How to Make Good Decisions On the Court

Welcome to the Tennis Psychology Podcast with your host, Dr. Patrick Cohn. Dr. Cohn is a mental Game of Tennis expert. Do you want to improve your mental toughness for tennis? Then join us on the Tennis Psychology Podcast sessions with Doc.

Welcome to session number 68 of the Tennis Psychology Podcast. Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn, and in today's session, I help an athlete who's having trouble with his shot selection, and I think he's overthinking the process.

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Well, when I hear an athlete tell me they don't make good decisions in competition, that often tells me that there's some indecision that you may have. And indecision can be borne out of several factors when it comes to, you know, playing a tennis match. One thing is you're not confident in some of the shots that you may play, and it leads you some indecision. Should I go down the line? Should I go across court? Should I run around it and hit my forehand? So if you have a little bit of problems with confidence, it's going to affect that indecision. And I think lack of trust. Some athletes that have lack of trust sometimes can be more indecisive as well where they start overthinking the shot. What's the best option here? It almost has to be a reaction, not a situation where you're trying to think, where's the next target? What's the next shot? What's the best choice here? Given this situation? You really don't have time to be able to think that much during a tennis match. So I would say your indecision is probably born out of overthinking it altogether rather than being able to be more reactive in that situation. So here's what you need to do. First of all, you need to think about what is your game plan. And your game plan needs to be based upon your strengths. For example, so let's say you're a serve and volley. Obviously, that's going to dictate what you do in the match, and that's going to be your strengths. So you want to think of all the scenarios in your mind. And really, once you have that game plan, you want to see yourself performing effortlessly or freely with that game plan. In other words, reacting to the ball rather than overthinking the shots, Should I take the volley down the line? Should I take it hard cross court? Instead of overthinking, you need to be able to look at where the open space is, where your opponent is or opponents if you're playing doubles, and be able to just simply react in that situation to the open court. So maybe you set it up in your mind several scenarios where you're going to be volleying or several series. Maybe you're a baseline player where you're going to be rallying from the baseline and you want to think about where is the open court going to be in what situations, and to be able to set up the conditions for you to react rather than overthink. And when I say react, I mean it has to be just an automatic, instinctive play on your part rather than, okay, what should I do with this next shot? Just not enough time because you're running to the ball, you're running to get set up, you're taking your stroke. There's really not enough time to think about it. All I want you to do is find the open space, think about where your target is, and then confidently and with trust and with decisiveness, hit that particular shot. Okay, thanks for the question, and good luck with your game. Foreign.

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