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The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s soon to be released Tennis Encyclopedia.
Tennis: The Mindful Approach
“In the long run, educating the body without educating the head and heart doesn’t truly help a competitor.”
In high-performance tennis, the ability to concentrate, remain self-aware, and bounce back from setbacks is invaluable. In this final chapter, we’ll explore how mindfulness enhances these vital aspects of your game, providing you with the mental toughness everyone talks about.
Improved Concentration
Concentration is the cornerstone of competitive excellence. The capacity to focus your attention throughout a single point for approximately 130 points (the average length of a match) is critical. Mindfulness exercises involve training your mind to focus on the here and now. Here’s how:
- Eliminating External Distractions: Your thoughts often follow your eyes. It’s wise to turn and walk back towards the back fence in between points with positive body language. Focus your eyes on your strings, eliminating the typical habit of being a spectator of other matches when you should be focusing on your battle.
- Eliminating Mental Noise: As your mindfulness practice deepens, you’ll find it easier to let go of mental clutter, such as doubts or worries about past mistakes or future outcomes. This clarity of thought leads you to more consistent performances.
Enhanced Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is your compass on the tennis court. Mindfulness encourages you to become more attuned to your thoughts and feelings. Following are five tools that surely will help:
- Emotional Intelligence: Through mindfulness, you develop the ability to recognize and understand your emotions as they arise. Self-awareness enables you to channel your emotions into productive energy and maintain your composure in challenging situations.
- Monitoring Emotions: You’ll find your triggers and unproductive habits by monitoring your emotional reactions. Being self-aware means looking deeper at your emotions, why you feel a certain way, and how your sentiments could turn into negative reactions.
- Focus: Correct decision-making is essential to being a top contender, but you can’t do that if you’re distracted. Train yourself to focus for long periods without getting sucked into the typical “unplug” found in competition.
- Coping Mechanisms: Unproductive coping skills nurtured in your younger years can prevent you from achieving massive goals. You can opt out of using them by becoming aware of the habit of automatic negative reactions.
- Responding Calmly: A calm response is a better choice than reacting emotionally. Confident self-awareness properly guides your response to situations or opponents who might set you off. The better you handle your responses, the better you are to avoid unnecessary conflict.
