By Paul Dale \ The 3AM Method
Your Emotions Are Advisors, Not Masters: The Hidden Superpower Inside
Every Tennis Match
Every player has emotions on the court. The question is whether those
emotions are working for you – or against you.
Tehran, 1990. A Match I Have Never Forgotten.
I have been involved in numerous tennis matches over the past fifty
years. Most blur together eventually. But some stay with you in perfect detail
— not because of the score, but because of what you learned.
This is one of those matches.
I was captaining Thailand in the Davis Cup in Tehran. We were playing
Iran on home soil, and the opening singles was between their player — a big,
powerful man built like a bull — and our player, Danai Udomchoke, who was so
slightly built that I imagine the Iranian crowd saw him walk onto court and
quietly assumed the match was already decided.
| Danai Udomchoke represented Thailand in Davis Cup with distinction for many years |
They were not wrong to think that. The Iranian started the match on
rocket fuel. He was playing in front of his family and friends. He was on home
ground. He was facing someone half his size. Every winner he hit was met by his
supporters banging the tin fence that surrounded the centre court. The noise
was extraordinary. The energy was electric. And Danai was being blown off the
court.
The first two games went quickly to the Iranian.
I sat watching from my courtside chair, and I could see something very
clearly — something the Iranian player could not see at all.
He was not playing tennis anymore.
He was playing with his emotions.
The confidence — the adrenaline, the crowd noise, the certainty of
victory — had stopped being information and become instruction. He wasn’t
reading the match. He wasn’t making decisions. He was just swinging, riding a
wave of feeling that felt unstoppable.
So at the next changeover, I did something that surprised everyone
watching, including, I think, Danai.
I stood up and applauded the Iranian.
Not sarcastically. Genuinely. Here was a man playing the match of his
life, in Davis Cup competition, in front of everyone he cared about. He
deserved acknowledgement. And I gave it to him.
The players returned to the court. The Iranian attacked the very first
point — and his forehand winner flew completely out of court, crashing into
the back fence with a loud bang.
The next point, a backhand into the bottom of the net.
The crowd fell quiet. The fence went silent. And the match turned
completely. Danai went on to win comfortably.
What happened? The Iranian’s emotions had been his master. And the moment
I gave him a signal that his dominance was complete — that even his
opponent’s captain had conceded — those emotions tipped over the edge. The
confidence curdled into overconfidence. The energy became recklessness. The
very feeling that had carried him through those first two games dismantled him
in the third.
He was not a bad player. He was an emotionally unguarded one.
That day in Tehran taught me something I have carried through every year
of coaching since. It is not the presence of strong emotion that defeats a
player. It is the failure to read it.
The Question Every Player Needs to Ask
Every player brings emotions onto the court. Anger. Frustration.
Confidence. Fear. Excitement. Despair. These are not flaws to be eliminated.
They are not signs of weakness or instability.
They are data.
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| The ability to manage emotions during competition is your greatest superpower |
The problem is that most players – and most coaching programmes – treat emotions as something to manage, suppress, or overcome. The goal is to
feel less. To be calmer. To stay composed by pushing the feelings down.
I want to propose something different.
What if the goal is not to feel less – but to listen better?
“Your emotions are not your enemy. They are your
most honest advisor. The trouble begins only when you let them give
orders.”
Anger tells you something. Frustration tells you something. So does fear,
and so does overconfidence. The player who can hear that information — who
can say, what is this feeling trying to tell me right now? — has
access to something most players never develop: real-time intelligence about
the match they are actually in.
That is not a personality trait. It is a skill. And in The 3AM Method, it
is one of the most important skills we develop.
Reading the Emotions: What Each One Is Actually Saying
Anger is rarely just anger. When a player slams their racket or shouts at
themselves after a missed shot, the anger is pointing at something real: a gap
between expectation and result. That gap is information. Where does the
expectation come from? Is it realistic for this moment, this surface, this
opponent? Anger becomes a diagnostic tool, but anger obeyed becomes
self-destruction.
Frustration is a signal that your current strategy is not working.
It is the feeling of applying effort without getting the result. In a match,
that is incredibly valuable feedback. The observed frustration can prompt a
change. Frustration that becomes your master triggers urgency, which triggers
errors, which triggers more frustration — a spiral that is very hard to climb
out of once it starts.
Fear is perhaps the most misunderstood emotion in competitive tennis. Most
players treat it as an obstacle. But fear, at its root, is your system flagging
that something important is at stake. It is heightened attention. It is
readiness. The player who can hear fear and say, yes, this matters — now
what is my job? has turned that energy into focus. The player who hears
fear and says, I must not lose has already started losing.
