Fresh out of Harvard in 1971, Timothy Gallwey worked as a tennis coach.
One day, after leaving the court after a training session, one of his students, who had struggled with a technical problem, had remarkably improved his game by the time he returned. Gallwey observed that the student had taught himself to overcome the issue after the training session.
That’s when Gallwey realized his new way of coaching. He discovered that students would perform worse when he gave them verbal instructions and that they would perform better when he asked them to mimic his strokes and to silence the mutterings of their conscious minds.
Still just a young coach at the start of his career, he wrote The Inner Game of Tennis and never expected to sell many copies. He ended up selling >1mn. Al Gore gave the book to his campaign staff to improve their concentration, Itzhak Perlman recommended it to aspiring violinists, and a group of Canadian researchers identified it as a guide to better sex. In 1983, The New York Times called it the first to introduce the importance of mental training to the public
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Gallwey opens with:
Imagine what goes on inside the head of an eager student taking a lesson from an equally eager new tennis pro. Suppose that the student is a middle-aged businessman bent on improving his position on the club ladder. The pro is standing at the net with a large basket of balls, and being a bit uncertain whether his student is considering him worth the lesson fee, he is carefully evaluating every shot. “That’s good, but you’re rolling your racket face over a little on your follow-through, Mr. Weil. Now shift your weight onto your front foot as you step into the ball… Now you’re taking your racket back too late … Your backswing should be a little lower than on that last shot… That’s it, much better.” Before long, Mr. Weil’s mind is churning with six thoughts about what he should be doing and sixteen thoughts about what he shouldn’t be doing. Improvement seems dubious and very complex, but both he and the pro are impressed by the careful analysis of each stroke and the fee is gladly paid upon receipt of the advice to “practice all this, and eventually you’ll see a big improvement.
(…) My next lesson that day was with a beginner named Paul who had never held a racket. I was determined to show him how to play using as few instructions as possible; I’d try to keep his mind uncluttered and see if it made a difference. So I started by telling Paul I was trying something new: I was going to skip entirely my usual explanations to beginning players about the proper grip, stroke and footwork for the basic forehand. Instead, I was going to hit ten forehands myself, and I wanted him to watch carefully, not thinking about what I was doing, but simply trying to grasp a visual image of the forehand. He was to repeat the image in his mind several times and then just let his body imitate. After I had hit ten forehands, Paul imagined himself doing the same. Then, as I put the racket into his hand, sliding it into the correct grip, he said to me, “I noticed that the first thing you did was to move your feet.” I replied with a noncommittal grunt and asked him to let his body imitate the forehand as well as it could. He dropped the ball, took a perfect backswing, swung forward, racket level, and with natural fluidity ended the swing at shoulder height, perfect for his first attempt! But wait, his feet; they hadn’t moved an inch from the perfect ready position he had assumed before taking his racket back. They were nailed to the court. I pointed to them, and Paul said, “Oh yeah, I forgot about them!” The one element of the stroke Paul had tried to remember was the one thing he didn’t do! Everything else had been absorbed and reproduced without a word being uttered or an instruction being given!
I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn: that images are better than words, showing better than telling, too much instruction worse than none, and that trying often produces negative results. One question perplexed me: What’s wrong with trying? What does it mean to try too hard?
Anyone who has ever done a competitive activity can resonate with that story. But you can’t help but feel there’s a mystery to it all. Why is it that imaging has become a better learning approach? How can verbal instructions turn counterproductive? What does it mean to try too hard? What is the inner game?
In tennis, you’re not competing against one opponent; You’re competing against two. One is the player standing on the other side of the court. The other is your conscious mind.
You always perform at you best when you’re in a flow state. You feel free of inhibitions, at your peak performance. It’s always difficult to explain how you got into the state but everyone has felt it. The flow state is how it feels to win over your conscious mind.
Gallway explains:
Reflect on the state of mind of a player who is said to be “hot” or “playing in the zone.” Is he thinking about how he should hit each shot? Is he thinking at all? Listen to the phrases commonly used to describe a player at his best: “He’s out of his mind”; “He’s playing over his head”; “He’s unconscious”; “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” The common factor in each of these descriptions is that some part of the mind is not so active. Athletes in most sports use similar phrases, and the best of them know that their peak performance never comes when they’re thinking about it.
It’s from this observation that Gallwey drew his key insight: the idea of Self 1 and Self 2:
Now we are ready for the first major postulate of the Inner Game: within each player the kind of relationship that exists between Self 1 and Self 2 is the prime factor in determining one’s ability to translate his knowledge of technique into effective action. In other words, the key to better tennis—or better anything—lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the natural capabilities of Self 2.
The idea is that Self 2 can master anything in a short amount of time if only Self 1 doesn’t interfere. So you want to quiet Self 1. But it’s hard thing to do. We are thinking, conscious animals. It’s our nature to always be vigilant of ourselves and our surroundings, and we tend to talk to ourselves.
As Gallwey writes:
For most of us, quieting the mind is a gradual process involving the learning of several inner skills. These inner skills are really arts of forgetting mental habits acquired since we were children.
The first skill to learn for getting into a flow state is to let go of judgments. Why? Because just the smallest act of judgment provokes a thinking process. And provoking a thinking process awakens Self 1.
Judgment results in tightness and tightness interferes with the fluidity required for accurate and quick movement. Relaxation produces smooth strokes and results from accepting your strokes as they are, even if erratic.
It’s not just negative judgments. Even positive thinking and compliments can be harmful. Self 1 sees a compliment as a potential criticism because it’s a binary thing. If you’re pleased with one thing, you will be displeased with the opposite.
Gallwey discovered this by observing what happened when he gave just positive assessments to his students and left out any of the negative. It didn’t work any better:
Clearly, positive and negative evaluations are relative to each other. It is impossible to judge one event as positive without seeing other events as not positive or negative. There is no way to stop just the negative side of the judgmental process.
The human body and mind work perfectly fine without conscious management. You don’t have to control every little thing your body does. It’s the urge to do that which paralyzes performance. Nothing you force too much leads to the outcome you desire.
Of course, when you’re a beginner, quieting Self 1 doesn’t work because you don’t trust yourself. You know you’re a beginner so you try to remember each sequential move you think is right. There’s nothing wrong with it. But as Gallwey explains, at some point you need to trust Self 2 to perform at your best.
Focus means staying in the present. Most suffering takes place when you allow your mind to imagine the future or dwell on the past. When a great tennis player is there in the moment, he stops caring about the plays that lie in the future.
Gallwey argues that every endeavor—whether wealth-seeking, education, reputation, or friendships—involves both external and internal obstacles. And while external obstacles vary widely, the internal one remains the same: the tendency to worry, regret, self-doubt, and self-criticize. To master the inner game, keep judgment at bay, trust your natural learning capabilities, and focus on the present. It requires effort to get there, but at the same time it’s beautifully effortless.