Five simple exercises to improve your mental game
What tennis and entrepreneurship have in common and how to train like a pro.
It’s summer, so I’ll keep this post brief.
I’ve never been a sports enthusiast, but I love watching tennis. It’s the elegance of the sport, the athleticism, the tradition, the rigor. It reminds me of the years I spent training to become a professional ballerina, devoting every minute to making something insanely hard look beautiful. The magic of tennis extends beyond the play itself, with its marvelous level of precision, to everything that surrounds it and makes it possible—the pristine courts, the athletes’ style, the conduct of every single person on the court. Watching tennis just makes me want to do everything better.
But when I watched the Wimbledon finals this past weekend, I realized there’s another reason why I’m so drawn to tennis. The athlete’s modus operandi closely resembles that of an entrepreneur. Every top player’s career is built on thousands of hours of practice to perfect their technique and skill. There’s also raw talent and fierce determination that fuel the game, along with an entire team of best-in-class people whose job is to help the athlete win. But every time they step on the court and pick up the racket, the athlete is alone. Every step, every decision, every moment rests on their shoulders. And that’s where, in both tennis and entrepreneurship, the mental game comes in.
Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts on mindset, drawing from mindfulness, neuroscience, and sports psychology. The latter is a field I’ve long been interested in because many of the tools experts use to help athletes perform at the highest level can be applied in other areas, including business. The most insightful book on the subject is The Confident Mind by Dr. Nat Zinsser, the Director of West Point's Performance Psychology Program. He has extensive experience training military cadets, world-class athletes, and other high-performing individuals. Unlike other books about high-performing people, this one wastes no time on anecdotes and instead provides the science behind confidence along with an incredible number of practical exercises for strengthening your mental game. Below are some of my favorite exercises from the book that have helped me feel more prepared to face work-related challenges.
To make better sense of the exercises, here’s a brief high-level summary of the book’s core ideas:
Confidence as a skill: the book emphasizes that confidence is not an innate trait but a skill that can be taught, improved, and applied by anyone to enhance various aspects of their lives and careers.
Mental bank account: Zinsser introduced the concept of a "mental bank account" where you can make deposits of Effort, Success, and Progress (ESP) memories. By regularly reflecting on and emphasizing these positive experiences, you can build and maintain confidence
Thought discipline: the book provides a framework for filtering out negative thoughts and emphasizing positive ones that align with your goals. It acknowledges that negative thoughts will occur but teaches you not to dwell on them.
Acceptance of nervousness: Zinsser dispels the myth that confidence eliminates nervousness. Instead, it teaches you to accept and reframe the biochemical shift experienced before important events as a natural and potentially beneficial response.
Visualization and mental rehearsal: Zinsser explains how imagining successful outcomes and mentally practicing scenarios can improve actual performance. He provides practical tips on how to incorporate these techniques into daily routines.
Exercise one: to strengthen your confidence, remember your successes, not your failures
One-off: write a top-ten list of success moments that energized and encouraged you in the past.
Daily “E-S-P” journaling practice: think about an episode during the day when you made your best “effort.” What kind of “success” did you experience at that moment and what kind of “progress” did you make?
Exercise two: think constructive, present tense thoughts about current and desired performance
Create an affirming statement about something you do well now, phrasing it in the first person, in the present tense, and with positive, precise and powerful language.
Write more affirmations in a notebook every evening to close your day with potent, positive thoughts.
Exercise three: imagine a positive future performance
Envision perfecting a technical skill or specific task. Take an internal perspective, as if you were actually performing that task. Think specifically of the beginning, end and other critical points. Start by imagining you are sitting in a cozy chair in a special room surrounded by things that give you comfort and joy. Envision arriving at your place of performance. Vividly imagine the setting, and know what you want to have happen. Mentally walk through your warm-up, your first steps, the high points, your successful ending and the celebration that follows. Engage with the physical and emotional components of the visualization. Also visualize possible bumps in the road. Mentally rehearsing your response enables you to confidently deal with obstacles when they arise.
Exercise four: actively reinforce your confidence when circumstances threaten to undermine it
When something doesn’t go as you hoped it would, consider that moment a chance for learning. To turn any failure into a lesson, treat it as a one-time situation and an aberration. Move on.
When an internal voice threatens your confidence, call it out and tell it to shut up. Substitute that voice with affirming thoughts.
Exercise five: develop a “pregame routine” to prepare you for a challenge
Conduct a “mental inventory” to assess what skills you bring to the task.
Make an analysis of the performance ahead. What is the task at hand? What could be any opposing factors? Consider not only your “opponent”, but also think about any unexpected circumstances that might require your attention and solutions how to overcome them. Make yourself familiar with the setting.
Shift from “preparing” mode to “delivering” mode. Establish a “statements only”rule: When moving into execution phase, stop questioning or doubting yourself regarding your physical or mental preparedness.
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