I am super excited to announce the launch of our YouTube channel REDEFINING TENNIS.
We are going to share lots of content on and around tennis of course, but also be ready on topics like fitness, rehabilitation, expert opinions and much more!
The heart of the channel and my favourite topic though has to do with mindset &. perception, relaxation of the body & the mind and doing things rather a bit differently in order to stay true to yourself.
That’s why we found the mission for the channel to be: “bringing ease to the mastery process”.
Why REDEFINING TENNIS ?
We all know what it means to have the desire to master something, a skill, a technique – not necessarily speaking about perfectionism – just bringing a flow to the things we already do and we enjoy doing.
Sometimes though our circumstances and the systems we live in these days do not really give us the freedom to live up to our full potential. That’s the reason why a different approach might be needed and here we are to redefine our playground of life. For me, in this case, it’s tennis.
For a long time already I was thinking about starting a YouTube channel to show the life of a professional tennis player as well as different topics that interest me and that keep resonating with me throughout my life, and, – this sensation did I have – will be interesting for other tennis and sport enthusiastic people as well. During the period of my first pregnancy in 2022 I then had the time and the distance from the professional tennis circuit to contemplate about various things considering the life of an athlete.
I think in many ways it is a privilege to be a professional athlete: You get to travel, you extend your network of interesting people that you meet along the way, there is a lot of outdoor activity involved – which I see as a blessing. Tennis especially is a sport that fires your personal development through all the stages and emotions you go through mentally and physically, is it organizing, practicing, winning, losing. BUT there are also things coming along with it that I could observe in myself as well as in fellow players and which can affect the wellbeing of us players in a potentially negative way and that rather have to do with THINKING than with DOING. To put it short: we tend to lose the instinctive mind(set) to put our wellbeing as our primary goal above everything we want to achieve.
Here are some examples to illustrate this: We get confused about what kind of decisions to take (“…do I play the next tournament, or do I withdraw”), the injury rate and physical and mental fatigue goes up, the motivation goes down, we are getting angry and frustrated on ourselves or on others, we are in a way losing our intuitive self on what’s actually best for us to do in every situation and to look after ourselves, and in times we also tend to lose the burning desire of which we have initially started this beautiful sport: it’s just IMMENSELY BIG FUN to hit a tennis ball!!
Many intense conversations with players and coaches confirmed my thoughts and feelings on this topic.
Looking from a distance I get the feeling that tennis has evolved to be a cult where certain thinking patterns have been planted in our subconscious mind from little age on and it’s almost impossible to escape those patterns when we grow older.
For me in turn, there is a growing need to speak about these observations and to see how you, the tennis community, respond to these. Have you experienced similar situations? Can future generations of tennis players benefit from the experiences already made?
The idea became clear that this channel is needed and REDEFINING TENNIS was created. The time of contemplation, reflection, realization, stopping, discussing and learning never really stopped. It is also – like every athlete’s pathway – a pathway of identity.
I look forward to seeing you on the channel and please be in touch with emails, comments and social media, to let us know what you like and do not like – so we can all learn from each other.
We are releasing videos every Monday at 18:00 CET. 👉 Here you can enter the channel