"[Tennis] is played mainly on a five-and-a-half inch course - the space between your ears." Bobby Jones, legendary golfer [Quote adapted for tennis]
Every sport - indeed every business, career, school track and life path - carries a mental component. Overthinking or mis-thinking can lead to under-performance and even failure.
We've all been told often that these mental states help - remaining cool, calm and deliberate; staying in "the present"; and focusing only the next topic or next point at hand.
Mental coaches have even offered practical tips to help develop these states, and push out our continuous internal dialogue and stream of thoughts.
Among these: Focus on your breathing, count off even numbers, think about your feet touching and feeling the ground.
Best results, they say, are achieved by NOT focusing on results.
So what do we do?
Let's look at GOLF.
Maybe it can teach us something about tennis and life.
First, we observe that the big key to winning in golf appears to be consistency - meaning avoiding mistakes and errors.
And the big key to that seems to be good and early preparation.
And that means focusing on the process of preparation.
"Process" over "results" is what your mind must be drawn to for better winning margins.
- *Accept that you and everyone will make some errors.
- *Focus on the process of your pre-shot preparation routine. (In tennis, that's early and smooth take-back of the racket.)
- *See and feel your shot though visualization.
- *Hold a single thought as you strike the ball on any shot: either ball contact, spin, tempo, balance, target, trajectory and so on.
- *When you make a mistake or are frustrated, just deliberately slow down, forgive yourself and reset.
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