I often get asked a question from coaches I mentor and teach, "do you work on somebody's strengths or somebody's weaknesses more?"
That's a great question, it all depends on your student's developmental age and where they're at. If you're a touring pro that's playing on the tour regularly and your bank account relies on you winning matches, you focus so hard on things that are going to make you better; your strengths.
Your strengths are going to be the ones that come to the forefront of your game.
When you're playing on the court, you turn to your strengths when things aren't going well. But then on the flip side, if you're a developing athlete at 10, 11, or 12 years of age and you want to improve your game, yes we need to work on the strengths. However we also need to make sure that we are developing holistically in all the areas of your game. From technical, tactical, physical, ,psychological, or nutrition, you work on all those little things to develop a future product. But, if you're in that middle echelon of say 17, 18, or 19 years old, you may be blending between working on developing your weaknesses as well as your strengths, because you need to be starting to win more matches at that age.
So it's a fine line, but it's really important to understand that it comes down to the individual. In front of you if you're a coach, or it's about yourself, don't compare to anybody else. It's all about you as that athlete. If you can understand what your strengths are it's a really important factor because not many players, parents or coaches tell their kids what is the best part of their game.
A lot of the time as coaches we generally critique what is not right. We talk about how we're going to improve your backhand, why it didn't work on the weekend or how you served a lot of double faults. We've got to improve those weaknesses, but a lot of the time we need to try and highlight to our athletes what they doing really well. Players want to hear the things that they're doing really well. Positive reinforcement is really important to get them to understand what their strengths are, because under pressure they'll turn to those things that you said are their strengths.
They'll believe in it because you believe in it. It's about getting the belief in someone's strengths.
So depending on where you are in your developmental stage, it's really important to take into account how much you work on your strengths, how much you work on the weaker areas of your game (which I call growth areas) and ensure that you balance the two. Or if you're out there to win some matches, play to your strengths as much as you can.