Don't be a choker

The greatest players are those who can find a way to win from any situation. How do you become one of them? Dane Barclay provides some advice.

It's a great feeling when you are playing a perfect match; shots are hitting their target and victory seems assured. It's a completely different experience when we start to tighten up in crucial moments, we get distracted and lose our focus. To quote a well known tennis term, we start to choke.

It is not the difficulty of the task - but the enormity of the moment. The problem is not ability but nerve. This, of course, is the essence of performance psychology.

So, why are so many of us inclined to tighten up at precisely the moment when tightening up is most devastating? Why are we so prone to fail when we most want to succeed?

Choking under pressure is often equated to thinking too much about what you are doing, because you are worrying about losing the lead in a match, or worrying about failing in general. From a psychological perspective, the experiences that drive choking are based around catastrophisation (i.e. "I need to win this point, if I don't then I'm ruined!"). You may even notice feelings of anxiety led by tightness or fatigue.

Paradoxically the range of behaviours you try to counteract this anxiety by controlling your game (i.e. a change in attention) often gets you further away from committing to the right shots and tactics to win you the match. This stress and anxiety can lead players trying to control every aspect of what they are doing to guarantee success, such as the need to quickly and ineffectively try to win points and wrestle back "momentum", or a tightening and/or changing of the service action - which impacts on the serve speed and the ability of the opponent to return serve well.

When you try to ineffectively control your game, you will tend to pull away from your game plan, shifting your focus from your game plan and winning each point to simply trying not to lose.

Rather than going for your shots that you would execute well a thousand times in practice, you may play overly safe, or even overly aggressive trying to force points. You may even get more and more frustrated or anxious that you are not winning points that you should be - because your mind goes on to removing discomfort (anxiety) by trying to ineffectively control your game - this then further impairs your capacity to make effective decisions, committing to the right shots under pressure and increases the behaviours that lead to choking.

This is the reality:

1. Whenever your perform and find yourself in high-stakes situations where performing your best carries implications for future opportunities and success, you will experience stress.
2. Tennis matches and the professional circuit are NOT places where you can consistently feel confident, anxiety free and comfortable.

Yet, when playing tennis, we keep trying to feel anxiety free, this is a problem as it reinforces performance inconsistency and the susceptibility to "choke" when it counts.

Four key things to know:

Competition mythology

Tennis tournaments are exactly the place for you to experience stress and pressure. If you spend your time, energy and effort trying to remove stress and pressure, you are wasting effort and focus on the wrong things, it becomes more difficult to "handle" the big matches.

The need to be positive is a problem

So much has been written about needing to "believe" and be positive when playing tennis. Being positive is not a problem, however the need to be and feel positive is. All top players feel a range of emotions when competing (they're human just like you). It is not an absence of anxiety or stress that allows them to focus and win, it's that they focus on what is actually important when they're stressed - behaviours that lead to consistent performance.

Understand how you respond under stress

Understanding and raising awareness to what is actually going on for you under stress is key to be able to do something about it, when it counts. If you don't have awareness, your dominant emotional and behavioural responses will kick in, and it becomes a lot harder not to choke.

Develop your tolerance to anxiety.

"If you don't want anxiety, you've already got it." In effect, you become anxious about having anxiety. Increasing your willingness to experience stress actually has the benefit of reducing your stress so you can focus on what is truly important when it counts.

These are some of the key skills that will help you retain your focus when it truly counts, the important thing to do is put these into practice on the court and be willing to experience discomfort. Over the course of my career in psychology, I have developed techniques to enhance athletes' willingness to experience discomfort with great results.

Make no mistake - what separates the chokers from the great tennis players are those who are willing to experience stress and commit to their game plan when it really counts and those who can only do so when feeling comfortable and stress free.

This article originally appeared in Australian Tennis Magazine, February 2013 issue.