The Shame Spiral

Sometimes one can start a match playing pretty well; hitting the targets, moving well and making good decisions only to find oneself sliding inexorably into an infernal pit of despair. Often it seems to come out of nowhere, but only too often it seems to sprout from the germination, in the fertile soil of your brain, of a few unusual or particularly mortifying errors. This sign implies a vicious cycle: failure begets shame begets something? begets failure begets shame ... The question remains, what is that something? You cannot avoid failure in tennis - it is the very nature of the beast. Shame as a response to failure is also, regrettably, a non-optional, deeply integrated component of human nature and pretty much immutable. (I will gladly grant the existence of people and tennis players who seem to be completely shameless and take considerable benefit from that deficiency, but do you want to be one of those people?) So to break this cycle, we need to identify and manage the "something";

The Crisis of Consciousness

I and many others believe the missing link in this chain, the "something," is triggered by self-criticism resulting from a desperate desire to diagnose and treat unwanted errors. The constant yammering at oneself precipitates an exploding shame spiral. The mental chatter sounds something like this: "OK - OK, I am mishitting my forehand. What causes that? Oh yeah, I remember. Not watching the ball! Eureka! I must start staring at the ball intensely right now! I also have to remember not to over-swing."

"OK, no problem! Wait, now I hit the ball in the net. What could have caused that? Wait, was that the ball that just whizzed by me?" Of course, all this mental jibber-jabber happens in the cerebral cortex sending tidal waves of inhibitory neurotransmitters throughout the brain paralyzing the thalamus and any other part of the central nervous system involved in actually doing stuff like hitting a tennis ball. The result is a kind of deep paralysis and lack of any perceptible co-ordination or timing leading to, you guessed it, yet more failure. As this process progresses the failures become more bizarre and humiliating, and the shame spiral can drag one into self-recrimination - sometimes loud - always profane.

Now, if you think that this is a rare problem, if you think this is easy to fix and prevent or if you think that it is not a huge problem with your game, then you need to go back up to the top and reread it. The shame spiral is about you; about me, about everybody. It isn't Federer or Bjorn Borg, but it once was. Borg was a notorious hothead as a junior, but he overcame it and became a true Jedi warrior. Talented people are human too, but they recognize challenges and manage to overcome them. Of course, they have the advantage that they can fall back on their well-founded and deeply held beliefs that, all things being equal, they will always play better than 99% of the population. They make fewer bonehead errors, so they have less to ignore than the rest of us.

So, step one on the road to wellness is to leave all analysis including attention to, diagnosis of, treatment of and prevention of errors on the practice court. These tools are of no use to you in combat. The same applies to strategy and tactics. You must be in the game. I was always afraid to leave it all behind. After all, if I can't rely on a deeper understanding of the game, what do I have left to throw at my opponent? That which transcends tools, tactics, and strategy: faith in oneself.

Through faith, your deeper understanding of the game transcends consciousness and embeds itself into every part of your nervous system. It informs your choices, moves your feet, sequences your actions, and regulates your timing. It tells you when to tense up and when to relax.

Faith vs Belief

Here faith is not about belief in a deity or in anything else for that matter. Belief is always based on some confirmational observation; be it a burning bush or six ace serves in a row. Faith demands that you act on something in contradiction to all observable fact! That you hit your second serve with authority even after three double faults in a row. Why? Because if you don't, you are likely to puff the next one into the net.

Belief is a choice between alternatives, while faith is to act in the absence of alternatives. Faith is the best choice when there is no choice. It is un-rational but not irrational. Faith does not interpose itself between perception, intention, and action, so your responses are quick, affirmative, and effective. If you can't trust your body, then there is no path into the 'Zone'. Finding that path is about letting go. Don't think during a game; leave that to practice. When you do practice, remember to practice not thinking. Give thought an 'off' switch you can throw at will and then throw it whenever you find yourself in competition.

author's note - I am well aware that the preceding has the bitter taint of hypocrisy: That I would use analysis to indict analysis. Without understanding, improvement is impossible, even dangerous to one's game. The key is practice; both practice of strokes, footwork, and tactics under the careful direction of the mind and practice turning off the mind and learning to trust our bodies. It is not easy to trust something that has so often let us down, but that is the essence of faith; trusting in something when reason tells us not to. Stop trusting your ego; it is a compulsive liar. Instead, accept the awful truth; there is no alternative to faith; in one's body, one's game and oneself.