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Self-Sabotage

Posted on May 24, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential

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“Run Towards Winning Versus Running Away from Losing.”

Self-Sabotage

Self-sabotage is an “inside job.” If your athlete is their own worst enemy in competition, the issue likely lies in the relationship between your athlete’s conscious and subconscious mind. The conscious mind is the analytical, neurotic part of each athlete’s personality. It wants to help so badly that it causes problems. The issues occur because the conscious mind is constantly editing and evaluating every aspect of the performance. It is rarely possible to get into the zone and stay in that flow state if the athlete is editing too much during competition. You see, great competitors apply effortless effort. Meaning they’re putting out effort without the worry.

The subconscious mind is easygoing. It trusts the fact that it has performed these routines thousands of times. It’s the automatic pilot relaxed performer. Gifted athletes choke and panic at the most inopportune times because their conscious mind is overthinking and worrying about the possibility of future failure. This catastrophic way of thinking becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Stressing out about the possibility of future failure causes dopamine and adrenaline to flood the body systems as fear and muscle tension take center stage. Too many of these released hormones hijack an athlete’s brain.

Solution: Remind your athlete that it’s a privilege to be able to play tennis. Worrying about the outcome brings unwanted visitors through the conscious judgmental mind. Ask your athlete to observe their performance and make adjustments without judging. Before competition, preset solutions to possible future problems. Accepting an excellent performance versus a perfect performance is a great start to distressing an athlete. Great performances are born in inner silence.

The Fault Finder

Posted on May 20, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential

The Fault Finder

Sadly, most parents think they are helping after losses as they discuss the athlete’s laundry list of faults. Feeding the monster, or as we call it, the Inner Critic, is the last thing you want to do.

Your job as the parent is to foster the belief in their ability over being the fault finder. As you intuitively know, an external and internal battle rages in competition. Your youngster is not just battling the opponent and trying desperately to please you but also fighting a conflict within their head. If you are counting folks, that’s three wars raging simultaneously inside their underdeveloped brain.

Defeating the inner critic is the conflict inside the conflict. I hear a common statement from parents every weekend: “The opponent didn’t beat them … my kid beat themselves!” This statement implies their inner critic got the best of them once again.

How do we, parents and coaches, convince athletes that they will perform better if they tone down the attack from their own judgmental minds?

Solution: On match days, please remember it’s your job as the parent to avoid adding outcome-oriented, contaminating thoughts. (Your kid already knows you want them to win). Stick to performance-based dialogue with a relaxed demeanor and a chill tone of voice. Solutions to defeating their inner critic require calming, confidence-building dialogue that will help rid their mind of the typical outcome of “What If” worries.

This inner stability happens before your athlete is ready for the higher levels of the sport. Defeating the athlete’s inner critic requires the fault finder to stay silent and the loving parent to appear.

Red Flags

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

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Red Flags

A red flag is a signal that goes off when something’s not quite right. A commonality in sports is when the students’ words often don’t match their actions. Their words say, “I want to be a professional athlete,” and their actions say, “I don’t want to actually work for it.”

If your athlete brings internal drama and is unpleasant and frightening to be around on match days, the family is in for a world of uncommon hurt.

Solution: Here are a dozen red flags we do not see in the top competitors. Be honest as you read the list of common stumbling blocks. Do any sound too familiar?

Inconsistency in effort
Entitlement issues
Inappropriate anger issues
Lazy choices/poor decisions
Avoids solo training
Negative attitude
Faulty nutrition habits
Poor sleep habits
Substandard time management
Lack of gratitude
Second-rate preparation
Chooses mediocrity

An age-old saying provides insight: “There are contenders and pretenders.” Which do you have?

If you have a pretender, it may be in everyone’s best interest to put an end to the weekend drama’s and enjoy a normal life with a normal child.

Teaching Emotional Health

Posted on May 5, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential

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Teaching Emotional Health

Coaches typically teach physical health, but who is teaching emotional health? It’s a given that a physically healthy athlete is needed to pursue high-performance sports. Athleticism and a solid tool belt of strokes are the hardware required to play the game. But the software’s needed actually to win the game.

Mental health is the ability to think, understand self-awareness, opponent awareness, and generally make good decisions in competitive play. The key to the mental game is having the level-headedness to hit the shot the moment demands.

