Healthy doze of anxiety

June 15, 2018

Introduction

It is a challenging topic. Healthy doze of anxiety, how to measure the healthy doze? I experienced a little bit last few days. As a person likes tennis as competitive sports, I know that I need to train my brain to stay grounded. Do not think past or future, stay at the moment.

3 drills to help me recover

With hundreds of hour tennis practice, I know how hard it is to take to get good control of various strokes. I have to work hard, get all kinds of coaching lesson through video, real matches, and also I have to practice thousand of strokes and spend hundreds of hours to practice. 

Last 6 months I stop to play tennis match, even practice. I notice that something is changing. I try to believe that I can do things without practice enough time. 

So I have to go back to tennis court, and start to work on hours of sports. Every hour I practice on tennis court, I will know that it takes hard work to build muscle, and learn new things, and have chance to meet people again. 

It is busy time of year on tennis court. I could not name hundreds of players, but surprisingly people can remember a few girls's name easily. Today the player smiled to me and called my name Julia, but I could not tell his name. We used to play together at least 5 or 6 times last few year, over 4 hours, I still remembered a few years ago I talked to him, the first years he came to Vancouver as an immigrant, and he started to play tennis again. 

Those players really make me stay healthy and happy. I just do not have a lot of time to play double matches, I spend most of time on rally with one person, or against wall and chat with people on the court. I need to finish at least one hour of sports training. I am trying to cover all strokes, running and also talk to various people. 

Algorithm performance

I have to push myself hard to develop some drills to help me work on hard level algorithm and data structure.

One thing I like to do is to meet more people this weekend through mock interview. Let me learn something from the peer or try to teach something and share some programming skills to the peer. One peer a time.

I am looking for happy Julia, laugh loudly on tennis court, people call me Sharapova all the time. It is called grunting in tennis.

An honest assessment from a top tennis player

Dec. 28, 2016

Introduction

Julia has a holiday break whole week, so she decides to take some time to work on something different - Mental toughness training. Learn something about dealing with worries, how to handle the stress of practice, contest and study.

She plans to do some study on professional players - tennis player, how they handle up-and-downs smartly. And then, she came cross this article to read.

Study 

Victoria Azarenka: An honest assessment of my 2015 season

First, look up her professional records on tournaments:
http://www.espn.com/tennis/player/_/id/421/victoria-azarenka

Take notes from the article, learn how healthy professional player handles down-time smartly.

1. End season early, Wuhan Open - Oct. 3, 2015 ( Oct., Nov., December) 3 months training, no matches.

Fact: 
Surprising loss in second round in Wuhan,
Work on the mental part:
1.  only thing I can do is to stay in the present, in the now, and figure out what's next.
2. There is always a new season, a new tournament, a new chance.

2. My injuries
Facts:
Play with pain in Wuhan open

Work on the injuries:
Deal with pain, play through it, train through it, pretend that it is not there.

Learned through the experience:
Learn that the hard way. Take time off.

3. Australia - start new season
Facts:
my ego came along with the nervousness

Give out an ego talk:
How it is a good thing?
You're the best and nobody can beat you.
Having a healthy ego is absolutely necessary to reach the top.

4. New coach
Facts:
Contact Serana if it is OK to work with the coach Sascha Bajin

Argument:
Being honest is the only way to do business in my opinion.

Give out  a talk about hitting partner:
...

Talk about emotional toll - inconsistencies from hard court swing to ......
father underwent surgery ...

Self-talk:
How fortunate I am to play.

Talk about training place - Croatia - a country

5. Peers
Serena - No. 1
I believe in myself and nobody can put a limit to what I can achieve.

a lot to do , a lot more to learn.

my thoughts, raw, uncut and honest. Nobody can twist and turn it around.

Actionable Item:

Do some research on emotional toll, how top-players handle emotional toll properly.
Google search keyword:
how tennis top player handles emotional toll

More readings:

1. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/health-issues/conditions/obesity/Pages/The-Emotional-Toll-of-Obesity.aspx


2.https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201012/sports-the-power-emotions

In fact, one reason why the best athletes in the world are at the top is because they have the ability to control their emotions rather than their emotions controlling them.