The Serena Williams Journal (2026): Her "Match Book," and What Is Actually in It

Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, more than any other player in the professional era. She spent 319 weeks at world number one. She won a major while pregnant.

She also wrote notes to herself and read them during matches.

That second sentence gets repeated everywhere, usually with confident detail about what the notes said. Most of that detail is made up. But the habit is real, and better documented than almost any celebrity routine we have looked at — because in one case she published the notes herself.

Two habits, two sources, don't mix them up

Almost every article on this subject blends two different things into one story. They are separate, with separate evidence.

The Match Book — her own, printed in her own book. Her 2009 memoir On the Line, written with Daniel Paisner, is structured around them. Chapters open and close with what the book labels Match Book entries: short notes she wrote to herself, in her own voice, and carried into competition. This is as close to a primary source as this genre ever gets. Not a reporter's paraphrase of a habit — the artifact itself, reproduced by the person who made it, in a book with her name on the cover.

The practice notebook — described by her coach, not by her. Patrick Mouratoglou has told the story repeatedly of finding a notebook of hers in a tournament car at Wimbledon in 2010, two years before he started coaching her. What he found, in his account, was page after page of notes on strategy and practice. He said, in an S. L. Price profile for Sports Illustrated published in August 2014: "I've never seen a player who had a notebook where he or she would write during practice what she needs to think about, when she serves, what she needs to focus on." And: "She doesn't want chance to be part of the result. This is a very professional approach that I've not seen many times. Players don't write."

That is Mouratoglou, not Serena — a named person, on the record, describing something he says he held in his hands. It is still one man's account of another person's notebook, and we are not promoting it to her own testimony because it reads better.

What we could not verify

Here is the part the other pages skip.

We cannot tell you what was in the practice notebook. Mouratoglou describes the categories — serve cues, focus points, strategy — but no page of it has been published. Every article that tells you what Serena "wrote about her opponents" is filling in a blank. We checked the 2014 Sports Illustrated profile, Mouratoglou's own book The Coach, and his published interviews. The contents are not on the record.

And we could not find her describing the on-court reading in her own dated words. That she read these notes at changeovers is widely repeated and fits how the memoir presents the entries — but we could not put a transcript, a date and her name on that sentence. We checked her September 2009 NPR Weekend Edition interview, which is about the memoir and never mentions the notebook, and the ABC News excerpt of On the Line, which is Chapter One only. The writing is documented by her; the reading is not. We would rather say that than round it up.

The one thing she did put in her own words, on a related habit, came six years later. Guest-editing Wired in November 2015, she wrote: "I started using affirmations as the passwords to my phone and my computer." And: "You'll be surprised how many times a day you log in and have an opportunity to trigger the positivity." That is her, bylined, dated. It is not the Match Book, but it is the same instinct — put the sentence somewhere you are forced to walk past it.

The habit, precisely

1. The note is written before the pressure, not during it. The Match Book entries are things she brought with her. The decision about what to tell herself was made when she was calm.
2. It is addressed to herself, in the second person. This is the whole mechanism. It is not a diary of events. It is instruction.
3. It is short. Not pages. A line or two she could take in without breaking concentration.
4. It is re-read. A note written and never opened again is not this habit. The Match Book existed to be gone back to.

What the science says

We cover the general evidence on journaling in depth on our celebrities who journal page, including where the field's most famous study fell short. What follows is only the part specific to writing instructions to yourself under pressure.

Written self-monitoring is the best-supported piece. A meta-analysis of 122 studies found that interventions prompting people to monitor their own behaviour clearly outperformed those that did not (Michie et al., Health Psychology, 2009). That is the boring skeleton of the Match Book: something got written down and then checked.

The emotional-writing evidence is much weaker than the headlines. Expressive writing has 146 randomised studies behind it, and a meta-analysis put the field-wide effect at r = .075 (Frattaroli, Psychological Bulletin, 2006) — roughly a third of the figure people usually quote. The foundational study everyone cites is smaller still: its key interaction came out at p = .055, not significant, resting on one group of eleven people (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986). Writing your feelings out is not a settled intervention, and anyone telling you it is has not read the numbers.

Habits set slowly. In the study behind the "66 days" figure, 96 volunteers self-reported a daily behaviour for twelve weeks; the median time to automaticity was about 66 days, range 18 to 254 — over the 39 whose curves the model fitted (Lally et al., 2010). Small sample, self-report. Judge this in three months.

