Reducing Stress

Stress can lead to powerful counterproductive emotions.

Changing your perspective on competition can reduce stress. As we have seen, serious tennis matches involve fears of failure and are often stressful, and this stress can give rise to powerful counterproductive emotions.

These emotions can be controlled, but the greater the stress, the more difficult this task becomes. So part of the emotional control process involves reducing the underlying stress by changing one's perspective on the competitive situation itself. (For more on how emotions can be counterproductive, Click Here.)

Tennis players of all levels, from touring pros to beginning recreational players, experience stress from the same basic sources. The most common is wanting to win too much and the associated uncertainty of outcome. It is amplified by a number of other factors, all of which involve inaccurate perceptions or evaluations of reality.

One way of reducing stress, then, is to understand the process of competition more realistically and accurately. To do this, we'll look at specific examples I've observed in consulting with players, and these can illuminate the differences between accurate and inaccurate perspectives.

Expectations dating from junior tennis can lead to shaky nerves years later.

Concern about what others will think…