As we dive into the mental side of doubles over the next several weeks, I wanted to share 3 mental myths that many doubles players believe. Join the newsletter for more mental lessons.
Once you stop believing these and reframe your mindset, you'll be a better doubles player.
I'll explain how to think about each of these myths differently, so you play better under pressure, don't feel so bad when you miss, and play doubles the right way more often.
The Mental Game Masterclass will launch at the end of March.
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As we dive into the mental side of doubles over the next several weeks, I wanted to share 3 mental myths that many doubles players believe. Join the newsletter for more mental lessons.
Once you stop believing these and reframe your mindset, you'll be a better doubles player.
I'll explain how to think about each of these myths differently, so you play better under pressure, don't feel so bad when you miss, and play doubles the right way more often.
The Mental Game Masterclass will launch at the end of March.
-----
**Join the #1 Doubles Strategy Newsletter for Club Tennis Players**
**Doubles Strategy Courses** These video courses will help you play smarter doubles and make winning easier.
**Doubles Ebooks** These guides offer proven advice to improve your doubles strategy.
Today I'll cover three mental myths that you need to stop believing to become a great doubles player. But before we get to that, a few quick announcements. So I'm recording this on Tuesday, the 27th of February, this will go live on the 28th, and I'm going to be driving down to Austin, texas, for the ATX Open. I'll be there through Sunday. So if you're listening to this and you're attending and want to watch some doubles with me, then shoot me an email will. At thetennis tribecom. I'll also be at Indian Wells starting next Thursday through the following Tuesday and then I'm considering going to Miami and the Houston Open as well, which is in early April. So if you're attending any of those, definitely reach out. I would love to meet you and watch some doubles.
Speaker 1:This is the beginning of our focus on kind of the mental side of doubles. This is a very intangible side. It's not as clear as a lot of the strategy that I've taught in the past. Obviously, in January and early February we went over net play strategy. That ended in the net play video masterclass and this is going to end in a masterclass as well. But a lot of this is a little bit, like I said, less tangible. It's a little more difficult to prescribe, position yourself here or move to this spot. When you see this, the mental side is very kind of taboo and I wanted to start with some myths that I feel like a lot of players, especially at the club level, believe, but they're not true and if you can kind of get over these, then I believe it will help you become a more confident and better doubles player. I'll be releasing more mental lessons on the Instagram channel, the YouTube channel and then also in the newsletter. So if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, be sure to subscribe. This past week I went over how to prepare for a match mentally and actually gave you a um, an exact kind of 30 to 45 minute warmup that I like to follow before my matches. That helped me come out of the gates uh, really strongly and uh prepare both physically and mentally. So go to the tennis tribecom and you can subscribe to the newsletter on the homepage and all of those newsletter lessons that I write out sometimes it's a video um are for newsletter subscribers only, so you have to be subscribed to get that access to those uh, to those lessons.
Speaker 1:So anyways, let's dive into these three mental myths. So number one is great players don't get nervous. So a lot of us think that Nadal or Djokovic or Serena or Federer or Venus or whoever it is, they are pro players and they just don't get nervous in the same way that we do. The reality is, everyone gets nervous. Even Novak Djokovic, even Serena Williams, even Rafael Nadal everybody gets nervous and they, the nerves, affect everyone the same. So that feeling you get when you have a second serve in your down break point to lose the set or to lose the match, or even to win the match, um, if you're sort, trying to serve out the match, uh, that's the same nervous feeling that the pro level players get. So what is the difference between them and us? Uh, a, I believe that it is they have more experience dealing with those nerves, so they play obviously a lot more tennis and they're in those pressure situations more often, so they know how to handle the nerves. But that doesn't mean that over time, those nerves go away.
Speaker 1:If you watched the, the 60 minutes, um, I think it was last fall with Djokovic. He talked about how, um, he still gets nervous in his matches and, um, one of the things that they learned to do is, uh, what I like to call dance with the fear. So, um, there's a an author that I follow named Seth Godin, and he uh uses this phrase called dance with the fear. You have to learn how to dance with the fear. So, when you get nervous, you have to figure out what works best for you and learn how to, um, not get upset with yourself for getting nervous, not try to get rid of the nerves, but learn how to act with courage despite the nerves. Learn how to uh serve and volley because you know it's the right strategy, even though you're nervous about coming forward. Or Make that poach across the the net, even though You're scared you might get beat down the line. You have to really use courage and act despite the nervous energy that you have. So there's a lot of things that can help with this. I'm not gonna cover them all here, but you do have to figure out what works best for you and kind of go through your Routines and have kind of a game plan for when you do get nervous, because it it does happen to everyone.
Speaker 1:So let's move on to myth number two. This is the myth that losing a point is bad. So this is simply not true. The the best players in the world. This is a stat of throwing around in the past. I don't think I've mentioned it on the show in a while, but the best players in the world win about 55% of their points. This is a stat I learned from Craig O'Shaughnessy at brain game tennis. It's for singles players. The same is true for doubles players in general. If you win a match let's say 64 63 you're gonna win about 55 to 60% of those points. So if you think about that another way, that means if you played an 11 pointer, you're gonna win that match about 11, 9 or 11, 8, which you would consider a pretty close 11 pointer. But the match turns out to be 6, 3, 6, 4 and it's a relatively straightforward win for you. So the margins are very, very small. So you have to think about when you're.
