Frustration in sports: the right mindset.
Hello everyone ! =)
This week I’m going to talk about something that happened last weekend.
It was 8pm on Friday and I was in Avelar getting ready for my tennis lesson. I started warming up, feeling ok and relaxed and my strokes felt good.
While I was at it, I started noticing who was showing up for practice and I started being less excited because the player that usually gives me the most trouble wasn’t coming.
After warming up our coach told us to start making best of three games where if we got a 1–1 score the last game would be a tiebreak. I started the first game serving and my serve didn’t feel that good: I was even missing some of the second serves. While playing points I couldn’t put the ball where I wanted and that started to make me upset; adding to that, my opponent was making some lucky shots as well. I lost the first game and felt bad as hell.
When the second game started I was thinking that I would be ok because I could usually break his serve so I was still in the match. After some misses and a long game I got the break and the score was at 1–1. The game was hard, I missed a lot of shots and was very frustrated because I couldn’t hit the ball the way that I wanted.
Frustration kicked in.
I started doing stupid things, missing even more, I was missing shots, serves, everything and getting angrier at myself for missing so much. Of course everyone knows what happened next.
I lost the game.
1–2.
The rest of the practice was a waste. I gave in to frustration and could not play more than 2 shots without getting mad. After the end of the practice I left the court very sad and angry at myself for that pitifull training session.
Next day was very busy so that feeling didn’t come to mind again.But Sunday when I had more free time, that practice session came back to mind and I started thinking why was I so angry at myself?
It made no sense.
Everyone misses at Tennis, even pro players. Everyone eventually loses at sport!
So after some thought I reached a conclusion..
Expectations.
I had high expectations of myself.
I got angry and sad because I expected to hit the ball exactly to the spot that I wanted and I expected to win easily against my opponent. I was blind to see that I was doing some decent shots even if they were not perfect; my opponent was really trying and playing well and won the game with all the merit.
That made me realise that this applies to several things in our lives: we have expectations about people or about events, and when reality kicks in we get sad and upset. This is just a bad mindset that will never get us the results we want.
In my case what I should have done was to practice applying the growth mindset(this comes from “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S.Dweck) where before practice I plan on what I’ll focus on that session.
For example, “I’ll try to focus more on not rotating my right leg when I hit my forehand”. In this case if my shots go in or out it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what I’m training for. I’m just trying to improve that part of the movement. This is also called Deliberate Practice and can be applied to an array of practices.
With this mindset you should remove all expectations you have and just focus on that movement and that movement only; everything else leave it to other training session.
Of course this is easier said than done, we are all human beings and those feelings are hard to contain but still we should make an effort to change our mindset.
With this change we can get better at what we practice, because we are making deliberate practice and at the same time we’ll be happier because all those expectations are gone along with that frustration.
Some food for thought if you want to dig some more into this.
Progress Table:
Books: 1/4
Courses/MOOCs : 0/2
I delayed this a bit because I had a deadline at school for a project so I had to put more time into that.
Hopefully I’ll have my first HTML5/CSS3/Bootstrap course done next week.
See you all next Thursday =)
