How Your Child Can Keep Their Lead In a Match

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Have any of your young tennis players been leading a match? And then it ended up losing the match badly? Hi, I'm Dr. Patrick Cohn with another episode of the Tennis Psychology Podcast. In today's session, I'll answer another question from a tennis parent. Syed asked me the following question. My 14 year old daughter lost her confidence after losing badly in a tennis match. She just played another match and she was up in the first set, 5:3 and then it became 5:5 and and she was up in the tiebreak 6:2 and eventually lost 10, 8 and in the second set she didn't fight and lost 6:2. What can I do to help give her her self confidence back?

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Well, this is an interesting question because my philosophy is you can't give your player self confidence. In other words, self confidence has to be earned by your player and has to be supported by good thinking and a good mindset. So certainly there's some things that you can do as a sports parent, as a tennis parent to help support your athlete's confidence. But here at peak performance sports, we really like to emphasize the self and self confidence. What that means is she has to have the belief in her ability in order to perform well. You can talk her into thinking she's great. You can't say words that are automatically going to instill confidence in her. As a matter of fact, I find it's actually counterproductive because athletes can often interpret those words of confidence as high expectations coming from parents. In other words, you might say, well, this is an easy draw. You should breeze right through to the finals. And then the player all of a sudden starts to think, wow, my parents or my parent expects me to win a lot of matches here. And that puts pressure, undue pressure on your tennis player. So in this case I don't want you to think about really how you can give her confidence back. Certainly winning helps confidence a lot, but I focus on other areas that you can help your athletes with. How many years has she been playing, for example, that has to flow. Confidence has to flow from that base level of experience that your player has. If she's been in the junior ranks for six, eight years. Well, that's a lot of time to base her confidence on and have that experience. So to me, player really shouldn't lose all their confidence on one or two matches. Confidence certainly goes up and down and there's ebbs and flow. But you want to think about getting your player on that steady train of confidence. The confidence I talk about in my workbook program Tennis Confidence Mental Toughness for tournament players@peaksports.com that steady train of confidence is going to really help her through those thin times when maybe she can't pull out that particular match. So it's really about getting your player on this stable, long term steady train of confidence. Rather than you trying to instill confidence because she had a particular loss. Don't look at it as you giving her confidence. Look at looking at her as earning confidence and thinking in a way that's going to help her feel the most confident and perform confidently. Thanks for your question and good luck with her game.

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