Emotional health is the ability to manage emotions under stress. This involves mastering performance anxieties common to the game.

The most common cause of our athlete’s painful losses is due to emotional self-destruction. It is often easier to blame a loss on poor mechanics and sloppy footwork, but performance anxiety is the most painful cause of a loss to accept.

To the uneducated tennis parent, this means there’s something broken deep inside our child, and it’s likely our fault. I’m here to tell you that they are not broken; they are normal. It just takes digging deeper to find solutions to emotional problems. Here’s a start.

Solutions:

Emotional healthy athletes have parents who identify the true causes of their losses. They observe competition and listen to their children. In quiet moments, such as before bed, the real cause of a loss is found in the athlete’s words, facial expressions, and body language.
Tennis coaches typically teach the hardware and don’t attend tennis matches. So, it’s the parent’s job to understand the common performance anxieties found in competition. These include fear, nervousness, choking, panicking, loss of focus, and inability to close out leads.
Parents should teach athletes that their thoughts and feelings aren’t always reality. Emotional speculations shouldn’t control the athlete; the athlete should control them.
Parents want their athletes to perform the way they’d love to perform. We get annoyed when our children don’t mirror our self-image. After all, they should be perfect because they came from our gene pool.

The core of most emotional issues stems from the athlete thinking that their outcome goals matter more than their performance goals. As any good coach will tell you, the ability to control one’s performance under pressure secures the outcome goals we all seek.

Concentration and Focus

Posted on April 18, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential

Regulating Focus

There will be stages in your athlete’s future matches when they face dramatic obstacles, from creative line callers to those who flip the score to opponents well-trained to get under their skin. Your athlete needs to preset their protocols in the form of routines to combat future gamesmanship. Regulating their attention around their performances will help them overcome the drama that comes with some matches.

Most importantly, mentally tough athletes need concentrated focus in-between points to desensitize the drama and navigate the match. This emotional strength, of course, is the non-hitting portion of their match performance. In between points, your athlete needs to pay close attention to three areas of their Between-Point Rituals (BPR). They include self-awareness, opponent awareness, and score management. Self-awareness and opponent awareness are based on paying attention to the patterns and tactics of the athlete and their opponents. Score management allows the athlete to modify their aggressiveness based on the score.

Solution: Ask your athlete to take their between-point rituals very seriously. Mentally tough competitors rely on the non-hitting time on-court. Most thinking, perception, memory, learning, reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making happen in-between points. On rare occasions, athletes need to call audibles mid-point.

Most intermediate athletes have focused exclusively on their hardware for years with their technical coaches. If they’ve got great form but aren’t getting the results they’re capable of, it may be time to reroute some attention to their software development.

Did You Win?

Posted on April 15, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential, The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

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Did You Win?

It is incredible how much self-inflicted contamination is created daily by parents and junior tennis players. Here is a prime example: what is the worst question parents can ask after practice sets or a match? The answer was, “Did you win?” Now guess what the most common question parents ask after practice sets or a match is? You guessed it, “Did you win?”

Parents need to replace an outcome obsession with improvement questions like: “Did you perform well today?” Remind your athlete that their real competition is in their mirror, and the only person they have to beat is the person they were last week. Asking your athlete, “Did you win?” pulls them away from focusing on their daily improvement goals and towards outcome goals because of the need for your love and approval. Athletes stressed about proving their worth to their parents are not free to focus on improving their untrustworthy skills. Athletes in this “winning is everything.” mindset only applies the comfortable skills they already own, not to disappoint their parents. This behavior stunts the growth parents seek.

Solution: Exchange the “Did you win?” question with performance-based inquiries. Another typical tennis parent blunder is booking their athletes into practice sets with higher-ranked players and then being crazy upset when their child does not win. Practice sets are learning tools to strengthen your athlete’s match play skills and identify those skills that are not ready for prime time.

If the parent is constantly in need of wins and a shelf full of plastic trophies, schedule sets with lower-ranked individuals and only register your child into low-level event.

Changing Inner Belief

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in Maximizing Tennis Potential

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Changing Inner Belief

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Teach your athlete that we all have empowering and destructive beliefs. Remind them that the power of positive inner belief will become thoughts that guide their new actions.

