Developing Mental Strength

At a recent interview, Novak Djokovic stated that his focus is not a gift. It may seem like he is always in the state of flow but the mental strength Novak displays is “something that comes from work.” Novak has a process to keep his mind in the present moment. He defines mental strength as how quickly you bounce back from a mental or emotional distraction.

Everything we do is an extension of what takes places in our mind. The way you act and feel about yourself on the tennis court has nothing to do with your environment. It is influenced by your state of mind. If I stress myself out over something I can’t control, then my actions will reflect that anxiety. If I am distracted, you’ll see it in my wandering eyes. However, if my mind is focused on the now, then you’ll find me paying attention to my environment. I’ll be alert and aware without tension. Your level of presence comes from your state of mind.

That kind of focus exists within you. You can learn to find flow and tune-in to your environment with minimal mental distractions. And by mental distractions I mean spending energy on thoughts while you’re trying to do something in the moment. The second you think of something, you’re out of the flow state. During a tennis rally, this could mean you lose track of the ball for a split second. The likely result is you hit it out of your strike zone and miss.

So I want to bring your attention back to Novak’s statement: that his focus is not a gift. The idea that geniuses are born and not made has become a clear myth. If a person worked on it and learned how to stay in the zone during pressure moments, then you can too. Richard Feynman, a noble prize winning physicists, also asserted that he just worked on learning his skills that led him to become a phenomenal lecturer and physicist.

You can learn the tools to develop mental strength as well as anybody else.

Mental Strength

Everything we do is an extension of what takes place in our minds. If I stress myself out over something I can’t control, then my actions will reflect that anxiety. If I am distracted, you’ll see it in my wandering eyes. If my mind is focused on the now, then you’ll find me paying attention. Your presence starts with your state of mind. This type of focus that athletes strive for is called flow.

Flow is attainable and will make you mentally strong. You can learn to find flow and tune in to your environment with minimal mental distractions. By mental distractions, I mean thinking. The second you think of something, you’re out of the flow state. During a tennis rally, losing flow could mean you lose track of the ball for a split second and hit it out of your strike zone.

In a recent interview, Novak Djokovic stated that his focus is not a gift. It may seem like he is always in a state of flow, but the mental strength Novak displays is “something that comes from work.” Novak has a process to keep his mind in the present moment. He even defines mental strength as how quickly a player can bounce back from a mental or emotional distraction.

To develop mental strength, teach yourself mindfulness and equanimity. Mindfulness means you are paying attention to the time and space of the present moment. Your mind is not thinking about anything. There is no past or future. You exist only in the now. It’s important because tennis is a sport of constant motion. You, the ball, and your opponent never stay put. That means you should pay attention to the ball’s motion and be aware of your and your opponent’s positioning on the court. That requires complete mental resources at the present moment.

Equanimity is a state of no judgment in the face of your present moment. Even if there is a chaotic moment, you see it for what it is without putting labels. Mindfulness alone won’t cut it. You need awareness and the ability to see reality without distortions. That’s where equanimity fits in. Otherwise, you might get a shot that might be very deep, and you could judge it as “a difficult shot” instead of simply seeing the shot and adapting to it.

Style Without A Style

My favorite style of tennis is to play without style. The idea is to play points without sticking to a predetermined plan. We can call this intuitive tennis. This concept is not novel, as it has been presented in Timothy Gallway’s 'The Inner Game of Tennis.' However, I got inspired to explore tennis without attaching myself to a particular style before reading Gallway’s book.

I came across Bruce Lee’s work on martial arts. He developed Jeet Kune Do, which is a martial art without a style. Lee’s logic stems from the fact that you’re dealing with reality (i.e., physics), and it doesn’t set any preferences for a style. A punch is a punch, a kick is a kick. That idea can be applied to tennis. If you see an opening, you take your shot. Need to play defense? You do it.

I was motivated to play in this manner during college tennis. We played different teams, and I often played someone I hadn’t seen before. I rarely knew what my opponent’s strengths and weaknesses were until a few games into the match. Without knowing your opponent, it’s difficult to plan for anything. Typically, I would stress myself over how I should play. In setting expectations, I made myself rigid and felt more stressed when the match wouldn’t go as planned. It’s slightly different when you know your opponent; you can visualize playing your strengths against their weaknesses and neutralizing them when they attack. That kind of visual training helps you get ready. Still, being ready for anything is the best approach.

