By Randy Walker
@TennisPublisher
Rafael Nadal’s stunning second-round loss to No. 102-ranked qualifier Dustin Brown at Wimbledon has plunged him into darkest depths of his legendary tennis career.
With his ranking now set to drop well out of the top 10, the 29-year-old Nadal is mired by an extreme lack of confidence that has haunted him all season – losing at Roland Garros for only the second time in a decade and not winning a singles title on his beloved European clay. The 14-time major singles champion has been candid in press conferences about this lack of confidence, using surprisingly harsh negative language to describe the state of his game. Chris Evert remarked on ESPN prior to Nadal’s match with Brown that she had “never heard of a top player talk so much about a lack of confidence.”
Nadal’s dour attitude preceded even his worst-ever clay-court season. In March, after losing in the third round of the Miami Open to fellow Spaniard Fernando Verdasco, Nadal said the loss was “not the question of tennis.” He said, “The thing is the question of being enough relaxed to play well on court. A month and a half ago I didn’t have the game. My game has improved but … I am still playing with too much nerves for a lot of moments, important moments, still a little anxious on those moments.”
Following his fourth-round loss at last year’s Wimbledon to No. 144-ranked Nick Kyrgios, Nadal was off the ATP Tour for three months with a right wrist injury and after playing for a month in the fall, an appendicitis ended his 2014 season. While he won his 65th career title in Buenos Aires earlier this year (and his 66th two weeks ago in Stuttgart), he suffered through numerous unlikely losses, losing before the final in 10 of his 13 events for the year entering Wimbledon.
“All these are small things that are difficult to explain,” Nadal said again of his bad form in March after his loss to Verdasco. “One of the tougher things has been fixed, that is the game, in my opinion. Now I need to fix again the nerves, the self-control on court. That’s another issue. I am a little bit on and off too much. That is something that didn’t happen in the past. In the past I have been able to change a lot of situations, negative situations, in my career and I want to do it again. I am confident that I can do it. I don’t know if I am going to do it but I hope I can.”
How can Nadal extricate himself from his cycle of negative self-talk and lack of belief?
Emily Filloramo has just written the book “How To Permantently Erase Negative Self Talk So You Can Be Extraordinary” (available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1937559564/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_ztFLvb13F3JJF ) and in a conversation hours after Nadal’s shock loss, she said that Nadal’s recent mental frailties and failures are not uncommon to highly successful people.
“All of these overachieving athletes, business people whoever they are, they have been driven by something in the past that has made them succeed beyond their wildest imagination,” Filloramo said. “This allows them to blow ahead to be the best athlete or to get in the best schools to keep going and going and eventually that part, this overachieving behavior, will eventually crash and burn. It is something that is born out of trauma, it can be a little trauma or a big trauma – even if a teacher said ‘You are not the smartest kid in the class’ and you will say ‘I will show you’ and you become valedictorian and get into a top school. Your system re-organizes and your drive to overachieve dominates your life, but you can only do this overachieving for so long.”
“For Rafael Nadal or someone like (golfer) Tiger Woods, they were driven by their insecurity to achieve,” she said. “There is some area in their life, where the original insecurity shows up, the negative self-talk, whispering in their ear, like the coach from their past who said they are never going to be any good, for example. These frozen parts and experiences from the past are stuck in old memories. They come back and sabotage you, guaranteed. We are all driven by demons. If you don’t address those demons, you end up crashing and burning in some shape or form.”
What kind of therapy can be done to eliminate the negative self-talk that was fomented from the traumatic past experience? Filloramo’s coaching technique is guided by professional trainings in Internal Family Systems, a revolutionary and intuitive psycho-spiritual healing model (developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD), as well as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), which is a communication and belief change tool to help you reach your potential. Internal Family Systems is the next generation of cutting-edge personal development.
“You have to do the right type of therapy,” Filloramo said. “You have to talk of these incidents and go back to the old memory and take it out of the past. You have to get to know the part of him that is insecure about his abilities that has all of the sudden come up. The overachieving part is gone now and has been taken over by the insecure part. You have to get to know the story of this insecure part that is all of the sudden showing up and stopping him for winning. What is it afraid of? Maybe it has reached a point where part of him doesn’t want the limelight anymore? Perhaps he is afraid of living again through a past hurt? You have to get to know what the story is of this insecure part.”
There is no way for anyone outside of Nadal himself, or perhaps someone in his very close personal circle, to know the cause of Nadal’s prolonged lack of confidence, and his openness to discuss it out-loud in such public forums as press conferences. How he faces this added challenge in the months and perhaps years ahead will be worthy of close scrutiny.
Said Justin Gimelstob on Tennis Channel of Nadal’s dilemma, “It’s tough to win without confidence and it’s tough to get confidence without winning.”
