Hi, once again thanks for joining us here on The Tennis Menu.
Today is all about creating habits. Habits to me a critical for us tennis coaches and parents to create in our players and our children from a young age. Why? Because habits are hard to create and they take time, but habits are also hard to break. So once you create the right habit, you're going to find it very hard to get out of. On the flip side of that, if you create the wrong habit, it's extremely hard to get out of that habit, so we need to form the right habits and behaviors in our children and players from an early age.
There's a quote that I really love and it's...
"You don't rise to the occasion, you sink to your habits."
If you want to rise to an occasion and play a great tennis match, it's only on the back of what your habits and behaviors are on a regular basis. If you regularly get up at 7am in the morning and that's your normal time, and all of a sudden one day you have to catch a flight that is a 6am, meaning you need to be up at 4 o'clock in the morning, it is really challenging to break your 7am habit of waking up and it feels awkward. You feel out of routine, out of rhythm you don't wake up early in terms of your mindset, in terms of physicality you find it hard. It's different, it's out of your comfort zone.
So what we try to do is we create habits in our kids every day. The same thing that we would want them to do later on in life, whether it be in tennis as a warm-ups, whether it be elite training behaviors of intensity and work rate, or standards and mental discipline. It's about creating those right habits from the word go, so when you go to a tournament and you're gonna watch that player play, they bring the habits from training. So for me as a coach, it's important to train the habits.
I'm notorious for doing that on the practice court. I make sure the intensity is the same, the standards are the same, the mindset is the same, the warm-up at the start is the same and everybody must repeat the habit day-in day-out.
"Once you get to that tournament, you're going to sink to those habits, so form the right habits from the word go."
It takes time, it takes years to make them a habit. They're only behaviors for so long. Let's form those right habits and make sure that it's every single day, and catch yourself out when you're not doing the right habit, because it will make you a better player later on.
So good luck with forming those habits. I think it's an important part of becoming a solid human being as well as a fantastic tennis player.