Reading Bruce Lee’s philosophy on martial arts, I began incorporating bits of that into my tennis mindset. I spent months contemplating what it means to have no attachment to a style. His philosophy was based on Tao and Zen. So, mindfulness training became an essential component of getting rid of attachments to any particular style. I eventually learned that the best preparation is to keep an open mind and be ready for anything.

If you want to try this out, you will need to prepare your mind to let go of any thoughts and concerns about controlling outcomes. People lose their intuition when they are drowning in thoughts about outcomes. So, learn to meditate and remain in that state throughout the day. You observe what is going on without making any judgments on what you see. Your mental state will be ready and adaptive.

Communication Makes the Difference

The way a coach communicates and acts toward their student can make a life-changing difference in how the student thinks and responds to challenges. A coach can help instill a strong belief in oneself or plant seeds of doubt. The best form of communication is supportive of the person, not just what they do.

Having trained under German, Russian, French, and American tennis schools, I had the privilege of experiencing the effects of different communication approaches, including extremely negative and positive coaching. While both extremes can incite quick reactions that may appear as successful results, neither always positive nor negative communication approaches work in the long run.

I have witnessed some coaches drag their students down with years of daily negative attacks. Negative comments are discouraging and traumatic, stripping away the student’s belief in their abilities. For example, if a coach tells you that you are doing a bad job, are a horrible player, and not worthy of their time every time you miss a shot, it would likely put you down. With that kind of negativity, players begin voicing the same ideas in their minds. It’s negative programming and difficult to reverse (though not impossible). Those students would make comments during matches like “I suck” and display depressed body language.

Some coaches take a positive-only approach and tell their students "good job" at every opportunity. While it’s not as bad as raining fire on the student’s mind, it also poses problems for the student. "Good job" implies there is a bad side too, so the fear of failure hangs over their heads.

The most important thing a coach can do, aside from sharing knowledge, is to provide a judgment-free environment for their student. Whether they hit the ball as intended or not, it doesn’t matter. The key is to help the student explore and learn. This way, they are not distracted by thoughts of good or bad outcomes but find themselves focused on learning the game.

A research study titled “High fives motivate: the effects of gestural and ambiguous verbal praise on motivation,” published in 2014, showed that hand gestures and “praise without explicit attributions motivated as well or better than praise explicitly focused on effort.”

Kids are happy to get acknowledgment and to play in an environment without any fear of judgment. So, be mindful of how you communicate with your students and aim to create a judgment-free training environment.

Mistakes Don't Exist

Many coaches and players have told me that “tennis is a game of errors.” It seems like a cup‑half-empty statement but also makes some sense. You hardly win or lose matches by hitting winners. Some points will come from winners, but the majority will be counted after someone misses a shot, whether forced or unforced. The nature of tennis scoring thus leads people to assume mistakes play a central role in the game. Since mistakes count as losses, we veer toward viewing errors with disdain.

Disliking mistakes has a range of hindering consequences. Depending on how the coach or parent responds to their student’s unforced errors, the student may become paralyzed under pressure or avoid training outside of their comfort zone from fear of missing. One could make the student fear mistakes and turn them into a solid player through rigorous training. But, at the highest levels, everyone can play – rigor alone won’t help compete against top players.

The player who endured emotional attacks over missing will have an additional battle from within during each match. So, instead of playing the game, they are dealing with overcoming ingrained fear. For example, I always knew I needed to be aggressive to maintain pressure on my opponent. But the second I missed a shot and judged myself, playing aggressive turned into an impossible task no matter how well I was able to strategize. The player needs to be creative, open minded, and willing to take risks without fear.

Understand that tennis, like other sports, is about us learning physics on the intuitive level. For a moment, forget about scores, winning or losing, and anything involved with the race for a higher rating. We hit a round object with another object over a set space and move around to keep the round object in play. There is math and physics involved in every part of the process. Our brain is computing and anticipating speeds and trajectories. We thus train to get more familiar with the possibilities in the space of the tennis court.

