How Mental Training Will Get You to Your Next Level of Play

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Hi. This is Dr. Patrick Cohn with the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Today I have a special guest. Her name is Brenda Schultz McCarthy. She played on the WTA Tour from 1986 to 1999 and was ranked as high as number nine in singles and number seven in doubles. And currently she's the director of the camp at the ted's foundation with her husband, Brenda. Thanks for joining me today.

Thank you, Patrick. Yes, great to be here. Improve your mental game quickly by visiting sportspsychologytennis.com today and claim a free tennis psychology report titled Six Unforced Mental Game Errors Tennis Players Make Between Points.

So when did you realize you came out on tour really early, when you were 16, when did you realize that tennis was really a big part of it, once all the training is done, Right. That it's a big mental game?

Yes, I realized that probably. I mean, they told me the whole time, but I didn't understand that. They didn't explain it to me the right way, I feel. So since I was a little girl, Since I was 10, 11, I got very nervous, but I just was so strong. I was always strong, always had a big serve, big forehand, and I kind of hit the ball so hard that I could overcome that, that mental part till I got to a level. And that was at like 30 in the world. What's already really high, 30 in the world. Most people are happy with that, but obviously you always want to go higher and higher. And my goal was to be. To be number one in the world. And so at that point, at 30, I kind of got stuck. I was like five years, I was the same ranking and couldn't break through to that top 10. And the coach that I had at the time, Juan Nunes, he was saying, you need to see a psychologist. You need to see a psychologist. At that time, it wasn't so much sports psychologist, it was like psychologist. And to me, in my brain, that was like, there was something really wrong with me. And I'm from Holland, and people are very like, there's a Dutch word for it. I'm trying to think of the English word. But anyway, they. They're like, oh, you're good. You know, so. So I thought, I'm not crazy, right? And nobody explained it to me till my husband came along that it was just like working on the forehand, working on the back end for three, four hours a day. Then you do physical training for an hour a day. But there's things that you well know that you can do for the mental part. And I never broke it down like that. Now, of course, all my students, I explained it, I said, listen just this much. That's why they say it's 90% mental, not because it's 90% mental. You work on the other things 90% of the time. And on your brain, there's tricks also to not have you so nervous, and there's breathing methods and there's tapping methods, and there's all these things that you can do to be less nervous or to play the bigger points better.

What did you think you struggle with when you were at 30 in the world? What did you struggle with mentally? Was it the nerves? Was it playing big matches? Was it playing in the majors? What was the toughest part mentally for you then?

I think it was the money part. I grew up in a middle class family. The only way I was going to get tennis lessons was if they gave it to me for free. My parents, looking back, were fighting a lot about money to play tennis. Like, oh, you know, we've got to sell the car and we'll take the bus and we'll, you know, we'll make it happen somehow to have Brenda play tennis. And my sister, so my sister's five years older, was not as good as me, but still top in Holland at the time, but not in Holland. You had to be by the top four to be able for the federation to pay for it. If you're out of the top four, there was nothing paid. So my sister was like eight in Holland. So they actually had to pay a lot more for her than for me because on a young age, I would say 11 years old, the people thought that I was going to be good. And I got a lot of free things. I got sponsored by Adidas. But I always heard that money issue, like if we went for tournaments the first night we might have to sleep in the car till my mom would figure out a way to say, okay, we're gonna lift these people, take us in for the, for the couple days or there is like a nuns place that in the church, then they'll take us in. So she always, it was never more than one night. She always was very creative and found a way. But I think that was the reason why I had the biggest problem with the Grand Slams, because if you lose the first round in Grand Slam is $5,000 now it's in Australian Open this year, it's $100,000 losing first round. So if you have the other tournaments, you win the tournament, you make the same as they're winning one round. So from a young age, I feel like it wasn't so much the points, it wasn't so much the ranking either, that the ranking helped to make more money. But I think in the Grand Slams, I looked at the money and it was awful. But that's, I think, in the background now. You know, at that moment, I didn't realize it, but now that I study the mental part so much more, I think in the background of my brain, I was like, oh, man, if I win the first round, you know, my parents can buy a car or something. I mean, it's just, it was playing, and I think that got me tight and that made me not play well in the Grand Slams.