Overconfidence, and this is the lesson from Tehran, is the subtlest of the four, and in some ways the most dangerous. It
does not feel like a problem. It feels like being in control. But
overconfidence narrows your options. It makes you less adaptive, less careful,
less present. The Iranian player was not playing badly because he was nervous.
He was playing recklessly because he had stopped being curious. He had made up
his mind about the match before it was finished.
All four of these emotions, when read as advisors, offer something
useful. When obeyed as masters, they produce the same outcome: decisions made
from feeling rather than from thought.
Why Traditional Coaching Gets This Wrong
The standard approach to emotion in competitive tennis coaching is
essentially this: pretend it is not happening. Stay calm. Stay positive. Use
your routine. Control your breathing.
These are not bad suggestions. But they are incomplete ones.
The between-point routine, the breathing, the controlled body language
— these are excellent tools for guarding the gap between what you feel and
what you show. I have written about this elsewhere, and I believe in it deeply.
But they do not help a player understand what their emotions are actually
communicating. They help the player conceal the signal. They do not help them
read it.
There is a crucial difference between suppressing an emotion and learning
from it. One produces composure without insight. The other produces both.
The typical coaching environment makes this worse, not better. In
basket-feeding sessions and cooperative drills, there are no real emotions to
read. The stakes are low enough that the nervous system never activates.
Players develop excellent technique in a state of emotional neutrality — and
then encounter real competitive emotion for the first time in matches, with no
training in how to respond to it.
We call the result a practice champion. And we wonder why the court-level
skill does not transfer.
The answer, in part, is that we never taught the player to read what they
were feeling and use it.
“The most sophisticated instrument on the tennis
court is not the racket. It is the player’s nervous system — and almost no
one teaches players how to read it.”
The 3AM Approach: Emotions as Match Intelligence
In The 3AM Method, we treat emotional awareness as a trainable skill,
built through what we call Stress Muscle Training. This means deliberately
creating conditions in practice where real emotions arise – pressure points,
consequence-based games, competitive simulations that put something genuinely
at stake.
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| Give players repeated, guided experience of noticing their emotional state |
The purpose is not simply to expose players to stress so they become numb
to it. The purpose is to give players repeated, guided experience of noticing
their emotional state and making a considered choice about what to do with it.
We teach players to ask one question, in real time, when they notice a
strong emotion arising:
What is this feeling trying to tell me?
Not: How do I make this feeling stop?
Not: How do I hide this feeling from my opponent?
But: What is this feeling advising me to do — and is that advice
correct for this moment?
That question creates a fraction of space between the emotion and the
response. And in that space, the player is no longer being driven by feeling.
They are being informed by it.
This is the difference between the Iranian player in Tehran and the
player he could have been. He had every right to feel confident. That
confidence was earned. But he needed to hear it as a signal-“I am in a good position, now stay sharp”-rather than obey it as an order: “this is already won, swing freely.“
Danai, by contrast, despite falling behind, stayed anchored to his task.
He did not let the emotion of the situation – the crowd, the noise, the
scoreline- rewrite his approach. He kept reading the match. And when the
tide turned, he was ready to take it.
The Match Inside the Feeling
Every competitive tennis match is two contests running simultaneously.
There is a contest on the scoreboard. And there is the contest happening
inside each player’s mind and body – the real-time flow of emotion,
sensation, and interpretation that shapes every single decision.
Most players are only aware of the first contest.
The players who develop emotional awareness – who learn to hear anger,
frustration, fear, and confidence as advisors rather than masters – are
competing in both. And the advantage that gives them is enormous.
The Iranian player in Tehran was outstanding. On talent alone, he should
have won that match. But his emotions were running him, not advising him. And
the moment the emotional tide shifted, he had no framework for reading what was
happening, no habit of asking what the feeling was telling him, no trained
distance between feeling and decision.
Danai did.
That is the margin. It was not technical. It was not physical. It was the
capacity to remain, even under pressure, an observer of one’s own inner state.
That capacity is trainable. It begins with curiosity – the willingness
to turn toward your own emotional experience during a match and ask, what
are you telling me? It develops through deliberate practice under real
pressure. And it matures into one of the most reliable competitive tools a
player can possess.
“The player who can read their own emotions has
access to information their opponent cannot see. That is not a small advantage.
That is a decisive one.”
Start listening to your emotions. Not to obey them — but to learn from
them.
The match inside the match is always being played. The question is
whether you are fluent in its language.