Do You Get Frustrated When You Don't Master a Stroke Quickly?

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Hi. This is Dr. Patrick Cohn with the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Today I have a special guest. His name is Florian Meyer. He's a high performance tennis coach and he's the founder of onlinetennisinstruction.com he has an MBA in sports management and he spent several years in Florida coaching high level juniors as well as professional players. Now he's back in Germany coaching and operating his online tennis instruction program and developing programs for national juniors in Germany as well.

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Florian, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Patrick.

What I'd like to do is answer a couple of questions from our readers today. I'll start with the first one from Cassandra. Cassandra says during practice, this is a tennis parent. My daughter gets frustrated when she doesn't get things a hundred percent right. After two hours on the court. She was practicing her topspin recently, her serve, which is very difficult, the parent says, and she says with anything else, she is very persistent. However, she gets frustrated quickly when she can't get it right. And I think this is common. I see this a lot. Florian, with some of the more perfectionist type tennis players out there. What would you tell the parent? What would you tell her daughter?

Yeah, I think you really have to look at where that perfectionism comes from. Perfectionism obviously is very common with junior players and I think a big part of that is managing your expectations. Now what happens a lot, I think, is players tend to measure themselves against their absolute best form. So in Cassandra's case, she might measure her every serve she makes. She's gonna measure it against the best possible serve she's probably ever hit. And that course is going to lead to a lot of frustration. So I would kind of look at that and try to manage those expectations.

Absolutely. I do think it's expectation based with perfectionists. How about in that moment when you're giving a lesson and the athlete is so distraught, the player is so frustrated that you really can't get through to that player. It's almost like you want to sit the player down so that they can calm down and get it back together again. But for those tennis players, that can really blow the remaining part of the lesson because they're frustrated. How do you get them back?

Right. Well, as a coach, I really like to, you know, if we're working on the serve, I like and that happens. I like to just move on to something else and get their mind onto something else, get them to play some points or do something that they do well at and kind of let them catch their breath. And I found that that works really well. And then sometimes half an later, you can come back to that serve and go at it with a bit of a different approach and a new mindset.

So basically just switch it up, go work on something else that the player can have more success with.

Yes, do that first and then come back when the time is right, because at that moment you're really not going to make any progress when the player is already that frustrated.

And I think it's also important really to communicate with the player. I mean, she's 14 years old in this case, it's really vital to communicate with the player that, look, you know, you're going to get an hour lesson. You don't want to use 20 minutes of that hour. You want to be able to use all 60 minutes of that hour effectively. How do you get that notion over to, you know, a 14 year old about the quality of practice and being able to use that time effectively?

Well, that's a difficult question, I think. I think that, you know, has a lot to do, obviously about the attitude that the player has. So as a coach, I think your best bet is really trying to show that attitude and you can show the player that you care about every single minute of that practice and using it for that player. And hopefully that will rub off a little bit. But that really comes down to attitude, in my opinion.

How many young players do you work with? What's the percentage that fit this profile? The ones that get extremely frustrated when things aren't working for them, when they're trying to change something or work on a new stroke and they simply check out.

Percentage wise, I think depends on the age, obviously, a little bit. The percentage of players that are really perfectionists and tend to get too frustrated. I would say probably about 30%, something like that. It's a common problem, really.

Well, let's try to put a positive spin on it. For Cassandra, what's the positive spin about her daughter getting so upset with not being able to get this new serve?

Well, number one, perfectionists, they tend to master skills because they keep at it and she obviously seems to care about it. So that's really a good sign. In my opinion, I'd rather see someone being a bit more perfectionist than someone that doesn't seem to care. So now it's just a matter of managing that perfectionism so you don't get too frustrated and you can maximize your progress.

Yeah, great comment there. So Cassandra, if you're listening to the podcast, know that there's some advantages of that perfectionism. She obviously cares. She wants to improve. She's going to master that skill faster than someone else might. She's very dedicated. But then you have to be able to manage some of the downside that goes along with perfectionism. High expectations, getting easily frustrated, maybe what I call fragile confidence. And also maybe some issues with social approval and worrying about what others think, including what the coach thinks or including what her parents think. Great. Florian. Thanks for joining me today and answering the question from Cassandra.

Thanks for having me.

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