Serena Williams lost a highly anticipated match with Justine Henin in straight sets 4-6, 3-6. Most of us were expecting a 3 set battle especially with both women in good form.

But something happened to Serena and she wasn’t able to play her best tennis. The real cause of not being able to play your best is usually the mental part of the game.

Photo by FFT

Let’s see if we can find some of the reasons for her mental letdown in her comments after the match…

Serena:

1. I don’t know. Just everything was going wrong. Usually, I don’t hit in the net, like I think I hit so many errors today. I hit in the net a lot.

Why do we hit in the net more? Because we aim low.

Why do we aim lower than usual? Because we try to force the game more than usual.

And why do we do that? Because we feel that with our usual game we cannot win. In other words, we are not confident about our game and we may be afraid of our opponent.

Of course Serena’s ego can never say that in public.

2. Q: It was kind of a subdued tone to the whole match, you know, kind of an almost slow, quiet feeling to it all. Was it the weight of the occasion? You never seemed to pop with energy or anything?

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, I can’t answer that.

It’s possible that Serena really doesn’t know the reason. But the reason that got her into her under-activated state is totally irrelevant. She needs to monitor her arousal state every few seconds or at least minutes and control it.

Maria Sharapova constantly makes small jumps on the spot to keep her activation at high state.

Serena Williams on the other hand maybe doesn’t like to do it artificially and prefers to go with her emotions. If she is on fire, that’s good. If she is not, she is a victim of her own mood swings.

3. Well, I don’t think I had a great practice. My routine was off. I’m very superstitious, and things weren’t right, so…

That’s not why I lost, though. I mean, I’ve got to get it in my mind that I’ve got to stop being so superstitious. But, you know, nothing really went right for me this morning, and it just continued on through the match.

Superstition can be a good and bad. We all know how believing in something gives us energy and positive approach to really achieve that goal. It also works the other way. If you don’t believe you can make it, you probably won’t.

It’s just a double-edged sword and you need to decide whether you want to keep it or let it go.

4. You know, I mean, I’m just a little more just — I was hitting a little off in practice, as well, today. Well, I mean, for me, off. I’m always trying to do everything perfect.

And then I just wanted different shots, and I just, you know, I just left my notebook in the locker room, so…

There needs to be a fine line when you are looking for perfection. Striving for perfection is necessary especially when you are playing best of the best tennis players. But you need to accept excellence as being good enough and seeing yourself as an excellent player.

Human beings are not perfect and cannot perform perfectly especially not in such a demanding ball game as tennis.

When you look for perfection you constantly notice errors that separate you from it. Eventually your mind is full of mistakes since that’s what you focus on.

And when your mind if full of mistakes, it WILL send out signals to your body to actually produce mistakes.

Serena made a lot of mistakes in her practice session and she probably thought that if she makes that many mistakes against Justine Henin, she has no chance. This is true, but in her mind she needs to let go of the mistakes and remember good shots.

She needs to store good shots in her mind and good shots will appear later in the match.

5. Q. Would you regard that this half of the draw is tougher?

Yeah, I think this half is always tougher. I’m always on the tougher half. So I mean, I think, you know, we had some good players on this half. We don’t I don’t really even know who is on the other half.

I’ve heard this comment so many times from many players: I ALWAYS have a tough draw, I ALWAYS play with top seeds, I ALWAYS have bad luck…

Our mind likes to generalize in blind itself from reality. It’s our job to use logic and make the mind our best ally and not our worst enemy.

It is of course impossible and illogical that in the long term you ALWAYS have a tougher draw.

6. No, I just didn’t have the practice that I generally would have liked. And I just felt like I was just, you know, trying to recover.

I’ve always had bad practices, though, before a match. Very rarely, actually, do I have a great practice. That wasn’t anything abnormal, to be honest with you.

The bad practices probably come from Serena’s approach to tennis and herself by demanding perfection. She was trained to that by her father who pushed her and Venus to their limits never being satisfied with their results.

This made the girls work harder and longer than most other players and thus they reached and incredible level of tennis.

It also made them negative and they are still too focused on the small mistakes that separate them from perfection and always will.

Whether this approach is the right one or a wrong one I leave up to you…

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• Djokovic Out, Federer, Monfils And Roddick Through
• 4 Reasons Why Junior Tennis Players Behave Badly

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 10:25 pm and is filed under French Open, Mental Tennis, Serena Williams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.