Staying Positive

Talented athletes spend a lot of time in the Zone. They seem to find it quickly and, and when they drift out of it, they seem to have some internal map that brings them back promptly. They are impervious to stress, angst, fear, and shame. When they get the short ball at 40-30 in the third set, they step up and put it away. Those of us bereft of talent have none of these qualities. We float randomly in and out of the Zone, never spending much time there and completely unable to maintain it when stressed or embarrassed. In a feeble attempt to find our way back to the Zone, we instinctively turn to inner coaching. Unfortunately, our inner coach is an ornery, negative a son of a bitch who seems to have a wondrous talent for identifying our faults and chastising us for them but appears completely incapable of suggesting a positive plan for success. The simple but powerful solution to this vexing problem is the Positive Feedback Checklist. The feedback checklist is a set of affirmative solutions specifically designed to treat the psychological syndromes that break down our performance. Based on the relationship between the thymus and the cerebrum, the items on the checklist are concrete suggestions of what we need to do to fix ourselves, not vague negative critiques like ";Don't hit the ball so hard!" "Move your feet!""Stop hitting short!" "Don't miss that shot!". Instead checklist items are designed to be very specific and positive solutions to specific problems, for example "Get into dynamic balance!"

The most important difference between positive and negative suggestions is the part of the brain you are addressing. When you command yourself not to do something, you are speaking to the cerebral cortex, a big, fat, NO engine, full of stogey old inhibitory neurons. The cortex is the seat of the ego and knows nothing about winning a tennis game. Instead you need to speak to the thalamus, the seat of athletic excellence. It is much simpler than the cortex and way more affirmative. It just needs to know what you want to hit and when and it will go to work. The problem with telling yourself not to do something, such as not to hit the ball too hard, is that there is still an infinite number of possible ways left over to mess up the stroke; hitting the ball too soft, for example.

The cortex will pick up this message and start throwing off switches all over your brain. A specific positive command such as, such as to hit the ball a bit harder, is easy to follow and doesn't affect any other part of the stroke. It is an affirmative message, perfectly packaged for the thalamus, which will tweak the stroke a bit for more pace. In that case, you try the next item on the list. Trained athletes naturally use positive admonitions to find the Zone in real time. "Get to the ball quicker!" , "Racket back!", "Hit the ball flatter!" are specific functions that are easy to apply and give immediate feedback. Of course, gifted players have had 10-20 years of coaches yelling positive suggestions in their ears. Eventually, those messages are internalized and played back when appropriate, often without the player knowing what is happening. The result, when combined with natural body, court and game senses, is an uncanny ability to find their way back into the Zone when they drift out of it.

Since we were bereft of the kind of flashy athletic ability that gets one identified and "chosen" by the tennis coaching community, we have to be our own coaches. Since we don't possess the kind of intuitive sense of what is working for us and what is not, we must be much more formal and more specific about the fixes we apply. A real jock understands what "Step into the ball" means. The jock translates that into "Get your feet unglued from the court, bend your knees, on your toes, transfer weight as needed to stay in dynamic balance!" The differently talented such as myself interprets that as meaning "Plant your right foot then plant your left foot and then hit the ball!" My inability to truly understand the language of the talented might be the reason why, as a child, no tennis coaches, saw fit to take me under their wings. The communication from talented coach to talented player is in a certain kind of code that only the truly gifted understand. It is talent to talent. The purpose of this work is to break the code and learn how the differently talented can be our own coaches. The positive feedback checklist figures prominently in that regard.