ABOUT ME

MENTAL TRAINER FOR TENNIS PLAYERS & COACHES

Passionate about competitive sports as a search for self-improvement
Committed to personal growth as a way of life
Concern for the development of socio-emotional skills of young people

My story

Competition has always been part of my life since I was a teenager, both through sport and later at a business level. I started competing at the age of 15 in weightlifting, a very thankless individual sport with many hours of training and then a quick verdict in a few seconds where you risk all the preparation of many months. Despite seeming like a purely physical sport, it included a lot of technique and, above all, the need for great mental strength.
As a teenager, I became National University Sub-Champion in France for 2 years in a row, and I could already realize that many competitors trained very hard but when they competed they mentally collapsed even before trying.

The labour part

I lived my world of work in the export trade area as a duality between a tactical game of chess where you had to move the right pieces at the right time, and at the same time a coliseum full of gladiators (my competitors) where only one wins and takes the award. It was a daily pressure, first to get a base salary, and then the motivation to reach commercial agreements with large accounts such as Inditex, Repsol, Mango, among others

My personal process

But my great personal change began when my mother died in 2016. Something unknown inside broke and I felt a feeling of internal emptiness. It’s as if nothing made sense anymore and I felt totally lost, although apparently I had everything.

These circumstances led me to start a long path of personal growth of several years (which continues today) with the learning of tools (Sports Coaching, personal psychotherapy, Meditation, Yoga, … among others) that helped me understand where I came from my internal pain and being able to heal it through self-knowledge and the development of emotional skills.

This long road led me to create a more aware version of myself, with more empowerment, and develop more resources to face life’s challenges and also feel an inner peace that makes you feel happier.

Tennis Mental Coaching

The TENNIS MENTAL COACHING project was created based on my passion for tennis, my eagerness for competition, and my interest and curiosity about how the human mind works.

My vision is to be able to revert to others everything that I have been able to learn both with my training process and personally.

Tennis players both at the pre-competition level and ITF-ATP players (as well as many coaches) need to know themselves better from the inside out, understand how they work, know what moves them inside when they get angry, how the accompaniment of parents impacts in the children, and being able to develop skills and routines that help them improve their sports performance in competition, as well as having more resources as people.

If you feel identified with this vision and feel that it is your moment to undertake a deep personal and sporting work, I will be delighted to support you on this path.

REFLECTIONS ON COACHING

Being an aware Coach

Coaching

A conscious coach is a person who has internal concerns with a real interest in being a better version of himself, a seeker who wants to improve his skills to better support his players with an inclusive vision that not only putting the focus on the players better sports performance, but also committed to becoming better people on and off the court.

COACHING tries to get the coach to help and guide the players so that they discover and develop, through experimentation and error, resources that allow them to be autonomous to face their adversities. (and each player has their own)
This coach profile requires a process of self-knowledge and personal transformation to develop skills such as real listening, communication, being present, leadership, realizing and acknowledging one’s own limitations, difficulties and fears,… working on the person behind the coach, with the aim of being more aware to broaden their internal gaze and create a more empathetic bond that is a source of personal growth for everyone.

Be present

Presence is one of the fundamental pillars to be a conscious coach.
To be present, I first need to become aware of my own emotional state, how I get on-court, what mental noise is present in me, how it is affecting me and how it can influence training.
Why all this?
If I am not aware of it, I am not going to realize how my own energy can negatively influence the quality of training.

So, before starting any activity training, it is important first to CHECK :

How I am this morning?
What are the issues that move me ?
Can I solve it now? (if not, just put this matter asid)
If I’m aware of how I am, I can start redirect them
Also, some relaxation technique can be applied to release internal tension

BE PRESENT allows you :

To be more AWARE of yourself as a Coch and as a person
To have a deep active listening of your players
To understand them better
To be able to see what can they need
Be finer in the capacity of supporting them

Error as a source of learning

It is important to facilitate and develop a context where error is valued as a source of learning and to support the player so that he can change his relationship with the error and transform it into an opportunity instead of seeing it as a failure and generating a fear of error.

