Tennis Court Behaviour

Throughout the past few weeks and months I have been attempting to alter my behavior whilst on a tennis court, many times when I play or execute a poor decision or shot I often react in a negative way with negative thoughts such as doubt as well as negative actions like: shouting, throwing my racket or hitting the tennis ball out of frustration. This often leads me to lose concentration, which in turn increases my frustration as I will continue to lose points as well as stile thinking about the error i made before. It is very important that I change this behavior because it will allow me to maintain focus throughout tennis matches, furthermore I will offer much less of a mental advantage to my opponents as they will not know how I am feeling

I have attempted before to change this behavior however unfortunately although it managed to work for many months, I the fell into a deep slump and my frustration and anger grew and grew until a point when I didn't know how to deal with it so I cracked my racket which actually gave me a cathartic effect as since then I haven't played poorly in weeks. However, this is not what I would like to do regularly therefore i need to find a way to eradicate these negative behaviors and actions on court. After the period of me tracking my negative behaviors and starting to try to change them I expected to become much more relaxed whilst on court, fully eradicate if not significantly reduce my negative behaviors and actions, and in turn feel much more confident and focused on

In the first week I reacted negatively to the situation 54% of the time, this was clearly because I had yet to teach myself how to effectively use these techniques. Week two I began to observe a great improvement in the amount of positive reactions that occurred, in fact I reacted positively to making an error or poor decision 62% of the time, mainly I used positive self-talk this week because i was still teaching myself visualization techniques. Week three I continued to record an improvement and this week saw me react positively 76% of the time, This week i really started to use visualization as a technique to improve my confidence and focus in negative situations. Finally week four saw the most positive behaviors where 83% of the time I reacted positively using all three techniques effectively to avoid negative