25/09/2017
What is a Mental Game?
The first important question to ask is what is a mental game? This is not simply a matter of not "losing your cool" on the court. We're not talking about Marat Safin-type outbursts or broken rackets, although this would clearly be an area to improve.
Instead, think of when your mind is important in matches. What decisions do your have to make? What do you want to focus on? What is your mind like when you are playing great tennis? What have been your most mentally tough moments?
I sometimes ask players if they talk to themselves? Even the people who say no are probably telling themselves, "No, I don't do that. Does he think I'm crazy or something?"
The typical human being talks to themselves somewhere between 300 - 1,000 words a minute! Imagine what you say to yourself during the average practice. How about in an important match?
Now think about how important what you say is. The significance is this: Where our mind leads, our body follows.
Imagine this scenario: You are serving to stay in a set with a break point against you. It's your second serve and you start focusing on not missing the serve. You hear the voice inside your head, "Don't double fault. Don't hit the net!"
Nine times out of ten that's exactly where the serve is going to end up. On a simple level, our brain really sees more in pictures than it does in words. When our focus becomes the net or not missing, we picture the net or missing.
I call this setting negative goals or negative targets. Our body doesn't distinguish the difference, it just responds to what we picture or focus on.
Ironically, a great deal of mental conditioning is about helping you think less. For most people, this is why having a mental game plan is so hard.
For a lot of you, you're able to turn your mind off when you practice and can go for long stretches keeping your mind simple, focusing on the ball, patterns of play or simply targets.
However, when it comes to big matches -- or even big points within matches -- the brain turns on again. What you've done a thousand times in practice suddenly becomes more complicated. By turning your brain on and thinking more in this situation you have made the task more complicated!
The catch is how do you turn your brain off again, so that your body and muscle memory can turn back on. A lot of the very best pros have the phenomenal ability of trusting their muscle memory in the biggest points of the match.
Consider Roger Federer in the men's Wimbledon final in 2007. A break point down to Rafael Nadal in the 5th set, down 15-40, Roger comes up with three aces. I think that's a pretty good sign that he was able to shut out the nervous anticipation we felt as spectators and focus on his targets all the more clearly.
This doesn't just happen. We're not born with this ability, despite how it might seem. This is learned. This is why we call concentration, confidence, composure and motivation, for example, mental skills.
