This might have been tricky, but she adds: “It definitely made me grateful for what health I had.”
Appreciation what you have is a big cornerstone of Williams’ mindset: “I think it’s such an important message today, especially in this day and age where materialism, in some cases, has overrun our thoughts.
“We’re seeing people who are appearing to live amazing lives on social media, they’re travelling places on private planes, they’re showing you the things they have – all that stuff doesn’t matter. When you take that out of the equation, you realise you didn’t need much at all to be happy and to be able to appreciate the things that you have and the things that are important and appreciate something every day.”
But this also means “appreciating yourself”, Williams says. “We can be so hard on ourselves – we’re always our biggest critics, and sometimes we forget to appreciate ourselves. Obviously, that can go in the opposite direction, where you appreciate yourself too much, then you can not achieve what you should because you haven’t pushed yourself – but it’s so important to be your biggest cheerleader.”
And few people know how to finetune their mindset better than an elite athlete. Williams says it’s inevitable that you are “constantly looking at everything that you’re doing for improvement”.
She adds: “I could definitely walk off the court unhappy with everything, and that mentality can only take you to a place where maybe you’re not feeling good about what you need to achieve.
“At the end of the day, the person who wins the match in tennis is the one who feels good about what they’re doing. Even if you’re not the best player, but you feel good, you can really play freely and achieve what you need to.
“Sometimes even that’s a daily thing on the court – remembering that yes, you missed that one shot, but look at the other 20 you made. It’s a daily practice.”
Strive: 8 Steps To Train For Success by Venus Williams is published by Piatkus, priced £22. Available now.