The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible NOW available through most online retailers! Click Here to Order
Control the Controllables
Another anxiety reducing emotional protocol is to encourage your athlete to focus on simply controlling that which is truly under their control and to ignore everything that is out of their control. Understand that champions trim the fat and focus only on what they have control over versus outcome issues out of their control. Most performance anxieties stem from focusing on contaminating issues that have no place inside the head of an athlete during competition.
“The player’s performance anxieties lessen greatly when parents stop obsessing about the outcome and rankings and encourage belief, effort, and improvement.”
Ask your child to forget about the outcome of matches for a while. Instead, ask them to focus on being better than they were yesterday. A long-term goal to strive for is to be twice as good this year as you were last year.
