Coping with Perfectionism on Court

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Are you committed to improving your mental game in tennis? However, your perfectionism is getting in the way on the tennis court. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In this episode, I'm going to help a tennis player who does all the right things mentally but is still in her way with perfectionism and over control. You're listening to the Tennis Psychology Podcast.

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Here'S the question that I received from Stacy. Stacy said, I'm very committed and I work hard on my mental game and I think about goal setting, focus playing one point at a time using positive self talk. However, what if you have perfectionism and thus have confidence and self doubt issues? How do you manage not to try so hard in matches and that causes you to tighten up and make mistakes as a result? How do you just get lost in the match and enjoy the game without thinking about consequences? Stacy, thanks for your question. There's a lot of stuff there and I think you mentioned many of the challenges that perfectionists face. I want to commend you for really paying attention to the mental game and trying to work on goal setting and also work on confidence strategies like self talk. That's really excellent that you're paying attention to that. Often with perfectionists they struggle on the court with mistakes because of the high expectations they have. So the profile of perfectionist is very high expectations, easily frustrated with mistakes, very self critical and judgmental of their game. When they're playing they worry about what others think about their game. They often have fear of failure which causes them to tighten up as well. And post match they can be very critical and not gain any confidence from the match, win or lose. So there's many challenges that go with the perfectionism. So goal setting and positive self talk is great, but you have to learn how to manage the downside of the perfectionism and that's what we do at peak performance sports. We work with a ton of perfectionists from all different sports helping them manage. Now it's not all bad. It's probably the reason why you're good and you can learn new strokes quickly and you're very goal oriented and dedicated. So there's some real benefit to having some of those perfectionist qualities that you do. However, like we've talked about, when you go to the court, it can all unravel so well. How do you have more fun out there and how do you play better as a perfectionist? Let's start with the notion that you have to manage those high expectations. And what do I mean by that? Perfectionists tend to have what I call the triple whammy. The triple whammy is my strokes have to feel clean, the ball has to do what I want it to do. In other words, it has to look good. And then finally the ball has to go to the target. Well, that's a triple whammy. Because if one of those is off, guess what you're going to do. Why am I playing so cruddy? You can get very self critical quickly. So what do we do about that aspect? To start with, you have to play what I call functional tennis. You ever been off balance, reaching for a shot, you got it back in the court and you were able to win the point? Well, that's functional tennis. It didn't feel good, didn't look good, but you got it done. You got the ball in the court and your opponent wasn't able to return it to you. Well, you won the point. And that's the idea of tennis. You're supposed to win the point. Perfectionists get too trapped up into how you should win the point, how it should look and feel, like I said earlier. So if you want to have more fun out there, you have to let go of the expectations and be kinder to yourself. Here's a tip that I give to my personal coaching students that really, really helps. You have to stop judging every stroke and every point because that judgment leads nowhere. What I mean by that is you'll probably deem that you're not playing up to expectations. So I've worked with many perfectionists, as I stated, and they tend to think about that last stroke and how clean it was. You just can't play that way. As you talk about get into the flow and having fun, you have to stop judging what you just did because most of the time with perfectionists you tend to be very hard on yourself and very critical. So being able to play functional tennis and not judging every single stroke or every single point or every single game is going to go a long way for you. Functional tennis is the antithesis to trying to play perfect tennis out there. In addition, after the match, I want to make sure that you write down two or three things that you did well, because what a perfectionist tend to do after the match while this game was awful or that serve was awful or I missed shots here, they tend to only focus on the mistakes and then your confidence is going to suffer going into your next match. So try to be your own best coach, also called be your own best friend after the match and don't be so critical of your skills. Use that match as a learning opportunity or a launch pad to improve your game for the next match. All right, if you want help with your mental game, jump over to sportspsychologytennis.com I'll provide the link here for you and you can read more about our articles, our videos, and also our podcasts are posted there as well. And if you want that personal touch, we have one on one mental game coaching here at Peak Peak Performance Sports. All right, thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

Thank you for listening to the Tennis psychology podcast with Dr. Patrick Cohn. Discover the secrets to superior tennis confidence by visiting www.SportsPsychologyTennis.com for practical mental game strategies to improve your tennis game.