The Tennis Parent’s Bible
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COMING SOON: The Tennis Encyclopedia
The Challenge of Change
To substitute one behavior for another sounds so easy, but it’s not. Our emotional responses are habits that are hardwired in our brains. Altering the wiring takes time. Plan on training to rewire the new skill sets for months before they override the deep seeded poor habits holding you hostage. Change begins as an inward journey of understanding. Reinventing your emotional climate affects your new thoughts, feeling, and actions come match day.
“Nothing can harm you as much as yourself in a tennis match.”
1.1 Letting Go of Past Habits
To “unmemorized” past emotional responses, you’ll recondition your belief system. Nothing can harm you as much as yourself in a tennis match. Are you ready to break the habit of being yourself in matches and reinvent a new competitive self?
1.2 Tournament Personality Traits
Athletes under stress have almost the same thoughts today that they did yesterday. Here’s a fact:
Most thoughts in competition are repetitive. After repeating the same response, it becomes your competitive temperament. Those temperaments then become your tournament personality trait. These traits reappear like clockwork as soon as matches begin.
1.3 Neural Pathways
We create a neural pathway if we do something often enough, including reacting negatively. The more we repeat the behavior, the stronger the connection in the brain. This neural pathway is how our habits get formed and why breaking a bad habit is so challenging.
1.4 Cascading Emotions
Every positive or negative thought we have creates a cascade of effects. Are your old negative emotional routines keeping you comfortable or holding you captive? When you slow down between points, you reduce negative thoughts and reset. Only then can you experience mental clarity.
1.5 Coping Skills
Taking control starts with understanding your coping skills. Under pressure, are you in a coping mindset or an escaping mindset? Coping is refusing to act like a victim and taking positive action. Escaping is avoidance of the solutions.
1.6 The Four Stages of Change
Choosing to make a change and develop a new emotional state is a process that generally requires the passage through four stages:
- Disbelief
- Frustration
- Acceptance
- Commitment
Let’s begin the inward journey toward understanding your emotions. The following chapters will explore how you leave disbelief and anger behind and enter the acceptance and commitment stages.