So, when you first learn tennis, you take baby steps. Your exploration of the multidimensional map is very limited. The surface area may be relatively small, but the time dimension has almost infinite possibilities. You can play with time by hitting faster or slower, adding varying spins, and changing the timing of when you strike the ball.  Every action you take is therefore an exploration of the different variables and their combinations. In other words, you are learning every time you do something on the court.

Why is this relevant to mistakes? Fear changes the way you learn. When you miss, there is often an emotional response that comes after because you judge the error. The judgement and emotions close your mind to what has happened. Instead, the focus is on the judgment and how bad it was to miss.

We all know what fear does to us; it draws attention away from the task into the thing we fear. So, if I am afraid of attacking a short ball off my backhand side because I think I might miss, then I will feel that fear whenever I get a short ball on my backhand side.

Instead of being afraid of mistakes, learn to embrace them as any other shot. You’re in the process of learning at every instance and if you are in the space of flow and not fear, you will be able to immerse yourself in the game and enjoy every bit of it.

Learn to Take Risks So You Can Grow

Your comfort zone feels safe but that doesn’t mean it’s correct or helpful on the tennis court. For a long time, I was a solid baseliner and I felt confident playing without coming to the net. As I worked my way up the competitive junior tennis landscape, I began encountering players who kept the ball in the court with the same frequency and intensity. I lost my edge over my competitors and matches leaned heavily on battles of grit rather than skill and grit. I needed to develop new tools to compliment my solid baseline skills so I could establish an upper hand on the court.

However, instead of embracing change, I held on to what I knew for years. My development slowed down and I went from winning most tournaments to losing in the quarters or early rounds. This regression took place because I didn’t want to take risks. I prioritized safety and comfort over the uncertainty that comes with learning new tricks. I received plenty of good advice on what to work on but never accepted that I needed to go through the feeling of insecurity to reach the next level. I stubbornly held on to the way I was so I can feel good about myself and my game. In the short term, I got my satisfaction but, in the long run, I knew I was hurting myself.

I eventually embraced coming to the net when I started playing Division I college tennis. As part of a tennis team that relies on the doubles point to secure a lead, we spent at least half our practice sessions working on our net game. I had no choice but to go along. I went from being only comfortable at the baseline to feeling good playing from any part of the court. In the second year, my game began to flourish and I won nearly every match. I was finally able to claim that I played all-court tennis. This could have happened sooner had I opened my mind to learning new things.

A cause of my closed mind was fear. I was afraid of working on my weaknesses because learning something new meant I was going to experience failure. We should realize that most of our learning inhibitions stem from fear of failure. We can learn new skills just as well as anybody else. Our paths to obtaining new knowledge may be different and unique, but what stops us from learning when there is an opportunity is generally the same state of mind.

The beauty about developing new skills is that you add to the totality of your abilities. You get good at handling a greater variety of challenges over time as you work on new things. In my example, I needed to work on stepping in and approaching to the net. It wouldn’t have replaced my baseline game. Rather, it became an addition to my game and made a better tennis player. The best part about opening yourself to learning new things in tennis is that you will have an easier time doing the same for other aspects of your life.

Keeping Your Head Still Like Federer

If you have watched pro tennis over the years, you likely noticed that Roger Federer keeps his head down and still through the duration of his swing. As you can see here, you will find most pictures show his head still down by the end of his swing. However, every student I have worked with moves their head either before making contact with the tennis ball or while they are making contact. And no matter how many times coaches tell students to keep their head down during the swing, most will never fix this problem. In this article, I will explain why it’s important to keep your head still, the reason most have not been able to truly fix this problem, and the solution to a permanent change.

The reason you must keep your head still as you’re swinging is because when you move your head, your shoulders tend to follow. That leads to opening yourself up too soon before or during the swing. This also means your swing path will shift along with your shoulder movement. This causes one of two errors: (1) if your swing path shifts up before making contact with the ball, your strings will hit the top of the ball and send the ball towards a declining trajectory, which increases the likelihood of hitting short or the net; (2) if your swing path shifts up as you’re making contact with the ball, you will lift the ball up and it will likely sail long.

