Isn’t Being Mentally Tough Hard? Yes!

posted on: January 27, 2014
author: Brian Lomax, Ed.D.

Let’s face it – being mentally tough in competition is difficult and one of the reasons for that are the many apparent contradictions as to what to do and what to focus on in a given moment.  There are no black and white answers that tell you to focus on just this one thing or do this one thing and you’ll be fine.  There is a lot of gray involved and it’s difficult to find the right balance of what to do and what to focus on.

For example, in some of my recent blog posts, I’ve discussed the importance of understanding the long term goal of playing well and winning (hopefully), yet at the same time focusing on the moment and giving your best effort.  Too much focus on winning can hurt performance because it might induce fear and nerves.  Not enough focus on that overall goal could cause you to make bad decisions from moment to moment.  A balance between the two is required, and that takes practice and experimentation which will build experience.

Another apparent contradiction for tennis players is the notion that some points are more/less important than others.  While that is true, the message is not that you should play “less” important points with less effort than other points.  You always want to give your best effort on every point, but the key is to manage your reaction once the point is over so that you don’t take yourself out of the match.  In sports like tennis and volleyball, you almost always have a chance to recover from a lost point, but you need to bring your best game to each one when the next point is in front of you.

The key to dealing with these contradictions is to first be aware that they exist.  There are nuances and gray areas to the mental game, and that’s ok.  Accept it.  Many athletes don’t recognize this and therefore, they under-perform when the pressure mounts.  They may learn this concept over time through experience or they may never learn it at all.  One of the first steps for you to become a great competitor is to realize that this isn’t easy and it’s going to take some dedicated practice to learn to compete better.

Next, you’ll have to specifically train these skills with a goal of making yourself an extremely calm and highly rational competitor who makes great decisions all the time.  Because these are new skills, it will be difficult and exhausting at first.  You’ll be putting a lot of mental energy into this process and you probably won’t get into the zone while you’re playing.  But once you are able to reconcile these apparent contradictions through deliberate practice and experience, you’ll establish patterns of thought that will no longer need to be consciously called under pressure.  They will become instinctual to your performance and part of your identity as a competitor.  And then you will be more able to get into the zone because you will have quieted your mind and let your new patterns of thought go on auto-pilot.

If you’d like to talk more about this type of training, I’d love to hear from you.  Feel free to leave a comment below or email me at brian@performancextra.com.