Speaker 1:When you lose a point, you have to think about why you lost that point. So what if you forced a low percentage down the line shot and they made it? So that's okay, that's a shot that they're only gonna make three, maybe four out of ten times. So you're gonna win six out of ten of those points. And that was just one of those three or four shots. But that's okay, you had a good process, you did the right things and they came up with a good shot. But that's not gonna be sustainable for them throughout the course of the match. So losing that point, losing a point that way, is not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing because they might think that they can make that six out of ten times. But you know that it's a low percentage shot and they probably won't do that. And if they do start to make it consistently, obviously you make an adjustment.
Speaker 1:If you in the point with a missed easy volley or a missed easy overhead up at the net, that's not a bad point to lose. That's actually A point that you had such a good process that it resulted in a pretty easy Put away shot for you that you just happened to miss, and you'll make that shot Seven, eight, nine out of ten times. So if you continue that process, you're probably going to win the point. So we constantly have to be thinking about this kind of six out of ten number At the end of each point. Ask yourself Was that a six out of ten point where I'm gonna win at least six out of ten of those, or was that a four out of ten point when I'm only going to win, you know, three or four out of ten of those. And if you can play more of those kind of six out of ten Points where you have a good process, where you're doing the right things, where you're forcing low percentage shots, then you're going to increase your odds of winning the match. So losing a point is just part of the game of tennis. It's not something that needs to be avoided at all costs. Just because you lost a point doesn't mean you had a bad process. You should actually look at it from that kind of 6 out of 10 and 4 out of 10 perspective.
Speaker 1:Another point on this is that some points will set up later, more important points. So a lot of times early in a match, if you, let's say, you hit a ball down the line at the opposing net player, they volley it through the middle and you lost the point, that might be a good point to lose because you're showing them that you're willing to hit that ball down the line and that might open up the cross court return or cross court rally a little bit later because they're nervous You're going to go for that down the line shot again. So you're sacrificing that one point early in the match to open up the cross court shot later in the match, which means you're going to win 2, 3, 4 extra points by sacrificing that one point early. Or maybe you're moving a bunch at the net early in the match and you're going to miss a couple of volleys or get beat down the line, but ultimately that's going to apply a lot of pressure on that baseline player and they're going to create a lot more errors as a result of your movement. So sometimes you have to lose points early to win more points later in the match.
Speaker 1:So losing a point is not a bad thing. You really need to look into why you lost the point and if it's a good process. Again, think about those percentages and that kind of 6, 7 out of 10 number and asking yourself that at the end of the point. So the third mental myth that we need to stop believing is if you miss or get beat down the line, it's your fault that you lost the point. So I see this all the time at the club level. It frustrates me a lot. Even I find myself doing it sometimes, which I know I shouldn't, but people will miss a shot or they'll poach and miss the volley or they'll get beat down the line because they're too far to the middle and they'll walk back to their partner and they'll say oh, I'm sorry, my bad. In reality that is not your fault.
Speaker 1:There's doubles as a team sport. If you listen to my interview with Neil Skupsky, I talked to him about the first match they played at the Dallas Open, where his partner, santiago Gonzalez, is the player who got broken. He had more break points faced on his serve and I had asked Santi about that in the post match interview and Neil was very quick to jump in and say well, just because we were struggling more with Santi, serve doesn't mean his serve is the problem. It could be that I missed too many volleys at the net or I wasn't moving well enough. So it's a team sport and every single point has so much detail and nuance that you can't blame one person. Not only is it incorrect, it's also unhelpful and it kind of can ruin your team chemistry a little bit. It can kind of degrade that a bit.
Speaker 1:So if you move and miss a volley and you go back and say I'm sorry, or you think it's your fault, well, what if you missed the volley because your partner gave the opponent a short forehand and they had an easy shot that they ripped down the line at you or they hit cross court and you were trying to poach. Then it's your partner's fault for giving them the short forehand right. But what if they got the short forehand because you were hugging the alley when your partner was serving, so the opponent had a really easy big cross court return. They hit this big cross court return. Your partner was back at the baseline defending. It resulted in a short, easy forehand for the opponent and then you missed the volley. So maybe it's your fault because you were hugging the alley too much. But what if you were hugging the alley because your partner has a really weak second serve and the opponent has ripped it down the line at you and you feel like you're getting picked on up there?
Speaker 1:So we can keep going through this on every single point. We can constantly blame one person, then blame the other, then blame, and it's just not very helpful. So there's no reason to think about it in terms of you know, it's my fault we lost that point or it's your fault we lost that point. Let's instead kind of problem solve together and figure out what can we do to improve our odds of winning these future points? If it's the case that we diagnose it all the way back to a weak second serve and my hands aren't good enough with your second serve, the combination of your second serve and the opponent's really strong return, then maybe I need to step back a little bit. Or maybe we need to play two back on your second serve even, which is something I've done in the past.
Speaker 1:I don't recommend it a lot, but there are scenarios where it makes sense. So you really have to think about this as a team and not go into blaming yourself or blaming your partner if you lose a specific point. Really, the only point that is your fault specifically is a double fault, and even that there's scenarios where it may not be. Maybe there was a point earlier where the game should have been over and you really shouldn't even be serving anymore. Or maybe your partner really wants to run this formation and it's having you double fault more often than you normally would. There's always scenarios. So, outside of the double fault, I think in general you cannot blame yourself or your partner for a lost point.
Speaker 1:So those are three mental myths that hopefully have helped clarify for you and help you think about them in a different way. They can help you going forward into your next match. So, again, we're going to be covering this a lot more over the next month. I'm hoping to have the master class available by the end of March. That's the plan right now. Like I said, I've got a lot of travel over the next several weeks, so we'll see how it goes. But if you all have any questions, you can always reach out. If you're going to be attending any of the tournaments that I mentioned before, reach out. I would love to meet you and I will talk to you all soon.