Wow. Interesting story. So what do you think today with kids? I mean, is it different today with the kids that you work with at Ted's, for example, do you think, like, we see a lot of perfectionists? For example, we work with a ton of perfectionists at peak performance sports here. Do you. What are the biggest challenges you see today when it comes to the mental game and juniors coming up? Is it different than when you were a junior?

No. In certain situations, there's cases that are similar to me, for example, with my niece, she made it to. When she got to me, she was 19. She decided not to play in college. She wanted to make it on the tour. Like her aunt and her parents didn't make the money. They're both tennis teachers. And it's sad that that's not a job that you can afford to travel around the world and play all those tournaments. So I was kind of helping her out at the time. I was traveling, training her for free. I was getting her to tournaments. And she always felt that pressure of the money. She's like, no, I really have to make it now. Or her sister would be saying, you really have to start winning some tournaments, otherwise you're not making any money. And it was always about the money. But I get other students that money is not a problem at all. And like you said, they're very much perfectionist. And they get A's only as sounds like some of the students that I have in school, and they think that because they work hard on the tennis court and they do everything in their brain to have an A, and then suddenly they don't have an A, because in sports, it's not that simple. It's not like I do my homework and I listen to the coach and I do everything, and now I get an A. So I see a lot of that. It's this really smart people in life, in school, and then they get all tangled up when they miss a forehand. So.

As you know, it's way beyond just your training, your work ethic. As you know, you could have the best work ethic and training and you could train eight hours a day. But really that mental part of the game is really going to come into play when you're playing in matches, right? So what do you think separates that top 50 player from that top five player? I mean, you were really close there at the height of your career. But today or back then, what are the mental skills that the. What is it that those players have beyond the work ethic, beyond the talent that helps them get to the five in the world?

What I have found is that let's say the 5 or the 10, it's very close. Like any given matches, you know, like if I would have won one match at the time, I would have been four in the world. So it's give or take, let's say the top 10. Because there's so many people that play tennis, right, that are trying to get there. You can even say the top hundred. But top ten is very special. And most of the top ten players will stay there for about ten years. So what's interesting, you know, like an anirotic of an adult or Federer or Djokovic, they get to the top 10 and then they stay there for 10 years. So that means those other kids that are trying to get there for 10 years are not getting there because this group is kind of there. So I believe that a lot of those people, and like I said, I was so strong physically that everybody said, Brandon should be number one in the world. And I probably should have if my mental. And the mental part, what I see, and I saw it with my niece because I was so close to her when we would go skiing. And this is just an example. And there's a gondola, right? She would let everybody go first and maybe miss the gondola at the end, but she wanted to make sure that everybody was in the gondola. I was very similar. I wanted to make everybody happy. And in tennis, when you playing and you have to beat somebody, you're not making that Percy happy. You actually make him very mad.

Yes. I call it the too nice syndrome. You're too nice.

