How FBTL Teaching Academy Works
The following section is my Teaching Academy. This will be the core of the work I present here at FBTL and the thrust of the program. We aim to identify and embody all the qualities of the ideal player. I will write on each topic and post here on this platform and my Substack because that’s what I do. I'm also a writer. The issues and essays I will address allude to the qualities of our idols and role models. By incorporating all the positive traits of our ideal players/ role models, we aim to conduct ourselves like our role models and, in the process, hopefully become role models ourselves. Assembling all their best qualities within ourselves will make us as close to our ideal player as possible, qualities that I see the strongest, healthiest, and most successful among us embody.
This is the work. Enhancing our emotional intelligence strengthens our emotional immune system, protecting us against all the challenges tennis life can throw our way. Often referred to as soft skills, focus, determination, perspective, or grit are anything but soft. They often determine our levels of success in our uniquely challenging sport.
Before I get too in to the details, let me stress something important. We all embody these traits to some degree or another. The mistake tennis has made as a sport is leaving their development to chance. Reflecting on my own playing days, focus, or loss of focus, lost me countless important matches, my erratic work ethic left me unprepared to go the distance more than a few times, and having a poor perspective left me to make rash decisions about my playing future, destroying my chances of seeing my talents through. And I could go on and on.
The core function of my Teaching Academy is to provide players with the tools to become proficient in these areas and help them understand their crucial role in their development.
I wish I could teach you Rafa's forehand or any of the amazing skills of our sport’s best—I really do. But what I can do here at FBTL is teach you the traits that will allow you to become the best version of yourself, allowing you to see your tennis dreams through.
I've identified 50 traits across the fields of Emotional Intelligence, Positive Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Spirituality, Recovery, and Character. Possessing these traits empowers a player’s immune system, protecting them against burnout, dropout, or a highly diminished overall playing experience.
Traits that are not just performance-enhancing but life-enhancing as well.
Most importantly, when you've hit your last ball, I aim for you to take all the skills learned here at FBTL and apply them seamlessly to life’s challenges, whether education, career, family, or even Pickleball.
And how do we do this?
Let’s have some fun with this. I introduce each topic through essay form, as I’ve done here on my Substack. Columbus Day and the importance of the journey, NYE and thoughts of hope, National Bagel Day and how to manage humiliation, Earth Day and the importance of understanding the tennis environment. Essays about the events in our lives, holidays, noteworthy moments, and all that embody an emotion that mastery of would be beneficial.
These essays will all be published in book form in a volume of collected works named Sport For A Lifetime. The goal is to do for Emotional Intelligence what the Inner Game of Tennis did for Sports Psychology.
Each topic will get the complete FBTL treatment.
Introduce through essay, define in regular terms, be tested to measure understanding, educate, inspire, personalize, have Q&A, and use additional resources, then retest, measuring our improvement in understanding the topic.
Consider any of these traits and how improving our focus, grit, resiliency, perspective, attitude, etc., would be beneficial.
Now imagine yourself flush in all of them and what that means for your tennis success and your life after tennis. What a gift it would be, to live the tennis experience with all this wisdom.
But programs only work if you work them. They won’t if you don’t.
So be patient (one of our topics), curious (another one), teachable (you guessed it), and stay the course with me as I work to present this material most effectively to you.
A role model is a person you look up to and admire. They can be someone who has achieved great things, or someone who is just good at living their life in a way that you aspire to. Role models provide a template for success and can help people set and achieve ambitious goals, often modelling the type of behavior required to reach their goal.
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Centuries ago, well before Hubbel and the modern radio telescopes, the astronomer Ptolemy postulated our planet Earth as the center of the known universe, with all other celestial bodies orbiting about us. Yet, Ptolemy's bold claim was missing a few key details, not the least of which was any factual evidence to support his gaudy Earth-centric assertion.
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Understanding The Tennis Environment
An environment is a place where an organism makes its home. Otherwise known as a habitat, an environment meets all the conditions an organism needs to thrive. Its your environment. Once you enter, you become a part of it. Don't be a polluter. Preserve and conserve the tennis environment.