Publisher's Synopsis
What I want to address with you in this letter, is that there are mental forces which are largely unconscious, that affect your performance. I know that the games you play are important to you, and so I have taken the time to explore a perspective that will help you to be even greater on the court. Increasingly there is research emerging on the issue of social dominance, dominance hierarchies, and alpha and beta behavior in humans - this research is available for you to apply to tennis, and if you so choose, you can apply it beyond tennis.It is manifest that each animal in a species is able to very rapidly know how their fellow animal ranks in terms of dominance. Dominance throughout the animal kingdom is akin to status, control of territory, and control of resources. The existence of animal dominance hierarchies is common knowledge, but what the common person, and in this case the common professional tennis player is less knowledgeable of, is that the dominance hierarchy system, with all its rankings and peer evaluations, that very system operates in human populations, and is controlled primarily by automatic and unconscious mental processes.