Yeah. And that was a lot of times they would say about me and I think my husband. And not that he's not a nice guy to me, we've been married for 25 years. But they probably don't see him as a nice guy. He just, he. He had that part that I was missing. And I think when we met, he would say things to bring that, that fight in me that I didn't have naturally. I think I might have had it when I was a little kid, maybe somewhere by 10, I think I lost it because I wanted friends. And I felt like if I beat everybody and I was beating people, oh, and, oh, you know, 60606161 and nobody liked me and everybody liked my sister. And again, when I look back from the, from the deeper part, from the stuff that we cannot touch and feel, you know, the background in your brain that might have played a role that I was like, if I beat everybody so bad, I have no friends, right? And I. What I see from a Monica Sellers or from a Steffi Groff, if for. It's either the parents like Monica, super nice girl, but her dad was more like. My husband was more like a shop. And Steffi Groff, Steffi, super sweet. She was like, brenda, this is Stephanie. Do you want to practice? You know, I don't think there was anything with her but the dad. And I never had anybody. I had a coach with me from the Federation, but he had to take care of five other girls. And I think the coach later that I had was super nice too. He wanted to please everybody too. So he didn't, he didn't get that out of me. I think I have one mixed level partner that got it out of me and made me hit aces because he said, like, you know, certain things. And with Sean, the first thing when we met and I. The first time that I beat somebody in the top 10 happened to be Sanchez Ficario. And she was 2 in the world. And we had to play each other in the quarterfinals at the Miami Open. We just met. We might have met like three weeks before in Florida in Boca Raton. And he watched the first three matches I played. And he was a stockbroker at the time for Dean Withers. So he had to go back to work on that Monday when I had to play the quarters against Arancha. So he said, who do you have to play tomorrow? I said, aranche Sanchez. She says she's 2 in the world. I played her about 10 times, lost 10 times. Very unlucky. She's always lucky. She always guesses Right. So I give him all his excuses right now, and he goes, it doesn't sound like you're gonna be there tomorrow. And that's Sean in a nutshell, you know? But on the other hand, what he does, too, and what other people might have not done for me is find a solution. So at that point, I'm like, you know, you son of a gun. Because in a way, I knew he was right. But he went home and he went to work, and I went back to my hotel room, and I start thinking about it, and I'm like, he's right, you know, I mean, I don't believe I'm going to beat her because I'm saying all these things, why I'm not going to beat her. So I called him up, and I was calmed down at this time, and I said, sean, I get it. You're right. But how am I going to beat her? How am I suddenly going to believe overnight? And he's like, now, I listened to this guy, Anthony Robbins, and he said, if you Write it down 10 times in blue ink, for some reason it was blue ink. He said, you. It will help. I'm not gonna guarantee you that you. You know, that you. That it's gonna work, but it's. It's a trick that he says, you believe more. So I'm sitting there that night, I'm like, okay, so I wrote it down not 10 times, probably 50 times. And I'm gonna move my feet, and I'm gonna beat Archa. I'm gonna beat that anchor and everything. And the next day, we have to play. And the first set, I lost 6:1. So I can only imagine what went on in my brain, you know, like, this is not really working, right? So the second set, we get to a tiebreaker, and it's six all. And I get down six two in the tiebreaker. So that means that Alonso has four match points at this point. And she's. People know tennis. She's kind of like a back wall. It's like a Michael Chang at the time. Everything comes back. So it's very hard to win six points in a row against the number two player in the world that kind of is a player like that. And I have a poster that they took a picture in that tiebreaker. And whenever. Now, whenever I had the tennis camp or whenever my boys. I have two boys right now, I show them that poster, and I said, don't piss me off, because that poster is just like, there's so much fight in that picture. Like, come on, you know, you can see the. Some frustration, but also some. Something came up in me that says, I'm not gonna lose this time. It's just not gonna happen. And I won that tiebreaker eight, six, won the third set, six, three. And that was. Like I said, it was the first time that I beat somebody that was. That was a top 10 player in the world. In this case, he was number two in the world. But it was that elite group that I overcame. And. And from then that moment on, just a year later, I was. I was like 12 in the world. And then the only thing that stopped that train was my mom passing away two weeks before we got married. And that was a whole other. Other thing that we had to. To get to mentally when I think I did pretty good doing the mental part for the tennis. And I still believe if my mom wouldn't have passed away, I probably would have rolled into that top 10 right then and there. But then I lost six first rounds in a row and didn't really want to be on the tennis court. In a way, I wasn't doing it for her, but I felt like she did so much for me to get there, and I wanted her to be there at that moment to share those moments, you know? And it was really hard for me. And I didn't grow up believing in God or anything bigger, so it was really hard for me. And then I called Sean and I said, sean, either you come to me or I come to you, because I cannot live in this hotel rooms by myself. It's just not working out. And he was a stockbroker at the time, and he said, listen, I can always be a stockbroker, but you cannot always be a tennis player, especially on this level. So he said, I'll be there tomorrow. So he booked a flight to Paris, to the French Open. It happened. My mom passed away in. Right. Right when I had the year before. I had that breakthrough in the Miami Open, and I think it's in March, and she passed away, my dad's birthday. So like March 20th, something like that. So right before the Miami Open that I had to defend those points. She passed away, and she had an aneurysm. It was three days. It was over. I had to rush back home in order to make sure that I was there so I could still talk to her. And so Miami Open that I got to the semis the year before fell off. Then all the clay courts, the Berlin, the German Open, I got to the finals that year, those points fell off. So I went back to like 18 in the world. And that doesn't sound too bad, going from 12 to 18. But in tennis, it's that whole momentum of being seated in the tournaments, it just all fell away in a matter of a couple months. And that's when Sean came. And again, he came to the rescue. He was. He grew up believing in God. He was. Grew up believing, you know, in something bigger. So he was like, your mom is still there. She didn't do all those things she did for you to. You now throw it away. You know, to not fight, to not be there. I mean, she's still watching. She's still seeing it. Come on, we got to do this. And in the French Open, I managed to lose, to win the first round, but then the second round, I had to play against Uncle Huber, who was fourth. Fourth in the world at the time, and tough match on center court, but couldn't pull it through. But at least I won the first round, so that was a step in the right direction. And then.

