What I Learned From the Inner Game
Part 2

John Yandell

In Part 1 of What I Learned From The Inner Game of Tennis (Click Here) I focused on Tim Gallwey's fundamental insight about the superior power of images over words in developing and correcting strokes.

A second major component in the Inner Game was Gallwey's distinction between the two selves that vie for control inside every tennis player, what Gallwey labeled Self 1 and Self 2.

Self 1

Self 1 gives verbal instructions and also criticism. But Self 2 actually performs the action of hitting the tennis ball. As Gallwey put it: "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."

From working with students, Gallwey discovered that the relationship between the selves was often predominantly negative. "Okay, damn it keep your stupid wrist firm." This negativity affects what happens with the hit.

As Gallwey wrote, "If you look closely at the face of the player, you will see that his cheek muscles are tightening and his lips are pursed in effort and attempted concentration. But tightened face muscles aren't required to hit the backhand, nor do they help concentration."

Self 2

Gallwey believed that this was Self 1 at work, thinking too much, trying too hard and undermining the natural abilities of Self 2.

How to overcome all this? Through imagery, getting a clear picture in your mind of the shot, learning to see what was actually happening without judging, and learning to trust Self 2 to perform.

The book is full of examples of players berating themselves, and how the first negative judgment expands to more general negativity. A missed serve extends to I am serving badly today, then to I have a terrible serve, then to I am a lousy tennis player. Eventually the self-judgments become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Gallwey tells the story of a business man trying to learn a top spin backhand. He believes he is taking the racket back too high. 5 different pros have told him this.

But the reality is he hasn't really been able to actually see this happening. Gallwey has him stand in front of a large windowpane and swing while watching his reflection. Seeing himself lead to a different kind of revelation.

"Hey I really do take my racket back high! It goes up over my shoulder." He was surprised! Despite all the lessons he had never directly experienced what was happening.

On the court he was finally able to transform his backhand, developing a sense of feel corresponding to the image in the windowpane. Gallwey called this creating awareness of what actually is.

Interestingly nowhere in either book does Gallwey mention the use of video, although the technology for home use was then in it's infancy. I mentioned in the first article that we had exchanged 2 emails but he never responded after that. A question to ask if he ever writes again!

Letting go of self-judgment and creating awareness of what is are the prerequisites for Gallwey for trusting Self 2. Self 2 is the physical body, the brain, conscious and unconscious memory and the nervous system.

Gallwey uses the example of walking to a chair and turning on a light before sitting down to read. He writes: "Self 1did not have to tell your body how far to reach before closing your fingers on the light switch. Your body did what was necessary without thought. The process by which the learned and performed these actions is no different from the process by which it learns and plays the game of tennis."

True confidence comes from respecting Self 2 and the process by which it learns. To Gallwey it's the difference between making yourself do something and letting it happen.

Christina

Over my own teaching career I had many experiences with players dealing with self-negativity that interfered with their development. One that still stands out was with a player on my championship high school teams.

Christina played singles on one of those teams. She had a great forehand and was also a great competitor.

Her backhand was another story—she didn't extend and collapsed her finish. It often let her down and that in turn deflated her emotionally.

When we worked on it using the checkpoints for more extension at the finish, she would frequently hit a few great backhands, but once she missed a couple that would lead to a long string of errors.

So I asked her about what was going through her mind when the errors set in. What did she say to herself?

Her answer was "I suck." Gallwey would call this criticism from Self 1. The great psychologist Jim Loehr, who was influenced by Gallwey early in his career, called it "negative self talk."

Give Me Another One

His advice was to replace the negatives after missing with the phrase "Give me another one!" This really worked for Christina.

When she missed I asked her to smile and repeat the phrase "Give me another one," and them physically model the stroke and at the same time visualize the image and the feeling as a positive. I asked her to do the same in her matches.

It became an inside joke between us and I am sure some of her opponents were puzzled. But the end result is the consistency of her backhand went way up allowing her to stay in points til she could use that big forehand.

In Mental Toughness Training for Sports his groundbreaking book published in 1982, eight years after Gallwey published the Inner Game, Loehr shared data on how emotional states affected performance. (Click Here.)

He introduced 4 categories: High Positive Energy, High Negative Energy, Low Positive Energy, and Low Negative Energy. Not surprisingly, athletes across many sports reported that their best performances were associated with High Positive Energy.

IPS

Loehr labeled these feelings of high positive energy the "Ideal Performance State." He has written about this on Tennisplayer as part of a classic series of articles in our archives. (Click Here.)

Although Loehr doesn't mention Gallwey directly, he includes the Inner Game at the top of his list of recommended reading. And the Ideal Performance State seems to correspond closely to what Gallwey describes when tennis players quiet the negativity of Self 1 and let Self 2 play.

All of this work by these two pioneers influenced me deeply in developing the concepts that lead to the creation of The Winning Edge video with John McEnroe and Ivan Lendl. I saw in my teaching and my own playing that imagery was a bridge to the positive states on mind that Loehr and Gallwey described. (Click Here for a link to one of my favorite segments from the Winning Edge on the serve.)

I carried this insight a step further when I published the first edition of my book, Visual Tennis in 1990 and then the companion video. (Click Here.) The idea was to create images or stroke models that could then be used to key shots in competitive play and bypass the negative energy described by Gallwey and Loehr.

And that fundamental approach has continued to inform my work for Tennisplayer over the last many years. You can see this in my articles in the Advanced Tennis section (Click Here) and in My Teaching Systems articles (Click Here.)

As I said in the first article in this series, the two decades between the 1970s and the 1990s were a time of great creative ferment and the insight and inspiration that began in that period continues to sustain me today!

Next let's look at another revolutionary insight from Gallwey on watching the tennis ball. Stay Tuned.