IS EMOTION KILLING YOUR TENNIS?

To improve your game, you must begin to shift from reacting emotionally and use your brain more.

The emotional realm is when you play points with doubt, a lack of confidence, fear, and even anger, and you are often overcome with insecurity and frustration.

Sound familiar?

Even at the top level, tennis players deal with many negative emotions that conspire to wreck their game. It's just that the top players can override the negative emotions better, or their more brilliant intellect takes over art practised in crucial times and saves the day by helping them complete the win.

But at the lower level, players are overwhelmed by all their negative emotions, which subotage their game.

It's not surprising then that tennis, and many other sporting pursuits, can be very frustrating for most and gut-wrenching for others.

The continual emotional conflict between what you want to do and what you actually do in reality can result in us having a mental meltdown during the match. When our intellect fights against our emotions, it can get ugly because few of us can win that battle.

Djokovic has learned to master his emotions even
under extreme pressure on the biggest stage

The problem is that our emotions are far more potent than our intellect for nearly all of us. The intellectual part of us is poorly prepared. And what is the intellectual part in terms of when we compete? It's our technique, our strategy. In other words, our tennis knowledge, what we should do, how we should do it and when we should do it.

If you're a player letting their emotions ruin your game, you must understand some critical technical and strategic ideas to become a much more resilient competitor. By emotionally strengthening your mindset's intellectual side, you will squeeze out the emotional portion that dominates your mind.

Here are some essential "intellect" points to focus on:

YOUR TENNIS INTELLECT IS YOUR KNOWLEDGE

Your tennis intellect is simply what you know. You know how to execute the Serve, but under pressure in matches, you get nervous and can't perform the Serve the same way you did in practice. That's understandable, but you've got to get over yourself. No one said becoming a good tennis player was easy; if it was easy, everyone would be a professional player.

If you're making unforced errors in a match, you also know that you may be rushing your shots or going for far too much. Why, then, would you not make these simple corrections? Because an emotion of some kind, anger, frustration, or just wanting to finish the match and get off the court has taken over. It's no longer a competitive match but has become an emotional experience. There's no room for any of that stuff you worked on during practice. Emotion is dominating any tennis intelligence you might have developed in practice.

John McEnroe was perhaps most famous for
his emotional outbursts during his career and
Unfortunately didn't capitalise on his enormous
talent as much as he could have 

 

FOCUS ON YOUR TECHNIQUE

Someone once said that good technique is like your armour in a battle. It protects you against those things that can hurt your game, like your emotions.

You've got to start overcoming your negative emotions by adopting the techniques you've learned in practice.

The serial under-achiever

The easy volley at the net to win the point needs to be done technically correctly by blocking out any dealt or lack of confidence you might have from the past. Scaring from the past can only come back to haunt you if you give it a home in your head. That's where your tennis armour technique can be most helpful. It can help block out the negativity, lack of confidence or self-doubt within you.

MISTAKES ARE SOMETIMES GOOD THINGS

You need to understand that making mistakes is your quickest way to improve. If you hold your game back because of issues and think errors are the worst thing, you're operating from a place of fear, another emotion!

I listened to a podcast recently talking about this exact thing. An owner of multiple stores in a large city visited each store weekly, asking the managers, "What have you failed at during the past week?" 

One manager kept telling the owner what he had achieved each week, always making a good decision. During one visit the owner warned him, "If you haven't made a mistake when I come back next week you're fired", and he meant it!

Do you see the culture the owner is trying to develop? If every manager in his network actively tried new things and experimented with ways to improve customer service, train their staff, etc., imagine how much better the owner's businesses would be. Profits would follow.

The owner knew that,, mistakes would be made, but that was necessary to move the business forward.

It's the same with your tennis. If the thought of making mistakes is holding your game back, it's time to drop your anxiety and adopt sound techniques and good decision-making. If you fail, that's okay. You tried. It will get better.