It’s important to note: Athletes can’t outplay their belief system, so if they think they can or can’t, they’re usually right.

One of the reasons that it’s challenging to change emotional habits is that the athlete is usually loyal to them only because they’ve believed in them for so long. Changing their perspective will take commitment from the athlete, parent, and coach. If your athlete is willing to improve their inner belief at crunch time, these ten tips are for you.

Solutions: Parents, please ask your athlete to utilize the following tips:

Choose inner dialog and positive self-talk that boosts confidence versus the standard negative monologue that derails confidence.
Please list of all your unique strengths, then one by one, appreciate them.
Employ SMART goals which are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Reminder: Winning every time isn’t a smart goal.
Develop a skill each day. Inner belief comes from growth.
Seek new inspiring mentors as trusted advisors.
Nourish your inner belief by exchanging pointless social media with informative YouTube posts regarding confidence and belief.
The human mind magnifies the bad. So, review the matches you were clutch under pressure versus those you gifted away.
Focus on what could go right versus what could go wrong.
Remember: Where your focus goes, energy flows.”
If you’re going to have an attitude, make it gratitude.

Changing inner belief begins with these ten simple reminders.

The Argumentative Athlete Tennis

Posted on March 16, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

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The Argumentative Athlete

For most teens, argumentativeness is more a reflex than an angry choice. Typically, high-performance athletes believe their knowledge of their sport exceeds their parent’s knowledge. Hence, giving them a perceived advantage over their parents. Turning damaging arguments into healthy disagreements is an emotional strategy. The lesson learned is that everyone can get their concerns heard and considered. Parents can find these arguments puzzling. You’ll help athletes regulate their emotions and solve problems by teaching them how to respond better.

Solution: Nurture the ability to postpone and censor their responses to advice. This key self-awareness trait will serve your athletes well on and off the tennis courts. Here are some tricks to get them started:

Digest the substance of the request.
Recognize when emotions are running the show.
Take a break.
Avoid criticizing before responding.
Set the ego aside and choose your battles.
Formulate evidence before stating your case.
Offer solutions versus pointing out flaws.
Disallow the blame game.
Confront the subverting of the conversation.

Remember, even though your athlete’s tennis skills are mature, their emotional regulating skills are likely still under development.

Tennis Mind Set Matters 2

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Frank Giampaolo in The Psychology of Tennis Parenting

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Decisions Not Situations

Mark is a very athletic junior from Florida. He has a wicked serve and a pre-stretch, compact forehand reminiscent of Agassi, but he performed poorly in matches. Through video analysis, I determined it was clear that Mark’s match decisions were the cause of his match failures. Here’s what I found charting his match.

Mark’s mechanics were reasonably solid, but his reckless shot selection caused the lion’s share of his unforced errors. Mark won 68% of the points that he played inside the court. Unfortunately, he played most of the match from 10 feet behind the baseline. From the backcourt, Mark won 36% of those points. His chosen court position wasn’t exposing his strengths.

In the first set, Mark allowed fear to control his mind during mega points, abandoning his strengths and pushing to be careful. He choked after building a comfortable lead due to his lapses in concentration. After dropping the lead in set one and losing the set, Mark started set two in a destructive mindset, racing through points. His self-doubt and negative self-talk were on full display. While he occasionally played brilliant pro-level tennis, his lack of mental and emotional training was running rapid.

Mark’s hardware skills were good, but his software skills needed development. His decision-making skills applied between-point and during changeover routines were non-existent. Every choice an athlete makes will either push him toward their goals or pull them away from them. These choices are part of the athlete’s software components.

Solution: The best way for Mark to improve his results is to shift his focus to new software development. Strategically Mark would be wise to use his strengths more often, especially on big points. Mark hit approximately 50% forehands and 50% backhands. A 75%/25% ratio would be beneficial. Also, from the tactical side, Mark should be attempting 70% of his first serves with his huge kick serve instead of the flat bomb that rarely hits its mark. Emotionally, between points, Mark needs to keep unwanted, contaminating thoughts out of his mind by keeping his mind filled with his performance patterns of play. Mark’s outcome wants trumped his performance needs, as seen in his lack of routines and rituals.

For Mark, I recommended that he fill his mind with solutions rather than a laundry list of problems. Being solution-oriented is the mindset that matters in competition.