Beginning Tennis​​

1. Be Present

One way to define "choking" is when your mind is full of thoughts, which inhibits your body to play naturally. Choking happens when your mind is full. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is the intentional act of being present by focusing your awareness, objectively and without judgement. It is the emptying of the mind and simply being observant in the present.

 

Here's a quick mindfulness exercise: Clear your mind of any thoughts and then breathe deeply. Focus only on the physical feelings of breathing—your lungs expanding, air escaping your nostrils, and so on. Other thoughts will pop into your head, but gently bring your awareness back to your breath.  Now, examine your mood without judgement. What emotions are you feeling? Perhaps you're feeling anxious. If so, it's natural to immediately shift your thoughts to blame, guilt, or worry. In this exercise, however, simply acknowledge your feelings of anxiety. Accept their existence; no judgement. Remember, you are not your missed hit; you are a child of God with celestial potential. Godhood is growing within you. Sometimes it's easy to let your ego get wrapped up in your ability to hit the ball on a certain day.

 

2. Identify Mental Triggers

As you continue to practice being present, you'll observe that you will generally experience an emotional reaction to triggers. (Triggers are the events that cause these emotions to naturally arise.)  Eventually, you'll discover that you can't control the emotions that arise. You cannot stop yourself from feeling. However, you can control how you react to these emotions.

 

The next time a self-sabotaging thought process begins, momentarily remove yourself from the situation emotionally by stepping into an observer's role and ask yourself: How do I feel? Anxious? Guilty? What was my mood leading up to that point? How did my environment impact my feelings? It is crucial to do this objectively and without judgment, otherwise it's common to start blaming yourself and/or others. While you might feel you deserve it, mental self-sabotage is never worth the cost, even if you believe you're "motivating" yourself. Think about it. Was there ever a time you submitted to an immediate emotional outburst and ended up a better person for it? Probably not. Afterwards, you likely experienced a moral failing of sorts due to the inability to exercise the willpower to turn away your desires. But that's not true. In reality, our willpower is a limited commodity. Making mistakes doesn't mean you are a bad person; it means you're human.

 

3. Avoid Known Mental Triggers

The next time you feel yourself about to submit to self-sabotage, follow this process:

 

1. Examine your trigger. Think about the rationalization and answer the following question: when you gave into it previously, did the outcome ever leave you better off? Probably not.

2. Employ mindfulness to examine your feelings leading up to the event. Maybe even before your co-worker handed you a cupcake, you had celebratory feelings. You then felt pressure after being offered a cupcake and guilt after finishing it. When these emotions start coming on, examine them objectively, and without judgment. You may want to write this pattern down for future you.

3. Realize that you are not your emotions. Think about the last time you felt this emotional pattern—you probably had the same urge to self-sabotage, right? (E.g., tell yourself you suck at tennis and you should just quit.) Note: It's not a moral failing if you have the urge to binge eat, binge drink, or watch The Bachelor. The urge is not inherently bad. You cannot control your feelings. You are responsible, however, for what you choose to do with them.

4. Determine the root emotion behind your urges. Perhaps you are bringing a stress from a relationship or work onto the court with you. Realize that your "need" to get down on yourself may be a result of feeling a lack of control or a sense of worthlessness regarding a project deadline you're faced with later that week. If you can identify the root emotion or problem, you can disassociate it with your current actions. 

5. Distract yourself with something else and focus on how great your future you will feel. Now that you have disassociated your emotions with your actions, do something neutralizing. Go to your towel, high five your partner, reconnect with your breath, relax, slow things down. Focus on how good you will feel now that you have successfully decoupled your emotions from your actions. Know that because of this win, you're less likely to sabotage yourself in the future.

 

4. Combat Mental Triggers by Practicing Mindfulness

You might fail the first few times that you try this exercise. That's ok. Practice self-compassion and stick with it, knowing that you'll make improvements over time. Change doesn't happen over night. You wouldn't get angry at yourself if you fell while learning to ride a bike, would you? Instead of just getting frustrated and thinking change will never happen for you, take emotionally-removed, nightly notes of exactly what went wrong during that day and commit to paying closer attention the next time a self-sabotaging event occurs. One of the most empowering and rewarding feelings is overcoming (not subjugating yourself to) an event/trigger using mindfulness, rather than willpower or self-control. You'll then realize that your self-sabotage is not a moral failing; you just hadn't taken the training wheels off yet.

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Scripture

John 14:27 — "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid."

 

Text Source: (Lifehacker)

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