How To Help A Tennis Perfectionist

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Are you a tennis coach that has players who unravel quickly when they make mistakes or mishit shots and then the practice is shot and it becomes dysfunctional? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn. In today's session, I answer a question from Coach Fabian about how to identify perfectionist players and how to help this.

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Here's the question that I received from Coach Fabian. He said the perfectionist player. A lot of times the coach cannot identify this mental game challenge of the player. I don't know how to help players overcome this problem. How can coaches identify and help this type of player? Well, identifying this type of player, Coach Fabian, is the easy part. It's the player that's highly dedicated, highly motivated, has high goals, often is very competitive and likes to win. That's the good news. The bad news is this type of player often has very high expectations, can become easily frustrated, is usually influenced by fear of failure, worrying about what others think, and can have their self esteem or their ego tied into their sports performance, just to mention the big ones of the perfectionist. So if you have players in your academy or that you work with one on one, for example, in the lessons and they miss a couple of shots, you're working on a new stroke or something new in their strokes, they miss a couple of shots and then they immediately start to become frustrated and upset with themselves. They then it's a good idea that you're probably dealing with a perfectionist. They don't like to make mistakes, they like to perform perfectly and they have super high expectations of themselves both in the practice setting and when they perform. Now it wouldn't be so bad if they get upset and then they come right back to the lesson and they're able to work with you and stay focused. But what I often find is it becomes an impediment to you as a coach being able to coach this type of player because they're so focused on dwelling on the misses and dwelling on the fact that they're not perfect, the woe is me type mentality, that it starts to interfere with the coach athlete relationship and your ability to coach this particular type of player. So I've seen this a lot, and we work with a lot of perfectionist or perfectionist players at peak performance sports. So it is a common scenario that we see quite often. Okay, then, what do you do about it? Well, the answers aren't easy in this particular case because with perfectionists, they're doing a lot of things that undermine their both their confidence, their composure, and their performance. So, coach Fabian, if you have about eight hours, I can share with you the strategies that I use for helping perfectionists. But the bottom line is you have to start changing their expectations and their belief systems to be more accepting of themselves. First of all, they have to understand that it's not humanly possible to be perfect in sports. They want to hold on to that belief. You have to let them know that they only have to win two out of three points to win a match, that they can miss shots, that they're allowed to miss shots when they're working on things in practice. They have to have that mentality that it's okay to make mistakes and to miss shots, especially when they're working with you on the court. So that's the first thing is maybe ask them how many shots that they're capable of or that they're allowed to miss. Say out of 50 balls that you feed them, how many are they allowed to miss when you're working on something new? And if they say 10 out of 50, well, that's a starting point. If they say zero, then you got to change that belief system in that notion, especially as you know when you're making changes, the performance will often go backwards. They'll go down a notch on their performance and trust until that new change is repeated enough that it becomes more automatic and natural for them. So you have to explain that to them that when you make changes, the performance will go down, but in the hopes that you're going to take two steps forward for every step that you take back initially. In addition to that, you have to work on their expectations, because perfectionists often have very high expectations about their performance, such as I can't make any double faults, which we call a negative expectation. I can't miss easy short balls that are given to me. I can't hit the ball out. I have to hit every shot in the court. So you have to work with them by identifying some of those strict expectations they have for themselves and then changing up those expectations to things that are more manageable for themselves. Like, for example, I need to pick a target and type of server. I want to hit every time I step up to the service line. We call that a process goal or a more manageable objective that allows them, you know, the luxury and the comfort that they can do that every time, whereas you can't control whether you're going to, you know, sometimes miss a shot or have a double fault. I mean, it just happens. All right, thanks for the question, and good luck with your players.

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