What got you over the hump, do you think? It's that you stop needing that respect, Wanting to be liked by your fellow players. Like, you let go of that. That too nice syndrome. And. And just decided I was going to just. It's okay to beat someone on the court, but yet still be liked by others.

Yeah. And I think what helped, too. And that's again, what I found by those top 10 players. They all had a person in their corner that was very close to them. And I never really had that, even that, you know, I had a coach, but it wasn't in my corner. I was more with the girls from. From the federation, the five girls that I had to travel with. And the coach kind of did his thing. He went out with other coaches. He was, you know, and if you saw Sabatini, she was with her brother, her mom, her dad. The whole family traveled with her.

Having that support group.

They had that support group all the time. And I didn't. And with Sean, suddenly I had this guy. He's 6 5. I'm 6 3. I never liked being tall. And now I suddenly have this guy in my corner. I didn't have to look for somebody to have dinner with. I didn't. So I think, like, the support group. The support group was missing. When I grew up, I had the support group, my mom and my sister. And then when I broke out of that, because I was dirty in the world, so they. My sister couldn't catch up, so she got married and became a tennis teacher. And my mom, we didn't have the money yet for me to take a coach and my mom. So I was just with the federation, traveling around the world with some girls. And so, yeah, I never had that close support group. And what I could see in those top 10 people, they all had a very close support group for them. So they never felt that they needed that friend or something.

And it sounds like that's what you're doing today with your. The Camp and ted's foundation, where you're helping people in many different countries with, you would say, an eclectic approach to health and performance. How can people find out more about your Teds Foundation?

It's tedsfoundation.org so www.that's T E D S from what you think, eat do, serve yourself and others. Foundation.org and there on the website, there's a lot of things described. And like you said, you know, I found out all these things during my career. And it started more with the mental part that we had to overcome that hurdle. And then it was a loss of a loved one. I would say we had to overcome that. And then it was an injury that we realized later because we were already eating everything organic, everything clean. We listened to this gentleman speak, and he was like, if you stay away from this 10 Foods. So it was hydinated oil, margarine, got all this fake sugar. So we really got home after listening to this gentleman, and there was nothing in our closets or refrigerator. We had to throw everything out. So at the time that I heard my back, you know, we were doing the food good. We learned yoga, that it was important to do that. Then my husband started calling it mobility drills. It was all kind of qigong and things like that. Then we learned how to breathe, right? That breathing was so important. But there was still one piece of the puzzle missing because my back was hurting. And at 30, I had that back surgery. So at 36, Sean went to the seminar. Actually, at 35, he went to the seminar in Orlando. And the guy was explaining about muscle testing, about energy healing. And then he somehow he realized my husband again went straight to him in breakfast and said, sir, you know, my wife has this issue. And he said that anything emotional happened in her life, that could have been the problem. And he said, now, you know, her mom passed away two weeks before our wedding. And he said, that's it. That's what we have to attack if we can release that stress. She probably never got to grief because she had to play, you know, three weeks later in the French Open in front of 20,000 people. So I could never really. I fought through it, and I got over that hurdle, but my body still took a beating by just being, you know, sad. And so you're teaching people this system.

That, that you've developed through your career about health, fitness, nutrition, and the mental side, too. The mental health. Is that kind of that a good synopsis?

Yeah, that's the package. Yeah, that's, that's the whole. So circle.

Awesome. Great. Well, I've been talking with Brenda Schultz McCarthy, former WTA player and director of the Camp at Ted's Foundation. Thanks for your stories. It's been great talking to you.

Thank you, Patrick. That's great. Thanks for listening to the Tennis psychology podcast with Dr. Patrick Cohn. Discover the secrets to superior tennis confidence. Visit www.sportspsychologytennis.com for practical mental strategies to improve your mental game of tennis.