How I Discovered A Better Way To Develop Player Mental Toughness…

In just a minute I’ll tell you about the experiment that led me to discovering the better way to coach mentally tough tennis, but first I’ll give you some important background…

 Early Career Learning…

In 2003/2004, a couple of early coaching failures taught me quickly that I simply didn’t have the coaching skills to handle the competitive challenges that many players face.

And these early coaching experiences fuelled a desire in me to become better skilled in helping players reach their competitive potential.

To do this, I spent a couple of years working for my former sport psychologist Michael Fox (this is Allen Fox’s brother who has been a very successful sport psychologist in Australia). Time spent with Foxy further inspired me to become a sport psychologist myself and although I enjoyed working across different sports, I naturally found myself spending most of my time as a psychologist working in tennis.

During those early years I dedicated myself to implementing the traditional mental skills I’d learned during my psychology training as best I could.

Skills like Concentration; Goal setting; Self-awareness, Imagery; and the control of internal/emotional states with the aim to achieve the ‘ideal performance state’/’zone’.

These aims made sense to me; after all; we all know that it’s easier to commit to helpful actions that increase the chance of success when we’re feeling calm and confident, and when we’re not experiencing difficult thoughts about potential loss…

And I generally found it useful to help players to develop their concentration skills; to set goals; to self-reflect; and to use imagery, etc.

But To My Surprise…

Encouraging players to control internal states during matches with the aim of helping them achieve the ‘ideal performance state’ or to get in the ‘zone’ was proving to be more problematic…

No matter how I tried I generally couldn’t get players to stop thinking about the outcome; to accept the situation; to stay calm under pressure; or to reduce the feelings of frustration when not meeting their expectations.

For me, this led to much frustration and helplessness, a confusion as to what I was doing incorrectly, and the tendency to view the players I was working with as having personal flaws that were preventing them from doing what they should be able to do…

And for the players, I actually found that the more I insisted on their search for the ‘zone’ the further they got from it, leading to more, not less, difficult mental experiences during competition.

My 2-Year Experiment…

Luckily, just when I was beginning to feel powerless, a psychologist who I sought advice from introduced me to a philosophy that differed greatly from traditional approaches in one key area.

Called Acceptance and Commitment therapy, this new approach to psychology disputed the idea that the attempts to control internal states during competition were helpful.

At first this just didn’t make sense to me…

I mean of course we need to try to help players ‘change unhelpful thoughts and feelings that show up during matches’, because they tend to act based on theses mental experiences.

But given that I was doing so poorly in actually helping players to experience ‘ideal performance states’, I was willing to give it a crack...

So I decided to split all new clients into 3 groups:

Group 1.) With Group 1 I would continue to work with traditional Mental Skill approaches

Group 2.)With Group 2 I would implement the Acceptance and Commitment Philosophy

Group 3.) And with Group 3, given that there were several skills common to both philosophies, I decided to apply both approaches and see how players went…

The Results…

Too make a long story short for you, over the next 2 years I found that Group 2 players improved considerably more than the other players.

So eventually, I started using an acceptance and commitment philosophy with all my clients, as well as working with some coaches to adopt the same philosophy when coaching these players.

This combination I believe contributed greatly to some incredible player results…

For example, one of my original Group 2 players was Jason Kubler.

Jason was a super talented 14-15 year old player at the time whose erratic competitive effectiveness was causing much despair among the Tennis Australia hierarchy.

I was brought into work with him and in combination with his coaches Ben Mathias and David Hodge, we began implementing the Acceptance and Commitment philosophy with Jason.

Soon after, Jason went from being an unreliable competitor to a winning machine, claiming 40 of his next 41 matches and becoming World Junior #1 when still 16 years old.

I Wanted to Better Understand Why…

As I went through this 2-year transition to the point of applying the Acceptance and Commitment philosophy with all players I worked with, I wanted to understand more about why attempts to help players achieve ‘ideal performance states’ generally don’t lead to long-term mental toughness development…

Stay tuned for my next post in a couple of days, because I’ve written a special report which explains the failures of this traditional methodology and what we should do instead…

‘The Better Way’

Over the next several years, once I’d wrapped my head around the reasons that this ‘acceptance and commitment’ philosophy was so helpful to players, I worked with hundreds of players and coaches to refine the ideas so that they could be best applied to the specific challenges that tennis presents…

These thousands of hours of application and refinement eventually led to what I call the PACT Method and the ABC Routine…