The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible
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Solutions and Cures
Individual personalities come with unique frustration tolerance levels. So it’s safe to say that symptoms and cures are often remarkably different. Listed below are the anxiety reducing strategies that I teach my students to handle pressure. Set aside time to discuss the below 6 performance anxiety busters with your team.
1) Pre-match preparation is essential. Prepare all strokes, patterns, one’s physical body and one’s state of mind properly before each match. Top professional have a specific routine before and after every match.
2) Keep your self-destruction notes handy. The mental section provided you with a list of ten “Self-Destruction Solutions.”
3) To avoid choking and panicking requires understanding the under arousal, ideal performance and the over arousal state of minds.
4) Emotional toughness is being bigger than the moment. This state of mind requires three months of practicing in the manner in which you are expected to perform versus simply hitting tons of balls back and forth.
5) Remember the acronym for WIN- W: What’s; I: Important; N: Now. Dummy up and only focus on what’s important now, from pre-match rituals, through each point of the match, to post-match rituals.
6) Be prepared in every possible way- technical, physical, emotional and mental.
- Technical Preparation: The “tool belt” of primary & secondary strokes are all pre-developed and wired for tournament play.
- Physical Preparation: Aerobic and anaerobic capacities are ready to handle the long standing suffering of winning six matches in a row.
- Emotional/Focus Preparation: Pre-set protocols/solutions have been discussed and developed to handle any crisis.
- Mental/Strategy and Tactics: Pre-set patterns to successfully pull all four different styles of opponents out of their comfortable system of play.
“The very best way to destroy performance anxiety is through growth.”
Confidence Is Nurtured by Positive Self Talk
Encourage your athlete to think positively, such as, I deserve my success, I have trained for it, I am a problem solver, I am resilient, I will do my best and/or I can. A positive attitude is a critical first step when tackling performance anxiety issues. Sadly, I’ve found that many athletes are actually nurtured pessimism. This happens when players are raised by parents or trained by coaches that see the negatives in every situation- which is actually programing pessimism unknowingly to their children. Ironically, the very same parents and coaches often report, “My kids are so negative!”
If the family environment is becoming a bit too negative, a fun game to play for the entire family is an old psychology exercise called the “Flip It” game. Trust me, it could change your lives.
Hold a family meeting and introduce a one week exercise. Everyone is encouraged to say “Flip It” whenever they witness another family member saying something pessimistic or acting negative. Athlete example, “I don’t want to eat this healthy stuff.”- FLIP IT, “I hate this drill”-FLIP IT, “It’s too early…I don’t want to go for a run before school.” FLIP IT! Parental example “Yea, he won 6-2, 6-4 but he should of won 0-0”, -FLIP IT! This exercise spotlights the negative behavior. It makes the negatron aware of his/her reoccurring pessimism and encourages optimism in a light hearted, non-threatening way.
“Learning to spot and flip pessimism and replace it with optimism is presenting the moral code needed to champion tennis and life.”
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.