The power od words

Language is one of the fundamental components from which we build our mental models.
It is important to choose well the words we use to convey and convey to the player what we propose.
Depending on what word we use when talking to a player, we can motivate him or, on the contrary, hurt him and achieve the opposite of what we would like.

How am I “here and now”?

How do you think it could affect your coaching, if for example, you had a “fight” with your partner or with your children before leaving home? How irritated will you get to the Academy? How will you talk to your players?

If you don’t have an inside look at how you are doing, chances are your emotional state is going to influence your coaching. For this reason, it is important to become more aware of how we are at all times so that our personal discomfort influences our environment as little as possible and does not interfere with the suport of the players.

Put the focus on the “YES”

How many times have you told your players “don’t hit parallel”, “don’t yell”, “don’t raise your elbow”, “don’t talk to your teammates while I’m talking”….etc

And if I tell you now: “don’t think about a pink elephant”… what did you just think about?
Well yes, probably on that pink elephant.
The unconscious does not register the “NO” (DON’T). Focus on the action that you DO (YES) want the player to do, rather than telling them what you don’t want them to do.
What would it be like to focus on what if?
For example, “hit that ball across,” “try to stay calm,” “keep your elbow close to your body,” or say “it’s important to me that you all listen when I’m speaking.” Test it !!!

Work with the interpretation of the reality

It is essential to take into account that every human being sees “reality” from a different individual perspective depending on the “glasses” with which we see and interpret the world

If you show a photo of Paris with a tour-eiffel and ask each participant to put a word representing what they see, you will realize that there can be as many interpretations as there are people,…
For this reason, it is important to discover with what “glasses” the player sees and interprets the game situations, since it does not have to be at all like ours.
It is necessary to enter into the “internal world” of the player to get into his/her mind and understand how he/she interprets his/her reality to better support him/her.

What is behind the “bad” behavior?

To understand that behavior, we must delve into the deepest layers of our identity, made up of our experiences, our culture, our personality, our education, our family and social relationships, our beliefs, our values… that influence that behavior. .

Therefore, when you have a player who has bad behavior, you look beyond what you see, show a real interest in empathizing with him and help him and discover what is influencing that bad behavior and you will help him change his behavior.

A systemic work including the parents 

In my experience as a Mental Coach and therapist, I was able to verify the need to work with parents who are a factor of great influence on how children/adolescents behave

Apart from working with the minor players in Mental Coaching, I also work with the parents. The player is part of a system made up of their parents and family, coaches, friends, colleagues, couples,… etc.
If we work only with the “core” (the player) but do not intervene in his system, we may be doing work against the current due to the emphasis that his system is interfering with the player.

Talk less and observe more

While one speaks, there is no room for observation. Constantly giving opinions and instructions on the court is usually a symptom of poor listening and sometimes that the coach’s “ego” is triggered and he needs to “show” how much he knows to his players, or to justify and defend his coaching position due to a low self-concept or self-esteem of the coach (fear of losing his position) that enters into a feeling of worthlessness, or what others may think if they do not see a coach who is constantly talking shows how much you know.

We have the misconception that a coach has to be speaking and commenting often.
Be more observant, look at the details (gestures, body language, tone of voice, looks, facial expression,…) that will give you a lot of information about what the player is going through.

Ask the player

I have seen coaches who believe they always know what is happening to the player and give instructions based on that supposed certainty.

We don’t have a “crystal ball” and often we don’t know what is happening to the player. For this reason, it is important to validate with the player himself what is happening inside him.
For example, ask him directly: “What is happening to you? What are you up to? What is making you angry at the moment? What has touched you internally?”
The player will feel that the coach has a real interest in knowing how he is doing and the coach will show humility and empathy towards his player, which will create a closer relationship and trust between them.

The communication frequencies

There are 3 levels of communication from which we relate: cognitive (mental), emotional and physical, and we usually use all 3 channels.

However, we usually have a main channel from which we tend to communicate more.

For good communication, it is preferable for the coach to identify the player’s communication frequency; Because if you as a coach are above all mental and your player is very emotional, the “mental” information that you transmit to them will not reach them since they are not on the same frequency to communicate well. Therefore, identify in which main communication frequency your player communicates / through the words he uses (if he is emotional, he will use more words like “I feel” and if he is more mental, he will use words like “I think”).

