The Inner Game Of Tennis

The Inner Game Of Tennis is about the mental state required to deliver peak performance and how you can cultivate that state in sports, work, and life.

Do you sometimes insult yourself out loud? For example when you drop something? “Ugh, you idiot, watch out!” While some of us do it more than others, it’s a very common phenomenon in sports for players to curse at themselves. This is a prime example of Self 1 and Self 2, as Tim Gallwey calls them, interacting.

Self 1 is your conscious mind, the part you’re usually in touch with and that you use to think, decide, and talk to yourself. Self 2 is your subconscious, which you access when you’re in flow, relaxing, and just letting things happen. These two selves are often in inner conflict and how this conflict ends usually determines how well you perform on the outside.

As you can probably guess from thinking back to your own experiences, it is when Self 2 is in charge that we’re at our best. And often, Self 1 only gets in the way. For example, when you tell yourself to “stop being nervous,” does that ever work? Rarely.

For this inner conflict to be resolved, we need to take a different approach. Applying pressure doesn’t work.

The inner game is so powerful in determining our behavior that, sometimes, we can predict who will win a match, fight, or competition before it’s even begun. If you see a boxer stiffening before a match, they’re often trying too hard and, thus, will lose.

The mental state we need to excel instead is exactly the opposite. Tim Gallwey calls it “out of mind.” Not as in ‘insane,’ but as in ‘not stuck in your own head.’ What’s good about this phrase is that it doesn’t imply control. When we refer to flow as ‘being in the zone,’ we assume there’s a repeatable process we can use to get into that zone. That’s not really the case.

What we can do, however, to resolve this inner conflict, is to quiet Self 1 and trust Self 2. Primarily, that means not judging ourselves, but observing what happens and then trusting that Self 2 will do the best job it can. When you judge and scold yourself, you’re making Self 1 stronger and more present, which is counterproductive.

As children, we’re great at playing the inner game. We don’t intellectualize everything. All we do is observe and then try on our own. This is called implicit learning. Basically, you memorize a skill without necessarily being able to describe what you’re doing every step along the way. As adults, we have to learn to focus on this kind…