The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s updated release: How to Attract a College Athletic Scholarship.
College standout Steve Johnson provides his view on college tennis. Special e-Book price is $1.99
To Order Click Here
Tennis Can Teach Life Skills
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s updated release: How to Attract a College Athletic Scholarship.
College standout Steve Johnson provides his view on college tennis. Special Amazon e-Book price is $1.99
To Order Click Here
ELITE TENNIS PARENT JOB POST
The following post is an excerpt from the Second Edition of The Tennis Parent’s Bible, NOW, available through most online retailers! Click Here to Order
Frank wrote the ELITE TENNIS PARENT JOB POST as a humor piece while addressing the tennis parent’s extreme importance to maximize tennis potential and facilitate a healthy and positive environment. Enjoy!
ELITE TENNIS PARENT JOB POST
Before we dig deeper into the more serious components of the tennis parent’s role, let’s first laugh a bit about what a “Tennis Parent Needed” internet job post would look like…
With “tongue firmly in cheek,” I created the below piece for Tennis Magazine, which ran last year. The point of detailing this incredibly difficult and sometimes thankless job is acknowledging the love and dedication that go into developing and nurturing your child’s life skills.
Tennis Parent Job Description:
- Positive team player needed for 168 hours per week position.
- Candidate must possess a universal desire to be screamed at, talked down to, and be willing to be hated 5-6 days a week.
- The successful applicant must have an uncanny sense of “Buddha-like” calmness in an often psychotic, stressful, chaotic environment.
- Candidate must be willing to work early mornings, late evenings, and most weekends.
- Candidate must be willing to forget about their own personal interests, workout routines, sports, and hobbies.
- Candidate must not expect to go on vacation due to the year-round tournament obligations.
- The successful applicant should plan on missing traditional family holidays due to Thanksgiving Nationals, Winter Super Nationals, Spring Break/Easter Bowl, Labor Day, and Memorial Day Events.
Requirements:
- H R Skills– Interviewing, hiring, and firing tennis coaches, trainers, hitters, and off-court specialists…with the enthusiasm of Donald Trump.
- Accounting /Banking Skills- Possess an extremely thick checkbook and be willing and able to max out all of their major credit cards.
- Designated Driver- Must be willing to put 100 thousand miles on the family car and enjoy most of your meals behind the wheel.
- Expect your child to occasionally go “Tennis-Brain Dead“- Be willing and able to accept that your child will occasionally forget everything they were taught during the last $5000.00 worth of lessons and blow several events a year.
- Scheduling Manager- World-class juggling skills required to organize the ever-changing schedules of booking practice courts, times & logistics, hired hitters to practice partners, lessons, and events.
- Booking Agent– Flexible skills required to book last-minute airlines, cars, and hotels.
- VIP/24 Hour Courier Service: Laundry service, racquet re-stringing service, drug store pharmaceuticals pickup and delivery service, bedtime psychology sessions.
- Fashion Coordinator/Personal Shopper- Purchasing only the latest and greatest shoes and matching clothes.
- Maintenance Knowledge– General Maintenance of equipment such as racquet re-gripping, clothing malfunctions, shoelace replacement…
- Parental Intuition- Must have the uncanny ability to become expendable and invisible in a seconds notice and/or appear bright-eyed/ happy to help two minutes later.
- Match Performance Review- Must be willing to evaluate a crummy performance by first pointing out fifty positive observations but NEVER share negative feedback without starting WWIII.
Wages and Expenses:
- There is no pay for this position.
- All the work and travel-related expenses will not be reimbursed.
Learn How To Compete
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s updated release: How to Attract a College Athletic Scholarship.
College standout Steve Johnson provides his view on college tennis. Special e-Book price is $1.99
To Order Click Here
Maximize Tennis Potential
How to Attract a College Athletic Scholarship
College standout Steve Johnson provides his view on college tennis. Special e-Book price is $1.99
To Order Click Here
Eliminating Internal Judgment- Part 5
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis. Click Here to Order through Amazon
Eliminating Internal Judgment
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution #5:
Monitoring Outer Dialog
The fifth method of nurturing a positive inner dialog is to ask the athlete to monitor their outer dialog under stressful conditions. An athlete’s outer dialog includes speech, body language, and physical behavior, which are natural bi-products of an athlete’s internal dialog.
