David Ranney's Tennis Blog

Changing Unproductive Thoughts

 

I have really enjoyed your mini lessons and just found out from your last lesson, that ONE of my problems is CHOKING. Thank you so much for that lesson! 

 

My question is.....once you let the win or losing thoughts come into your thinking, what do you do then? Is it too late to recover from such thoughts? My partner and I both "suffer" from thinking too much.....especially about the outcome of the game.

help!

 

 

The first step is to be aware of these unproductive thoughts. Only when you are aware of them can you begin to deal with them.

 

The moment you are aware that you had an unproductive thought you say to yourself “Cancel Cancel”, take a sighing exhale and then make a statement that is productive. The kinds of statements that I am talking about are as follows: “OK, body, I can’t win this. You will have to do it and I will stay out of your way and I will just see the ball and breathe.” Or, “I am going to just let my body play and let the outcome be what it will.”

 

Please don’t use a negative like “I am not going to try to hit the ball into the court” as they say in NLP circles your subconscious mind does not hear the “not.” It just hears “I am going to try …” and hopefully you know trying doesn’t work very well.

 

The other thing you can do if you find yourself “thinking too much”, is to occupy your mind by watching a ball (any ball) and listen to your breathing in between points. That will keep you in the “here and now” and it will harder for “other thoughts” to intrude.

 

I hope this will help.

 

David

About Visualization

 

Here is another good idea from “my listening audience.” I give my idea about visualization below.

 

What about in the blog have players suggest their own visualizing that works. Thomas my son play with a great player and when he was missing shots in the net that he hit from behind the baseline she said: just imagine/visualize you are targeting the net behind me. Sure enough every shot Thomas hit from behind the base line went over the net. Now maybe other readers have similar suggestions to things that works for them.

 

Now for the ones with kids who want's the kids to start understanding/reading about these concepts I found a solution. I convinced his LA teacher to allow him to read first Gallweys book and make a book summary. The concept about 2 self are very abstract for kids and if you involve the teacher they work just a little harder to figure it out. Just remember to explain to the teacher that you will give them questions about the book that will ease their understanding of the concept. His teacher loved the idea and I got her started on her going in and out of the Zone bowling.

********************************************************************************

I believe that just about any visualization works. The one you described that your son did obviously did the trick. I like to have my students do the visualizations that address more precisely what I believe is happening. When the balls go into the net, I believe it is caused because the racket and the arm are not low enough. So, I have my students visualize relaxing their arm and wrist which will allow the racket to get lower so that the natural swing forward is now more up which carries the ball over the net. At the same time, I have my students visualize the ball going 1 to 3 feet over the net. Then, of course, the student must relax and let it happen. For those of you who have my book, see Lesson #11 for more detail.

 

One of the things that I don’t hear very often about the visualization process is that once you have visualized, if you then try hard to make it happen it just may not work very well. So, once you visualize, you must let go of trying, go back to seeing the ball, breathing and relaxing your body more so that the other than conscious mind can execute the shot or learn to do it if it doesn’t already know how.

 

If there are others out there reading this and you want to share your way of visualizations, please feel free to contribute to this discussion.

 

The Ultimate Goal in Playing the Mental Game

What is the ultimate goal you want to achieve when you play the mental game? Do you know?

I sometimes forget to talk about this as often as I should, but it is important to always keep this in mind as you are playing the mental game. When you have goals, it is ideal that you have the ultimate goal as well as smaller and/or short term ones. When you have the ultimate goal, then you can’t get too far off the path and the mind has a way of leading you to it more efficiently.

Anyway, here is what I believe is the ultimate goal. It is for you to find what relationship the conscious mind has to the body (or the other than conscious mind) so that you not only play your very best every time, but continue to create an environment so that you learn and grow as a player.

I cannot tell you what this relationship is. I wish I could. What I can do is lead you to the things that will lead you to find out for yourself. When you focus on the core principles, when you work on letting go of your judgments, when you let go of aiming, of trying to stroke it correctly, when you let go of hitting the ball into the court and you let go of winning, you will be discovering this ultimate environment. (How is that for a sentence?)

My wish for you all is that you will discover this in the shortest time possible as there is no better way to play.