If the only permanent thing in life is change, we must become not too attached to our habits, which we should first abandon.
Tag Archive for 'cambiare'
“To be able to face the youngest I had to reinvent my way to play tennis is constantly evolving.”
Federer shows that we can change even when we are 38.
At any age you can choose to change
You can always start over
as long as you are willing to make mistakes.
“Happiness does not come automatically. It is not a gift that good fortune bestows upon us and a reversal of fortune takes back. It depends on us alone. One does not become happy overnight, but with patient labor, day after day. Happiness is constructed, and that requires effort and time. In order to become happy, we have to learn how to change ourselves.”
Luca & Francesco Cavalli-Sforza
Tennis teaches me every day how easy it to play very bad for the players who are at the beginning of their professional career. These are young people, boys and girls of 18-21 years, who despite having quality of play and physical fitness cannot accept mistakes, are not confident in the court and negative about themselves. In other words, they are not tennis players accustomed to face errors and difficulties as normal and every days obstacles to overvome and above all they do not enjoy, because for them it’s an experience heavy and problematic. In my experience thing there are many more young people in the face of these difficulties choke rather than trying to master. The only way to change this situation is to start teaching to manage their emotions and thoughts in the court. At this regard, an important aspect to teach consists in the pause management (during the match but in the sessions too). Tennis players have to acquire a system allowing them to recover from the physical and mental fatigue, soon after, to get in the best mood to start a new point. This approach to the game should be practiced daily. They must know that the tennis technical and athletic component have to be trained along with the mental and that there is not a point in a game where all three are not present.
Who wants to know more information can contact me by email and receive an answer in a short time.
Often an obstacle to change is represented by the conviction to have no sufficient time available to change. The athletes often answer in this way but also their coaches, who usually do not spend time for psychological preparation, because they think to have already too many things to do. Once time to answer these objections I did long explanations about the importance of psychology and the efficient use of the mind. Then I found out that this answers had the only effect to reinforce the beliefs of my interlocutors, who continued to believe that they do not have time. At this point, I changed my approach. I started to respond by asking them if they had 15 minutes a day to devote to something else that was not the physical and technical training. Of course they all said yes, and on the basis of this positive response was easier for me to explain how to organize a mental workout in that short period of time.
To an athlete is not enough the talent to win. It is not enough to have the best physique. Not to be the smarter. These are all aspects useful but not decisive to win.
Winners adapt themselves better and more quickly to competitive situations coming moment to moment.
Athletes continuing to be successful are innovators in training and competition in a concrete, achievable and challenging way.
Balotelli can become a wasted talent, with the advantage of living in a golden world that relieves the failures with the money he earns in any case. Perhaps it will follow the way of Cassano, happy defeated in a Italian minor team, after having been the talent of Italian football. Eternal guys who do not accept the rules because they consider their talentsuperior to the need to respect them. Their problem is that they do not know they have a problem, for this reason they continue to repeat the same negative behaviors. The problem is represented instead by others, who do not understand them and that limit their footballing genius. Collaboration and team spirit are the social dimensions of which they ignore the meaning, there are only them, they are member of the Me-generation. Place themselves at the center of the world and they are the parameter to which the rules have to adjust. Narcissists: yes magnificently and truly negative. May be they couldchange, certainly if they understand that the world can do without them.
One of the reasons we often continue to persevere in habits and behaviors that we consider wrong depends on our emotional fear. It’s certainly easier and less demanding to be dominated by the desire to complain that happens when we repeat the classic phrase: “I knew it would be ended in this way.” We persist to defend ourselves by saying that we do not know what to do, it’s the fault of someone else or of bad luck that works against us or the fact that it is true that there is no other solution. These thoughts are commons and it is easy to fall down and they serve to mask our deepest fears. When the athletes commit the same mistake in a repetitive way, I often say to do something different, without being worried about the outcome, in the worst case they will commit another mistake but at least it will be different. To justify this lack of initiative we hide in saying “and if not okay?” More rarely we think that if it is not okay we will try to find the solution. This is because we are emotionally scared by the change, the more I feel the need ,the greater is the tendency to hide behind the reasoning. It’s important to learn how to talk with ourselves, asking what holds us back from changing a behavior or an idea and what we fear it could happen. We must never stop this dialogue, we are the main coach of ourselves. This quest for optimal emotional condition must occur not only in competition but also in training, because learning is a form of stress that gives rise to all forms of emotions from pleasure to displeasure, pride to shame and we must be able to manage for improve even more in the knowledge of ourselves.