Monitoring this process begins with the athlete recognizing their automatic system of behavior under the stressful conditions of competition. Although it is common to default to old comfortable habits under stress; negative habits not only perpetuate pessimistic thought patterns, they alert the opponent that self-destruction is in the works. Self-spotting outer dialog behavior will help the athlete to recondition their inner dialog chatter.
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution #6:
Resist Attention Seeking Negative Dialog
A behavior management strategy is to coach the athlete to resist attention seeking negative dialog and behavior. Athletes gain sympathy by projecting pessimistic behaviors. A typical example of this is an athlete’s excessively loud mini-tantrum in competition to gain sympathy from spectators, family, or coaches. In essence, the athlete is projecting, “I’m usually so much better than this…I must be having an unusually bad day!” Ironically, the tantrum is seen every day.
In my opinion, tactically ignoring the outbursts in hopes that they go away is not dialog management because an appropriate alternate behavior is needed. An athlete’s dialog projects their thoughts and beliefs. Their voices have been simply programmed into their subconscious. Since they determine the course of their life, reprogramming their negative inner chatter is a battle worth fighting.
“Optimistic self-coaching is a wonderful technique to create better human beings on and off the tennis court.”
Here’s an alternate view of tennis parenting and tennis teaching. The conventional method has been to feel balls, criticize what’s broken, and then focus on the athlete’s problem areas. This judgment based approach isn’t always in the student’s best interest. Why? Because it subliminally plants the toxic seeds of negative inner dialog and in competition, this learned behavior of focusing on what’s wrong opposes the natural flow state found in nonjudgmental, effortless, peak performance. Seeking “what is broken” isn’t part of performing in the zone or “treeing” as today’s juniors describe playing at one’s optimal level.
Eliminating Internal Judgment- Part 4
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis. Click Here to Order through Amazon
Eliminating Internal Judgment
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution #4:
Identifying Internal Obstacles
Looking deeper into competitive success brings us to a fourth method, which is assisting athletes by identifying their internal obstacles. Although losing to a more experienced player stings a bit, losing to a toad because you have self-destructed is much more harrowing. The secret to conquering one’s inner demons stems from understanding the importance of self-coaching. It is essential to master self-coaching with positive inner dialog by exchanging judgmental tirades with calming routines and rituals.
“Overcoming internal obstacles is more satisfying at a deeper level than beating a top seed.”
Athletes perform best when they are not excessively judged or overly concerned about the outcome ramifications. Having outcome goals is fine, as long as their focus is on the process. To continually stay process-minded is the backbone of successful inner dialog. What influences athletes most in their toughest moments is their mental commentary. A healthy mindset orchestrates a positive attitude, belief, and effort. So, what is competitive success? Competitive success is performing at one’s peak performance level set after set; the optimum victory for any athlete.
Eliminating Internal Judgment- Part 3
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis. Click Here to Order through Amazon
Eliminating Internal Judgment
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution #2:
Judgments through Comparisons
Judgmental thoughts typically stem from past or future thought comparisons. Typical thoughts of comparison in the heat of battle include, “Jason beat this dude. I can’t lose, I’ve got to prove I’m better than Jason,” “Kristin is ranked below me, and if I lose today, she’ll take my spot on the team,” “What are my parents and coaches going to say if I lose?” “Here I go…Choking again!”
Judgmental thoughts play havoc in the minds of our competitive athletes every day. Athletes in competition, with judgmental comparison thoughts, contaminate the match play process, which results in fighting two opponents, simultaneously- their negative thoughts and the real opponent.
Advanced athletes seeking better results often don’t have to learn more technical skills; they have to shift their attention to developing better self-communication skills. Keep in mind that the athlete’s inner voice will be with them long after they stop competing on the tennis court. Isn’t it worth the time to assist them in developing their lifelong self-coaching tools? Winning is much more likely when our athletes understand the art of self-coaching.
