Jim Loehr: The 16 Second Cure part 1

Between point behavior: the single most important factor in developing mental toughness. Think about your last match. How did you spend most of the time? Hitting forehands, backhands, playing serve and volley? Actually, for the majority of the time, you weren't hitting balls at all. Only about 20% to 30% of the match time is spent in actual play. The rest of the time is between points and game changeovers. You may have played for years and never thought about how you spend the majority of your time on the court. Yet, if we were to identify the single most important factor in developing mental toughness, it would be how a player uses these intervals between points and games. You may never serve like Pete Sampras, run like Lleyton Hewitt or hit forehands like Andre Agassi, but there is one thing each and every player can learn to do exactly as well as the top players in the world, and that is to use the between point time to become mentally tough. When we study players, it is no coincidence that they behave in very specific ways between points. And that is the behavior we call the four stages, or...