Dealing With Rough Patches In Tennis And Life

I’m an avid competition level tennis player, but I’m going through a rough patch in tennis at the moment.

I’m 29 going on for 30 and there are times when I really love this game, but other times which make me hate it, or rather hate myself when I’m on the court.

Any thoughts on this?

Rough patches are normal in everything we do in life. Could be tennis, business and other kinds of setbacks.

What interrupted my reading of your email is the word “hate myself“.

Take some quiet time and think about it where does this come from?

Because what happens in tennis is that we make mistakes, we miss so called “easy balls”, we have expectations and they might not happen.

All these “negative” events as we perceive them have different meanings for different people. It depends mostly on how you were brought up.

If an 8 year old child breaks a glass by accident, parents might say to him / her:
- it’s ok, things happens sometimes, let’s clean this mess
OR
- you stupid, clumsy brat, how can you do that?

This is how we learn how to treat ourselves when there are no parents.

And what adulthood allows is to recheck these old behaviour patterns and decide, whether we still want to use them or do we CHOOSE other ones (with more forgiveness) which at the end bring us a better outcome.

After all, we are all interested in a positive outcome - be a good tennis player, earn a good living and so on.

So we need to make a choice which type of behaviour or action we’ll use in response to some unwanted events that happen.

Related posts:

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Mental Tennis. 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.