Why is this happening? Imagine yourself playing tennis. Now, visualize how you’re set for the shot and are about to swing and hit the ball. In the live scenario, what I always witness, is that once the student is set up and ready to swing, their mind has figured out within the few split seconds how to intercept the ball. Confident they will hit the ball; the player then turns their attention to where they want the ball to go. And bam, they don’t hit the shot they intended to because their swing path was altered suddenly.

Many will try to fix this problem by mechanically forcing their head down. But there is a problem with this approach: it’s not sustainable. Forcing your head down and keeping it still means that you must be attentive to keeping your head down. That attention takes away from your state of awareness for everything else. And once you stop focusing on keeping your head down, your problem will resurface. Your best tennis will be played through intuition and not controlled thinking.

The underlying problem is a lack of self-trust and a need to control the outcome of shots. Players move their head because they want to see where the ball goes with a hopeful wish to control the outcome of their shot with eyes. It’s absurd because once the ball leaves your string, you have zero control over where the ball goes. It’s already determined.

This underlying problem brings us back to fear of failure. We don’t like to fail and thus feel the need to control our outcomes. But the world of physics does not know about the tennis scoring rules and it will thus not make any adjustments to make you feel good about yourself. It just tells us we must play by the laws of physics and geometry.

Roger Federer has talked about letting go of outcomes. He learned to trust himself and be OK with missing shots. You can do the same and learn to stay in the moment. All you need to do, is work on letting go of controlling outcomes, being OK with missing, and keeping your mind in the moment.

Mindfulness training and acceptance of missing shots are the best tools to keeping your head still like Roger Federer as you’re swinging. The universe does not care if you win or lose. We invented scoring to make it fun, entertaining, and to measure our progress. Tennis is just a game that teaches you intuitive physics, math, psychology, and athleticism. These benefits far outweigh the need to win points or make your shots in.

Another Reason Tennis makes you Healthy

You might have heard that tennis can extend your life by nearly 10 years compared to doing no sport (we wrote about it here). A factor is that tennis engages your mind and body dynamically. Another reason you live longer through tennis is the social connections you make—tennis players bond well. This sport is a society of its own, open to everyone. A few weeks ago, I went into an elevator and a stranger said I must be a tennis player. I carried myself like a tennis player and they noticed – we became friends. But what is not talked about is how tennis teaches you mindfulness and makes you stay focused on the present moment. That leads to many health benefits as well.

Tennis is a mindfulness sport. Every ball you get will be different. The court is large so there are a nearly infinite number of possibilities with variations in spin, speed, height, and placement. To handle the different shots consistently means you need to stay tuned in to how the ball and your body are behaving. If you’re thinking about other things, you will not be aware of the ball’s behavior and will miss a lot because you’ll be out of position. If you’re not tuned in, you will likely be stiff and off balance for many of your shots. This means you won’t feel much of a connection with the game. To stay consistent and connect, you need to be in the zone. That means no thoughts about the future or past.

Thinking about the future constantly or ruminating over the past can lead to stress. These are points in time that don’t exist and you thus have no control over. Yet we tend to worry about what happened or what might happen. We do this because as children we have been taught to worry and no one taught us to stay in the flow. Let mistakes and good things happen.

Thoughts cause reactions to our physiology. Negative thoughts cause chronic stress. Stress hormones get released from overanxious thinking. If you’re chronically anxious, you will end up with physical ailments. On a basic level, you’ll have more knots in your shoulder and back muscles. Mindfulness on the other hand is shown to reduce anxiety, and depression, and help alleviate pain (read this post from the National Institute of Health).

People who commit to tennis learn from their coaches that they should be in a state of Zen. They get rewarded with measurable physical, emotional, and mental benefits. This knowledge is not new. Timothy Gallwey published one of the best sellers for mental tennis in 1997: The Inner Game of Tennis. He shares insight on reaching a state of flow and getting rid of our mental inhibitions:

“The first skill to learn is the art of letting go the human inclination to judge ourselves and our performance as either good or bad.”