The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

by W. Timothy Gallwey

I too admit to overteaching as a new pro, but one day when I was in a relaxed mood, I began saying less and noticing more. To my surprise, errors that I saw but didn’t mention were correcting themselves without the student ever knowing he had made them. How were the changes happening? Though I found this interesting, it was a little hard on my ego, which didn’t quite see how it was going to get its due credit for the improvements being made. It was an even greater blow when I realized that sometimes my verbal instructions seemed to decrease the probability of the desired correction occurring.

Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. “Childlikeness” has to be restored….

Self 1 easily gets enamored of formulas that tell it where the racket should be and when. It likes the feeling of control it gets from doing it by the book. But Self 2 likes the feeling of flow—of the whole stroke as one thing. The Inner Game is an encouragement to keep in touch with the Self 2 learning process you were born with while avoiding getting caught up in trying too hard to make your strokes conform to an outside model.

The important thing is to experience it. Don’t intellectualize it. See what it feels like to ask yourself to do something and let it happen without any conscious trying. For most people it is a surprising experience, and the results speak for themselves.

Self 1 should not be expected to give up its control all at once; it begins to find its proper role only as one progresses in the art of relaxed concentration.

Nevertheless, I do not believe that ultimately the mind can be controlled by the mere act of letting go—that is, by a simply passive process. To still the mind one must learn to put it somewhere. It cannot just be let go; it must be focused.

Until I realized the purpose of competition, I never felt really happy about defeating someone, and mentally I had my hardest time playing well when I was near victory.

instead of learning focus to improve their tennis, they practice tennis to improve their focus.

The cause of most stress can be summed up by the word attachment. Self 1 gets so dependent upon things, situations, people, and concepts within its experience that when change occurs or seems about to occur, it feels threatened.

I, like anyone else, have to learn something very important—how to distinguish the inner requests of Self 2 from the outer demands that have been “internalized” by Self 1 and are now so familiar in my thinking that they “sound like” they are coming from me.