I started playing tennis just over a year ago. I thought would be a good way to keep myself consistently exercising and that has been the case.
Outside of high school gym class, I’d never actually played or learned tennis, so it has been a fun adventure to dive into learning a physical skill. Through the process, I think there are a lot of lessons on learning and life in general that I’ve pulled away from.
You Can’t Think Your Way to Being Good
Tennis is an interesting game because there is a lot of time to think while you’re on the court, but almost no time to think while you’re actively engaged in a point. This creates an interesting dynamic where you can mentally work yourself into a pretzel while you’re playing. You miss a serve, get mad, start beating yourself up about it, miss another, and before you know it you’ve double-faulted your way through an entire game.
To play well, you need to quickly learn the limits of what you can mentally focus on and integrate into your actions.
For example, if you miss hit a ball, you can give yourself a cue to do one small thing differently, but if you are trying to remember mentally how to hit your forehand, you won’t hit a good shot for the rest of the game.
The Inner Game of Tennis is a classic book that hits on this core issue. W. Timothy Gallwey (in the 1970’s), coined the concept of Self 1 and Self 2.
Self 1 is the conscious, thinking, full mental control of your actions part. Self 2 is the subconscious, feeling, part of ourselves. Our tendency in learning a skill is to train and practice until we feel that we have mastery through Self 1, but Gallwey (and any expert’s experience) teaches that it is in learning to trust and empower Self 2 that you reach a level of fluency.
In learning tennis I can feel the clear connection to my experience learning Spanish. At first, in a traditional education setting, you focus on learning rules, memorizing, and repeating. But then you get into a conversation and you stumble over yourself. A conversation is too dynamic to be thinking, you have to learn how to flow. Tennis is the same, but you can’t flow if you don’t know how to hit a ball or where to move.
Empowering Self 2 to learn is less about talking and memorizing and more about watching, observing, mimicking, and focusing your mind.
1 Kick 10,000 Times
Tennis is a relatively simple game. You hit a ball back and forth over a hit and it has to land within a rectangle. But within that simplicity is quite a bit of diverse skill.
There are forehands, backhands, slices, lobs, volleys, smashes, and serves. There is movement and footwork. There are hundreds of different types of rackets and many different schools of thought on the best way to play.
As you begin the project of learning you have to be able to focus on ignoring many of the details that are relevant to playing at a high level. This can be especially hard if your teacher is trying to push you to learn many different things at once.
You’ve probably heard this famous Bruce Lee quote:
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
In learning tennis you have to get comfortable with continuing to be quite bad at some things so you don’t get stuck in a trap of being mediocre at everything.
Momentum and The Mind
When you play a game of tennis, and it’s just you vs. your opponent, and you miss a serve it’s easy to get in a bad mental place. You start thinking “don’t do that again” and then you do it again. Now you’ve double-faulted and you have to walk to the other service box and you get tense because your afraid of doing it again.
On the court, there is no one else to step up while you get over your frustration. There’s nothing to distract you from the mistakes. If you don’t have mental fitness you can really spiral.
This is one of the reasons I think it’s a helpful game to learn as an adult. To play tennis consistently well you have to be conscious of your mindset and what you focus on. That translates directly into life off the court. You start to bring some of the positive self-talk and ability to direct your attention to moments of frustration at work or to forgive yourself for a mistake.
Losing
Tennis is an interesting game because a small advantage is skill leads to a clear difference in results. When the best team in the NBA plays the 15th best team it can often be a close game. Usually, the point spread would be only a few points.
When the best tennis player plays the 15th-best player in the world, the odds are usually highest for a straight-set victory.
As a beginner in tennis, it’s hard to even play the game. Then you get a little bit better and you can hit a few shots and you lose 0-6, 0-6.
If you are playing against people who are training and actively working on getting better it can take a long time before you can feel like it’s even a little competitive.
And in that process, it is easy to get comfortable losing. Especially since in a 1-on-1 game, winning often means that whoever you are playing against is losing, and they may not be taking that very well.
Getting consistent improvement then is about being about to focus on your process and not your results. You have to train yourself to win a game within the game, of competing with yourself.
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