How to Simplify Your Mental Game During Matches

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. Hi. This is Dr. Patrick Cohn, back with session number 75. We've taken a couple months off of doing the Tennis Psychology sessions because we've been busy developing a new product and launching that new product called the Confident Sports Kid, part of the Confident Sports Kid series, based upon my popular CD series, the Confident Athlete. If you want more information about that, you can just Google the Confident Sports Kid and I'm sure you'll find it@peaksports.com okay, for today's session, I answer a question about a player that's confused about her mental game and what to focus on when she's playing matches. Here's her question.

I'm confused with my mental game. If I concentrate on breathing, I can't see the ball well. If I think about seeing the ball well, I forget about breathing. I can't do both and hit the ball well. What's wrong with my mental game? 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.

The challenge that you're having, I think, has to do with the coexistence of two different thoughts of what you're trying to do. Certainly you can have a couple of goals, what I would call process goals or mini goals that you're trying to accomplish, and then you could switch back and forth between these mini goals. But I think what's happening here is you're trying to do too much with your mental game at once. Let me talk a little bit about how the mind works in that the mind is a serial processor. Yes, it's a serial processor. What that means is you can focus on one thing at a time, such as seeing the ball or bending your knees or taking the ball early. When you're trying to focus on seeing the ball and breathing at the same time, those probably aren't coexisting. So the mind is serial in that it likes to focus on one thing at a time. It can do it very rapidly, though. However, you can't focus on both of those things at once. But it sounds like when you're seeing the ball, when you're trying to see the ball well, then the other task you're having trouble with, and that is breathing. And when you're breathing you're not seeing the ball well. My theory here, without talking to you, is that you're becoming so absorbed and so obsessed into seeing the ball well that it's becoming problematic for for you to continue to breathe. And likewise, when you're breathing, you're so absorbed and so focused on breathing correctly that you forget to see the ball. Now, I want both of those to be automated for you. In other words, to breathe properly is something that you should be working on in practice every day. And so when you get on the court, you really don't have to think about your breathing patterns or what you're doing with your breathing between points. It should already be there for you. Likewise, it's a great goal, I think, to see the ball well. When you go out and play, however, it's a focal point for you. What that means. It's a place to put your intensity. It's a place to put your focus. It's a place to think about what you want to do with your mental game. But that process should be automated as well. Being able to see the ball well comes from how you train your vision and what you're doing in that practice setting. So once again, same thing goes for seeing the ball well. You want to train yourself to see the ball well in practice so that it almost becomes automatic for you in competition, or that it does become automatic, that naturally you're just watching the ball, you're seeing the ball well. That's going to free you up to focus more on your strategy or your tactics for the point. Remember, you don't want to focus so much on the mental game that it becomes a distraction for you that you can't think about your next shot, where you're going to place your next shot, for example, or reacting to your opponent. The mental game is has to be at the point where it becomes automated for you as well, that you're doing the right rituals between the points, etc. And you're focusing on the right things during the points. But I would say primarily focus on those things during practice. Make them automatic in practice. When you get on the court, know that they're going to be there and go to your tactics, go to your strategy for the match. Thanks for the question and good luck with your game.

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