linguistic:paraphrasing, stylistic:style_transfer
Attitude and demeanor

Freezing cold water. I do this before every match. It's the point before the point of no return. Under the cold shower I enter a new space in which I feel my power and resilience grow. I'm a different man when I emerge. I'm activated. I'm in "the flow"... Nothing else exists but the battle ahead.

–Nadal, on his pre-match rituals.

Despite his success, his uncle Toni ensured that Nadal remained as normal, modest, and down to earth as possible, as he believed these qualities to have a tremendous impact on results and motivation. He rarely if ever touts his achievements, refuses to put down his rivals, travels in public without a large entourage, and lingers after matches and practices to sign autographs. For instance, in 2007, Nadal would often interrupt his training sessions on the public courts of Manacor, just to hit a few balls with fans and foreign tourists that had asked him to, even though they were not very good, and even against his uncle Toni’s wishes, who had to tell him that he "cannot do this all the time". Former world No. 6 Gilles Simon has stressed that more than being grounded and simple off the court, what separates Nadal from the rest in contemporary tennis is his on-court humility, stating "Do not tell me that Rafael Nadal is not humble because he said in a press conference that he is not favorite in the first round of Roland-Garros".

Nadal is also noted for his visceral delight in competing, whether he wins or loses. He also has a rare philosophical approach to tennis and life that one sportswriter described as a “model of humility, empathy, and perspective”.

Nadal is known for a host of on-court rituals including specific bodily movements and the positioning of items courtside. At changeovers, he always waits until his opponent first crosses the net, refuses to step on the lines, and devotedly lines up his drinks bottles in precise positions near his chair, labels always facing out, before stepping back into action. His water-bottle routine is so well-known that when they fell over during a match at the 2015 Australian Open, a ball boy dashed over to return the bottles to their upright position, with the labels facing the court as Nadal had intended. Nadal himself has explained that such rituals do not stem from an obsessive–compulsive disorder complex or are based on superstition; they are instead meant to work as an almost therapeutic, psychological mechanism to help him stay calm in incredibly stressful situations.

There is also a pattern to the way he approaches a serve. He usually takes three balls, examines them, discards one, shakes the strands of hair that have not been corralled by his headband out of his eyes, and then serves. Nadal constantly picks at the rear of his shorts, wipes sweat from his brow and pushes hair back behind his ears before every serve. Nadal's extensive time taken between points has received criticism from other players including Roger Federer and Denis Shapovalov, with the latter wanting Nadal to be given a code violation for pushing the 25-second serve clock to the limit, stating that he was being given preferential treatment because of his status in the game.

Nadal's personality has been described by Jimmy Connors: "He's built out of a mold that I think I came from also, that you walk out there, you give everything you have from the first point to the end no matter what the score. And you're willing to lay it all out on the line and you're not afraid to let the people see that".