Bruce Allen Hartrich isn’t comparing his recently published book to any sort of famous artwork, but his source of inspiration isn’t all that dissimilar.
“I just woke up one morning and it hit me,” Hartrich said. “I was like, ‘I’m supposed to write a book’ … and I just started writing.”
Hartrich, a longtime tennis instructor from Greenwood, began his project during the COVID-19 lockdown last year and published the finished product this spring.
“Using the Law of Attraction in Tennis: How to Use the Power Within You to Take Your Game and Your Life to the Next Level” is a concise (52 pages) guide to navigating the mental side of sports. Though it was penned with tennis in mind, Hartrich believes it’s applicable to any athlete in any sport — or even to everyday life.
“It’s a way that people can really — in any sport, just about anything that involves people getting anxious and things like that, it’s an awesome way to get over things and learn to focus your mind,” he said.
The book begins with a simple question: What are your goals and desires? You can’t reach a goal without first setting one, and so Hartrich lays out setting clear goals as the first step. From there, he takes the reader through various stages of affirmation and goal realization, coming back to meditation more than once as a key step in the process.
Though most of Hartrich’s clients are adults, he decided to write the book in an easily digestible way so that younger readers could also get something from it. He notes that he had overcome some anxiety issues of his own when he was younger, and he’s hopeful that his methods can help others do the same.
“The most important thing in life is to have dreams and follow your dreams, and know that you can reach your dreams,” Hartrich said. “It’s a matter of deciding that you can; that’s the mental aspect of everything. It’s more of, do you believe you can? Because if you believe you can, you probably can.”
Hartrich said that most of the feedback on his book, which is available on Amazon, has been positive so far. He points out that he tested many of the ideas he wrote about on both his tennis students and himself, and he saw good results across the board.
He’s hopeful that his readers will be just as successful in taking something positive from the book.
“The problem that most people have is we have a lot of doubts and fears,” Hartrich said. “This book’s about learning to get over the doubts and fears.”
