Does Internal Chatter Disrupt Your Focus?

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Do you or your tennis players feel like you have too much internal chatter going on while you play points and this becomes distracting? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn with the Tennis Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I'm going to help a tennis player that can't really focus on the next point because of this internal chatter.

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Here's what Ed had to say. He said, I can't stop the internal chatter, and as a result, don't stay focused on the ball. I look away from the ball just before contact. Then I went on and asked Ed, well, what's the chatter all about? And Ed said, well, I find myself talking about what I should have done on the last point and what I need to do on the next point. And then I'm not ready for the next point. Okay, so this is a common problem for tennis players in that they're overthinking what just happened to them in the prior point. And I call that dwelling. And certainly then overanalyzing what you need to do on the next point isn't going to help you perform to your peak potential either. So this is really a situation of, you call it this internal chatter, negative chatter, whatever it may be, it certainly can be too much. We can say for certain that you're probably overthinking your strategy or overthinking your shots, looking away from the ball just before contact. I'm not sure what's going on there with that. You certainly want to track the ball into the racket. That could be a result of something else. Maybe you're getting a little ahead of yourself and wanting to see where you're hitting the ball to and see if it's going there. In other words, there's a little bit of anxiety about wanting to hit the ball to the target that you've selected, and thus you look up quickly because you want to track the ball. I see the same issue that happens in golf as well. So let's talk about the internal chatter. Let's get back. What can you do to reduce that excessive internal chatter? Number one is when you step on the court, you need to have a clear strategy or tactics of what you're trying to do with your opponent. Most players will figure that out after the five minute warm up. Get an idea where the strengths and weaknesses of their player are or their opponent is, and then figure out how they're going to use their strengths to their advantage. Secondly, after the point is done, you can spend maybe five seconds thinking about the last point, but once you turn around to face the court for the next point, you have to let go of that last point because completely what you're doing is kind of overanalyzing your strategy, what you did in the past, and trying to figure out something for the future. And so you're probably doing a lot of what I call searching and changing out there, when in reality, you just need to let go of that last point, process it, spend five seconds on it, move on. As for the next point, you have an idea in your head of what you want to do on the next point before happens, and you can do a quick visualization in your head to get ready for that next point. Once you're in the point, keep it really, really simple in terms of what you're trying to do. Now, for some players, it is simple. They're focused on tactics and targets, as I call it. So try to stay focused on your tactics and try to stay focused on the targets. And you certainly don't want to think too much about how you're stroking it. That should come from your practice and the repetition that you have in practice. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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