What none of this proves. Serena wrote notes and Serena won 23 majors. Two facts side by side, not a chain. She had a once-in-a-century serve, a father who built a plan around her before she could read, a sister to train against, and a full-time team. The Match Book did not produce that. What survives is smaller and still worth having: writing your own behaviour down beat not doing so across 122 studies, and a sentence you wrote calmly is available to you later, when you are not calm.

Why the note beats the pep talk

The reason this works has nothing to do with positive thinking, and everything to do with timing.

At the hard moment — down a set, third hour, crowd against you — you are the worst possible person to decide what you should be telling yourself. Most people try to solve this by resolving to think better under pressure, which is asking for the scarcest thing at the scarcest time.

The Match Book skips that. The thinking was done days earlier, by a calmer version of you, and written on paper. In the bad moment you do not generate anything. You read. That is a much easier job.

An honest caveat, since this is our own thesis

We build a nightly reflection habit, so we have an obvious interest in telling you these are the same thing. They are not.

What Serena did was in-competition self-talk: a short instruction, prepared in advance, deployed under acute pressure, in a domain where she was already world-class. What a nightly journal does is retrospective — you look back at a day that is finished and notice patterns across weeks. Different timing, different purpose. The 122-study self-monitoring finding supports the second more cleanly than the first.

If you take one thing from her habit, take the prepared-in-advance part, not the "journaling helps you win" part. Nobody has shown that.

How to run it yourself, starting tonight

• Write one sentence tonight for a hard moment you know is coming this week. The presentation, the fourth mile, the conversation you have been putting off. One sentence, written now, while it is not happening.
• Write it as an instruction, not a feeling. "Breathe out before you serve" is usable. "I feel nervous about serving" is not. Second person, present tense, one action.
• Put it where the moment is. Phone lock screen, the front of the notebook you will carry, taped inside your kit bag. Serena's version travelled to the court with her. A note in a drawer is a note you will not read.
• Keep the old ones. The point of a book rather than loose paper is that you can go back. Katie Ledecky saved her goal slips meet to meet for the same reason.
• Give it a season. The median time to automaticity in the Lally study was about 66 days, range 18 to 254, over the 39 of 96 enrolled whose curves the model fitted. Nine days proves nothing.

The mistakes that kill this habit

Writing it in the bad moment. If you are composing the sentence while under pressure, you have skipped the entire mechanism. The value is that a calmer person wrote it.

Making it a paragraph. Long notes do not get read at a changeover, or in a stairwell before a meeting. If it does not fit on a business card, it is a journal entry, not a cue.

Copying invented quotes. Search this topic and you will find confident lists of exactly what Serena wrote in her notebook. Almost none of it is sourced. Her actual Match Book entries are printed in On the Line — go and read the real ones instead of somebody's guess.

Writing affirmations you do not believe. The Match Book was written by someone who had already done the work and was reminding herself of it. A note asserting you are the best when you have not practised is not a cue, it is a wish, and you will stop opening it.

Expecting the writing to do the winning. She had a serve. Assume the note is worth a little at the margin and put your hours into the skill.

Where HealthBrew fits

The part of this that generalises is not the winning. It is that a written record exists at all, and that she went back to it.

HealthBrew's nightly close is that, minus the Grand Slam. Sixty seconds: how it went, what you did, what you would tell yourself about tomorrow. After a few weeks it shows what you cannot see from inside one day — which days come before your good ones. Your first 30 daily closes are on us, no credit card.

One last thing. We wrote about Serena because she won more than anyone, and picking people because they won is a biased way to pick anyone. Thousands of people write themselves a sentence before a hard day and nobody profiles them. They just handle the hard day slightly better than they would have, which was always the part worth having.

Educational content, not medical advice. Sources: Serena Williams with Daniel Paisner, "On the Line" (Grand Central, September 2009), whose chapters carry her Match Book entries; Patrick Mouratoglou quoted in S. L. Price, "Serena Now," Sports Illustrated, August 25 2014; Serena Williams, guest editor's essay, Wired, November 2015. The contents of the practice notebook Mouratoglou describes have never been published, and we do not invent them. This page covers a documented writing habit and takes no position on anything else.