Marco Bitran: Athletes And Anxiety - The Life Of A Low Level Tennis Professional Living The Dream Part 2

The dangers of negative and stressful imagery can leave you feeling awful. There is the opposite to that which comes in the form of positive imagery. As I've learned, visualization powers your ability to rediscover your inner resources and refuel your outer expressions when stress is on the rise. The most powerful way I found to do my visualization sessions was through help from others as guided visualization, just like the process I was about to do on the beach through my headphones. This way you are directed by an experienced professional on what images to bring to mind and how your breathing should be in order to bring about perfect balance in mind and body.

Anxiety sufferers have a difficult time doing any kind of meditation, and visualization sessions strictly on their own because the sensitized nerves that we have are always on high alert, so it's important at least in the first month to use GUIDED visualization. The idea here is to take full control over your mind rather than let it control you, and in my past experiences with visualization I've learned that the effects it had the next day on how I played my tennis match was incredible. During my pre anxiety disorder days, I had used mental imagery but completely gave up the habit during the six years of anxiety struggles I had. It stopped the negative voices in my head for just a few minutes each night so I could find space to direct my mind wherever I wanted to go and to concentrate on specific thoughts and images such as in my case hitting perfect forehands, backhands, and coming out as a winner after my match the following day.

With consistent visualization you learn to be gentle with yourself and compassionate, to understand and accept the uniqueness of you in this world and to recognize that the only pressure you feel is the pressure you put on yourself. When that pressure is gone, your true nature will reveal itself in time. After a great visualization session, I was able to get the rest I needed in order to play my match.

"Wake up," someone said. "WAKE UP!" We were woken up by beach patrol and they weren't too happy with us, I tried to explain our situation but they didn't want to hear any of it; in fact, they told us that if they found us sleeping on the beach again that we would be in big trouble. I didn't want to find out what kind of trouble so we gathered up our stuff, threw everything in the van and decided to handle the sleeping situation later on.

We decided that the food we packed wouldn't give us the fuel we needed to carry us through our matches and the rest of the day, so as we were driving down the street we ran into a beautiful sight, a couple of golden arches staring right at us. Nothing beats a McDonald's breakfast, right? It's amazing how grateful a person can be when you are on such a limited budget as we were. My $4 pancake and sausage breakfast was a well-deserved feast it seemed.

We finished up our breakfast and headed over to the site to check in our names before our matches. I was drawn up against a big hitting collegiate player. When you run into a division 1 tennis player that plays university tennis you better be ready for a battle, through the extremely competitive schedule that these guys are put through they come out with the most determined mindsets and will compete until the last point. But I didn't mind, at this level there are no easy matches and you have to earn each victory no matter who you play.

I felt well prepared before the match, and couldn't tell if I should be worried that this guy was a well-oiled athletic machine or happy cause he was going to tire himself out from doing more than 20 sprints before starting the match, with his eyes firmly glued on me in between every sprint.

The match got underway. We split the first two sets and were headed into the third set. Because of many line call disputes, we got a referee to sit and watch our final set so there wouldn't be any bad line calls on crucial points. I was extremely frustrated at the way I was serving throughout the match, and I knew that if I had just served a little better this match would have been over and in my favour an hour ago. As the score reached 3 games to 1 for him, I reached my boiling point. After a missed serve by me and a return by my opponent,I swung at the incoming ball with what felt like was one of my hardest forehands I've ever hit. It was cleanly struck and it was headed straight to where the chair umpire was sitting. To this day I still remember how that ball whizzed two inches away from the face of the referee, and if it had hit him I knew I might have been in deep deep trouble. The following words came out of the referee's mouth: "Disqualification Mr Simsek for ball abuse." I was kicked out of the match. I didn't really know what to say. I knew I had a moment of weakness and my anger got the best of me for the first time in a long time.

As I walked off the court shaking from what I had just done, I made myself a promise to never let my anger take over my reactions to something. What if that poor guy got hit? That would have haunted me forever. You live you learn... on to the next battle.

Dennis Simsek (also known as the anxious athlete) is the founder of the popular end the anxiety audio program that has helped many overcome their anxiety disorder related issues naturally. This is not a 'quick fix' solution but a proven strategy that in time will guarantee your natural recovery from anxiety related issues.

Visit http://www.anxietyend.com now to listen to a sample.