What style of leader are you ?

In your way of being a coach, what is your leadership style?
From POSITIVE DISCIPLINE, an educational model with great acceptance to learn to accompany children and adolescents to relate not from punishment or from being too permissive, but from a more assertive and respectful approach, based on communication, Love, understanding and empathy.

Its creator Alfred ADLER explains that the person is a social being and that the way of interacting with others is extremely important and is made up of 2 fundamental aspects: The sense of belonging and the ability to cooperate.

I like to use cartoons so that the different styles of communicator and leader can be seen very clearly:

THE PREACHER
THE MOBSTER
THE SMARTY
THE ASSERTIVE

The Preacher: he is the coach who usually makes sermons and they are repeated enough to almost beg, and with endless explanations and long moral content speeches.

Consequences: If the coach lectures the player repeatedly with the same speech as a “broken record” and that clearly does not produce changes, in the end the effect on the player is that they stop listening to something that they already know they are going to hear and not feel part of the group

The Mobster: is the coach who uses a coercive method, he usually uses threats and punishes and can even yell at his players using threats and blackmail to get what he wants, and withdrawing the expected gratification or using it as a bribe.

Consequences: When a player feels that he has had to give in to force majeure, he can feel humiliated, his feeling of inferiority increases and his feeling of belonging decreases

The Smarty: he is a coach who speaks sarcastically and in a pedantic way and reprimands the players after the situation has occurred as they had warned and makes them feel bad: “see?”, “how do you know more than Nadal, TRUE? If you had listened to me, this would not have happened. I already told you that you didn’t have to play like that.” The irony that he uses is usually harmful and lowers the player.

Consequences: The implicit message is that your coach is the one in the right and you better listen to him next time. The player not only suffers the aftertaste of failure but also the humiliation by the coach who reminds him that he was right. It is unnecessary to emphasize his mistake since the player himself will already remember it perfectly.

The assertive: is a coach who knows when, what, and how much to speak, as well as apply active listening when it is time. He is empathetic and knows how to put himself in the player’s place and at the same time can be a manager in a respectful way so that the players carefully apply the proposed work.

Consequences: This coach profile is respected for what it is (BEING) and not so much for what it does but how it does it. He is usually a model for the players and his style favors the development of values, as well as a sense of belonging and the ability to cooperate.

Individual sessions

First, individual MENTAL COACHING sessions take place both on and off the court. My experience leads me to work in an integrative way; that is to say that both the sports part, as well as the personal part and the systemic component are worked on.

Also, teenagers & Juniors bring a personal history and it is important to take into account their vital experience in order to integrate their personal skills, identify and improve their difficulties to enhance their performance on the court

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The strength of the group

First of all, my learning of personal growth has allowed me to experience that group work is a great tool to learn to see how I relate to my environment, what is my learning through colleagues, to be able to share experiences, what role does the competitiveness in the group, what development of emotional skills I acquire and how I learn to resolve conflicts or difficulties in my environment.

Secondly, the benefit of these group experiences (through specific dynamics) is reflected on-court in improving emotional management, learning to solve situations and difficulties, as well as improving decision making.

Finally, this work can be done on and off the court, where specific situations and conditions are created that will test their ability and abilities to overcome, and give them tools to improve their skills.

The systemic part

First of all, each teenagers & Juniors needs to feel part of their group and to be recognized and accepted. There are various groups such as the sports group, the family, the school group, friends, … etc). This need to belong, according to Maslow and other authors, is a fundamental need of the human being.

In addition, parents are the first systemic circle where each teenager is nurtured and where they begin to develop their bases: their references, communication, skills and beliefs, emotional learning,…

For this reason, it is really important to take into account the systemic part in the support of TENNIS MENTAL COACHING (TMC) as a teenagers & Juniors Mental Trainer to integrate and enhance these fundamental needs.

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Educate through sport

Additionally, one of my perspectives and personal commitments is that beyond competition and improving sports performance, that passing through competitive sports allows teenagers to acquire socio-emotional tools that also served them in their lives. personal, beyond sport.

TESTIMONIALS