Common Performance Anxieties- Continued.
4) Common Anxiety: “It’s not my strokes that fail me; it’s my mental toughness.
I just freak out!”
“Mental toughness is often confused with emotional toughness.”
Mental toughness is often confused with emotional toughness. My definition of mental toughness in the tennis world is the understanding of strategies, tactics, and patterns. It also includes opponent profiling and problem-solving skills. My definition of emotional toughness is the ability to overcome the onslaught of performance anxieties and outcome-oriented emotional thoughts.
Solutions to match issues begin with understanding the actual cause of the problem. Is the athlete’s above statement: “I just freak-out!” A mental issue or an emotional issue? I would say it is an emotional issue. Because the correct solution is customized to the issue, I recommend digging deeper into why this particular athlete “freaks out.” Does it involve the above mental categories, emotional categories, or a combination of the two?
It’s important to note that a seemingly unrelated component may be the root of the athletes break down. For example, if an athlete is physically unfit for serious competition, that lack of fitness can cause stroke mechanics to break down, reckless choices in shot selection, and manifest negative emotional outbursts.
Preparing for pressure involves knowing the difference between mental and emotional components.
5) Common Anxiety: “Johnny screams and throws his racket, why can’t I… ?”
“Attitude and emotions are highly contagious.”
Remember the old saying, Monkey See Monkey Do? It’s human nature for people to subconsciously model themselves after their sphere of influences. Preparing athletes for pressure include carefully navigating athletes away from bad influences. Negative parents, coaches or other athletes in their peer group can and will sabotage the strong character traits you seek.
Behavior modeling is a form of social learning. It states that most behaviors are picked up through imitating who and what they see.
Parents who are over anxious, prone to excess worry, stress, and fear are inadvertently conditioning their athletes to be a pessimistic emotional train wreck under pressure. Coaches who lack self-esteem because they couldn’t “make it” on the tour may project a deep-seated doubt in their student’s chances. Their passive-aggressive underlining message is “If I couldn’t succeed neither will you.”
Supreme confidence is essential in preparing athletes for pressure. Be aware of the behavior of those influencing your athlete.
6) Common Anxiety: “I’ve lost confidence. How do I get it back?”
“Your positive performances are imprinted in your memory, so choose to re-live them.”
A re-occurring defining characteristic of champions is their strong software skills. There are many times in an athlete’s career when they’ve lost their confidence and had to reboot their motivation.
One solution lies in choosing to focus on past successes more than past failures. Failure is no doubt part of the learning process but revisiting past successes via- match video analysis is one method used to rekindle self-esteem. If your athletes don’t already videotape tournament play and analyze (along with an experienced coach) their performance, now’s a great time to start.
Past successes leave a footprint in the brain.
Ask the athletes to remind you of previous pressure-packed situations when they performed spectacularly. Go into detail. Where did it happen? What event? What round? How did they overcome the challenges? Why were they determined to fight? What was their inner dialog? This process stops the discouragement and replaces it with the realization that they’ve done it before and they’ll do it again.
Preparing for pressure comes from realizing that you have come through under pressure before.