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution # 3:
Positive Inner Dialog
The third method of conquering the athlete’s negative inner dialog is through positive self-coaching with Neuro Priming. It is estimated that individuals have roughly 60,000 thoughts per day. Trading in a turbulent mental state for a relaxed, calming proactive state is essential.
What is Neuro Priming and why is it an essential addition to an athlete’s preparation? Neuro Priming is the science of preprogramming the athlete’s inner trust in their match solutions.
Mental rehearsals customize each athlete’s positive inner dialog by organizing their physical, mental, and emotional solutions into audio recordings in their voice. Listening to one’s inner dialog audio tapes increases tennis IQ, reprograms old pessimistic beliefs, changes negative behaviors, speeds up the learning process, increases focus, assists the athletes in quickly fixing stroke flaws, staying on their script of patterns, coping with stress, nervousness and the fear of failure. Neuro Priming isn’t meant to replace on-court physical training; its purpose is to enhance it. It’s self-coaching at its best. (Visit #1 Best Seller on Amazon: Neuro Priming for Peak Performance, Giampaolo).
Eliminating Internal Judgment- Part 2
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis. Click Here to Order through Amazon
Eliminating Internal Judgment
How to Strengthen Self Coaching Solution#1:
Video Analysis
One method of combating the athlete’s negative self-dialog begins with videotaping tournament matches and providing non-hitting match play video analysis. This process accesses the specific stressful environment that needs to be studied.
As the high IQ coach quantifies the match data alongside the athlete, I recommend identifying how the athlete’s inner dialog helped or hurt their performance. Were they able to self-coach successfully? When providing match play analysis, remember to apply the five optimistic comments for every one pessimistic statement. Following are video analysis topics the athlete and coach would be wise to discuss.
Match Play Video Analysis
- Strokes & Movement Efficiencies & Deficiencies
- Anticipatory Efficiencies & Deficiencies
- Staying on Script. (Top 7 Patterns)
- Opponent Profiling
- Between Point & Change-Over Rituals & Routines
- Emotional Control
- Focus Control
- Cause of Errors
- Court Positioning Cause & Effect
- Score Management
Athletes who are trained to monitor their emotions and inner dialog via post-match video analysis are much more likely to become aware of the software complexities of competition.
Eliminating Internal Judgment- Part 1
The following post is an excerpt from Frank’s newest book, The Soft Science of Tennis. Click Here to Order through Amazon
Eliminating Internal Judgment
My neighbor, Pete, owns Pete’s Home Repair Specialist. He’s a super friendly independent contractor. Due to his excellent soft science personal skills, Pete’s always in high demand. His decades of experience have taught him that detailed preparation prevents poor performance. Pete’s truck is like an encyclopedia of tools organized by alphabet and ready for action. Though Pete doesn’t need all of his tools at every job, he brings every tool, just in case he needs it.
This analogy is very similar to a high-performance tennis player’s tool belt. In matches, they may not need to employ every skill set developed in their tool belt, but they do need to have primary and secondary strokes ready for competition, as well as multiple patterns and plays developed and prepared to be accessed if needed. Life skills, such as preparation improve the athlete’s confidence, inner dialogue, and of course, solution-based self-coaching skills.
“In the heat of battle, the voice inside each athlete is their driving force.”
In match play, an athlete’s internal dialog is their self-coaching. Internal dialog is the conversation their ego is having with themselves. Athletes have a habitual way they choose to navigate their matches. When they see competition in a negative light, their internal dialog is dark. Conversely, when they “see pressure as a privilege,” to quote Billy Jean King, their self-coaching is more positive, uplifting, and optimistic. The question is: Where did the athlete learn their internal dialog mantras?
An athlete’s negative, problem-oriented inner dialog sabotages their performance by interfering with their quiet mind. To some athletes, negative inner dialog spirals them into a self-defeating, under-arousal state. To others, it pushes them into a panicked, over-arousal state. Both are detrimental to performance. As I mentioned earlier, an athlete’s non-stop inner dialogue is either helping or hurting their performance. Intermediate athletes are known to sabotage their play by criticizing themselves, worrying about losing, and inventing post-match catastrophic conclusions during competition.
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