If you win the last point, does it guarantee that you are going to win the next one? Isn’t it the same way, when the last point was lost. Even, if that was the last point of the match, there will be the first point of another match. I like to suggest my students to avoid celebrations, as much as dwellings, no matter how important, spectacular or dramatic the last point was. Move on.
What’s easier: to believe that you can win a close match or that you can win one (!!!) point during that match?
We all know that all you do, when you play tennis, is you play only one point at a time. Then wouldn’t it make sense to train yourself, or your mind, to believe that you can win that one point? Of course, the means of winning each point are different. Let’s just say some times you serve and some times you return. Sometimes you play defensively and conservatively. Sometimes you want to be more aggressive. Sometimes your opponent is lefty, sometimes righty and so on. That’s why it takes time to build your game and make it as versatile as possible to be able to capitalize in different situations.
So two things come out of this for me: first, to get to the final goal eventually, you need to stay focused on the one point task, secondly, you need a larger arsenal of wining options AKA build up your game.
Building your game is like filling up the deflated balloon, let’s even imagine the balloon in the shape of a faceless tennis player or better with your own face: just copying other players is not the same as learning from them. What makes you a player comes to you from outside, but needs to stay within you. This “tennis player balloon” cannot get instantly fully inflated, actually it never will be. It will be getting filled up gradually. If you are not “full”, yet, that does not make what you already have inside bad.* That is what you are as a player on a given day (the entire 100% of you, not more, not less) and you better know what this is, so you can believe in yourself and use what you have for the specific opponent or situation when the next point comes.
* I intentionally left that paragraph that way to use the concept as a rationale for players to like what they can do already and be aware of it (!!) to believe in it, and in themselves through that ability. Unfortunately, as a player, you can get filled up with …..