Psychological Aspects During a Tennis Game

When I play tennis, the passion takes over, I stop thinking, and I miss what I would not miss if I were calm. But how can you be calm and focused when you make three unforced errors in a row, when your ball touches the net and falls in your side of the court, when your opponent seems Superman ... and so on? The truth is that you can. In the same way we train our body to properly perform the swings, we can train the mind to manage emotions, to tell and see the right things, to give us an advantage over our opponent.

Our mind tells us things, predicts the future and reminds the past. All of this is against us so that, in addition to the opponent on the other side of the court, we have to handle our thoughts too.

It happens to all tennis players, because tennis is a very mental sport, where you have so much time to think and, usually, think about the wrong things.

It happens to all tennis players: however, the best ones know and use techniques to handle their thoughts. The main difference between the top 10 tennis players in the world and the following 500 is not the way they hit the ball: it consists in their ability to manage their mind, psychology, emotions, images, words and ideas that they create during the game.

The main points that help us understand how our brain works during a tennis game are:

• thoughts appear as images and words

• our brain is always working in order to meet our requirements

• the mind does not distinguish between what we imagine and what is real

From these three simple points, we understand that if after an error we say "I always miss this shot, I cannot play tennis today," our brain will try anything to confirm the statement. By saying one sentence, we have then compromised the whole game because our brain will try anything to make us lose. Imagine what happens when we continue to communicate to our mind negative thoughts!

The concept that our mind does not distinguish between what is real and what we imagine is really...