Marco Bitran: Athletes And Anxiety - The Life Of A Low Level Tennis Professional Living The Dream Part 1

In the world of professional tennis, everyone sees the glamorous lives of the top 50 players in the world on TV and live during tournaments. But they usually never get to see the thousands of other professional level players struggling at the bottom of the table like myself fighting for each and every ATP tennis point they can get, just so they can continue living the dream and maybe one day play on the ATP circuit.

The futures tour mainly consists of players ranked between 500 and somewhere around 2000 on the ATP tour, then comes the challenger level players who are in the range of 150 to 500 roughly. Then if you can bare the years of struggle and grind and are successful at the lower levels then comes the ATP level.

My whole tennis career has mainly been in the futures level of tennis with the very occasional "wild card" (a free pass for lower level players to compete in higher level tournaments) into a challenger event. I was able to play these pro events because I was successful in other prize money events that anyone could enter, which made me enough money to get from one tournament to the next... barely! Mix playing with a little coaching and stringing other players' tennis racquets and I was doing OK-financially anyway.

But playing high level tennis week after week left me emotionally fatigued, spiritually fatigued, mentally fatigued and caused great muscular fatigue. So after some time I knew I had to start taking care of the different kinds of fatigue I was feeling in the form of implementing tension eliminators, or else I would have a very short playing career, and absolutely no coaching career afterwards.

At the age of 25 (just a year before my 6 year battle with an anxiety disorder), I got a few friends together to hit the road in my rickety van to play as many tennis tournaments we could afford to, and to see if I could hang with other pro tennis players. As we all made the drive from Vancouver, British Columbia, to California we decided to "wing it" and didn't book any housing during these tournaments. The three of us had around $600 for a month and a half and that had to cover everything from our entry fees into tournaments, to gas money, to food and accommodation. Well we quickly realized, something... we didn't bring enough money.

We had a racquet stringer in case the other players needed their racquets strung up but other than that we had no other way of bringing in any cash flow.

Our faith was left in the two "money" tournaments that we all entered to get us through this trip to play the four futures tennis tournaments. Many of the futures players don't really stick around past their mid-20s in the futures circuit and quickly find jobs instead of continuing the constant grind of the low level tours but we were different, we were determined! We had incredible work ethic!

If there was one thing that the three of us agreed on it was that we had to have free accommodation or we weren't going to have a chance to play these tournaments. We slept on the beach, yep we all decided that the only way we would be able to afford this trip was to sleep on the beach because it was free, it was cozy, and it was somewhere warm and private. All the things a tennis player needs to bring out the best in him during practice and competition.

The morning after we arrived in California we quickly rubbed the sand off of us, took a shower next to the beach, and rushed off to find some public tennis courts so we could get a practice in. The van was running well and we had packed some 30 cent noodles (that we ate raw) to get us by for about a week. We found some courts in southern California in a place called Ventura and lucky for us there was a hill right next to the courts so we could get some hard-core fitness in as well (hills are a tennis players best friend). The practice went great and the sprints up the hill were just what we needed to stay physically and mentally sharp. Things were going great and we were all in good spirits. We found a beautiful park nearby and got the racquet stringer out to string a few of the broken strings on our tennis racquets.

As we were finishing up we saw a sign on the side of the road that said "29 cent tacos." Perfect timing! We were all getting a little sick of eating the crap we packed so we all decided we needed some real food (if you could call it that) and at 29 cents we couldn't pass it up. We parked the van and all got out and ordered four tacos each. After we were done eating we were still hungry and decided to have a few more so we ordered six more each. We were stuffed and even though it was only noon we decided we wouldn't spend any more money on food until the next day because we needed every penny on this trip.

As we were resting back home (or a different part of the beach) on the Santa Barbara beach, I felt like I was getting sick. I blamed my nausea and vomiting on the tacos and asked the other guys how they were feeling; surprisingly they were fine. I skipped the afternoon practice session that we had planned and took it easy instead, trying to recover for the next day because our first tournament was coming up. I started feeling better towards the night, and as I laid my head down to sleep with my buddies nearby, I started my nightly ritual anytime I had a match the next day: mental imagery...

Dennis Simsek (also known as the anxious athlete) is the founder of the popular end the anxiety audio program that has helped many overcome their anxiety disorder related issues naturally. This is not a 'quick fix' solution but a proven strategy that in time will guarantee your natural recovery from anxiety related issues.

Visit http://www.anxietyend.com now to listen to a sample.