Why Knowing What to Do
Is Not the Same as
Being Able to Do It

The title of this post is almost painfully obvious.

Of course knowing what to do is not the same as being able to do it.

Just because you know how a forehand should be hit does not mean you can hit that forehand. Just because you know where contact should be does not mean you are able to make contact there. Just because you understand what the serve should feel like does not mean you can produce that serve when it matters.

That is so obvious in tennis that nobody argues with it.

If you want to be able to do what you know you should be doing, you train. You try to do it. You cannot do it yet, so you make mistakes. If you notice the mistake accurately enough, and if you understand the cause of that mistake correctly enough, then you adjust. And if you repeat that process over time, you improve.

That is how skill development works.

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What is strange is that many people do not think about the mind in the same way.

Even now, when this is changing, there is still a very common assumption that the mental side should somehow work differently. That once a player understands something mentally, they should be able to do it. Not only do players often expect this of themselves, but coaches and parents often expect it too.

That is one reason the mental side becomes so frustrating.

A player knows they should stay calm. A player knows they should not get nervous. A player knows they should let go of the last point. A player knows they should not get angry. A player knows they should focus on what matters.

Fine. But what does that actually mean?

When somebody says, "Don't be nervous," what are they really asking for?

Of course it would be helpful not to be nervous in certain moments. But is that something a player can just decide? Of course not.

The reality is much more specific than that.

The same situation can make one player very nervous and another player barely nervous at all. Most players will be somewhere in between. And even when two players are nervous to a similar degree, that still does not mean it affects them in the same way. One player may get completely hijacked by nervousness. Another may feel just as nervous, and dislike it just as much, but still be able to hit the shot, think clearly enough, and keep moving.

That difference matters.

And all of that is skill.

It is skill in how a player relates to what they are experiencing. Skill in how distracted they become. Skill in how quickly they recover. Skill in whether attention gets hijacked. Skill in whether they can redirect attention to what matters. Skill in whether they can allow an unpleasant experience to be there without letting it run the point.

Knowing this is true has very little to do with being able to do it.

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Just because I can do something does not mean the player I am coaching can do it. Just because a coach tells a player to do something does not mean the player has the ability to do it yet. Just because a player wants very badly to do it does not mean that ability suddenly appears.

This is where mental performance training comes in.

And it should be understood from the same methodological perspective as training a shot, training movement, training stamina, training strength, or training flexibility.

You are trying to build a capacity.

That means first there has to be some intellectual understanding. You need enough clarity to know what it is you are actually trying to do. Then you have to try to do it in a situation where it is possible. Not too easy, not too difficult. Just difficult enough that it challenges the skill without overwhelming it.

Again, this is no different from training a forehand.

If the ball is too easy, the training effect is limited. If the ball is too difficult, and everything breaks down, the training is also poor. The same is true mentally.

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Take nervousness as an example.

First, we need to be clear about the goal. The goal in a nervous moment cannot simply be "stop being nervous." That is not a useful performance instruction. And for now, I am also not talking about techniques that can quickly lower arousal, like breathing interventions, which can absolutely help. Those can be very useful. But they are not the whole story. They can shift the system for a moment, but if the situation still feels threatening and the underlying relationship to nervousness has not changed, the nervousness will often return.

So what is the actual issue?

A very common scenario is that a player is serving and becomes nervous. Then the nervousness starts to hijack attention. Instead of paying attention to where they are aiming, or what kind of swing they want, or how relaxed the arm needs to stay, attention gets pulled into the nervousness itself.

And nervousness is not one thing.

For one player it is more in the mind. Racing thoughts. Anticipation. Worry. For another player it is more in the body. Tightness. Rush. Constriction. Heat. Shaking. Often it is both.

The more unpleasant it feels, and the more the player resists it, the more likely it is that attention will get pulled away from what matters.

So how do you train this?

Not by pretending the nervousness is not there. Not by trying to suppress it. Not by hoping it goes away on its own. Usually the training moves in the opposite direction.

You learn, first, how attention gets distracted in general and how to redirect it. Then, more specifically, you practice doing that while mildly nervous. Not maximally nervous. Not in a situation that overwhelms you. Just nervous enough that the skill is genuinely being challenged.

And what the player practices is not getting rid of the nervousness first.

The player practices allowing it.

Allowing the nervousness to be there. Letting it be there in the body, in the mind, or both. Not because it is pleasant. Not because it is ideal. But because fighting it usually makes it more dominant, while allowing it creates more space to return attention to what is needed.

Then the player redirects attention back to what matters. The target. The point of contact. The relaxed arm. The rhythm of the motion. Whatever is actually relevant for that player in that situation.

That is the training.

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And once you understand that, it becomes easier to see the central point of this post: understanding what to do here is not the same as being able to do it.

A player can fully understand that they should allow the nervousness, not fight it, and bring attention back to the serve. That understanding may be correct. It may even be very clear. But that still says almost nothing about whether they can do it when they are actually tight, distracted, uncomfortable, and under pressure.

That ability has to be built.

And it is built the same way other capacities are built: through repetition, through difficulty that is appropriate, through mistakes, through better detection, through adjustment, and through training over time.

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This is one of the biggest problems in mental performance.

Players often judge themselves as if understanding should already equal ability. Coaches and parents do the same thing. A player is told, directly or indirectly, "You know this already," as if that settles the matter.

But knowing is not the same as doing.

And doing once is not the same as being able to do it reliably.

And being able to do it in practice is not the same as being able to do it under pressure.

These are different stages of skill.

The mental side is not exempt from training. It does not get a special shortcut just because we can talk about it. And it does not improve just because the advice is correct.

It improves when a player trains the actual capacity.

That means we need to stop treating attention, emotional regulation, and response under pressure as if they should simply obey instruction. They are trainable skills. They respond to method. They improve through practice. And they need to be developed with the same respect for progression that we would give to any other part of performance.

That is where mental training becomes real. Not as vague advice. Not as slogans shouted from the side of the court. Not as the hope that a player will somehow "just do it." But as skill development.

And once we start seeing it that way, a lot of frustration starts to make more sense.

This post is part of a series exploring how mindfulness shapes performance in tennis. Also in this series: What Are You Actually Paying Attention To When You Play?