Inner Game of Tennis: Origins

Sean Brawley

I appreciate the opportunity to write about something so near and dear to my heart. I have known Tim Gallwey for almost 30 years and had the good fortune of being mentored by him for over 6 years starting in the mid-1990s.

He and I have collaborated on numerous Inner Game workshops over the years. I helped him revise the Inner Game of Tennis book in 1997, and am listed as a key contributor to the Inner Game of Work. I was also the first certified Inner Game coach in the world.

With regards to John Yandell's series on what he learned from the Inner Game (Click Here), when I spoke to him, he suggested that I write a point/counterpoint article. But what I thought would perhaps be better was for me to write a series of articles that uses John's articles as a jumping off point to expand on Inner Game ideas and principles, clarify some things he wrote about, share my own personal experiences, and share some of the latest findings from neuroscience that support Inner Game philosophy.

Origins of the Book

Tim started writing the Inner Game of Tennis in 1972 and it was published by Random House in 1974. It quickly became a huge bestseller that year selling nearly 200,000 copies. It is indeed, as John wrote, the #1 bestselling tennis book of all time selling over 1.2 million copies to date.

The book came about in true Inner Game fashion. Tim had written two chapters for the students he was teaching so they could better understand his coaching philosophy. One of those students was Adam Smith, an author of economics books, who sent it to his editor at Random House.

Random House reached out to see if Tim wanted to finish the book. No one thought the book would sell more than 15,000 copies total.

The origins of Tim's discovery are thus: after graduating from Harvard where he majored in Education, he enlisted in the Navy where he became a training officer. After serving, he joined a small group of people who created a small liberal arts college in the mid-west. The school closed after 5 years, and its failure was hard on Tim.

Not sure what to do next, Tim took a sabbatical from working, went home to Carmel, California, and a few months later landed a job at the Meadowbrook Tennis Club teaching tennis to earn some money.

It was here in what he has described to me as being in an open, vulnerable state—the perfect state of mind for creativity and discovery—that one day he observed something surprising. Tired from teaching several hours, Tim fed balls to his student, an elderly man wanting to improve his backhand, and didn't give him any instructions.

Then he noticed something terrible happening. The man was learning all on his own!

At first, Tim worried he wouldn't get credit for his student's improvement. So he began giving a few instructions and noticed that his instructions interfered with the student's natural learning and actually made things worse. The man tightened up, became mechanical in his movements and he started judging his mistakes.

Fateful Question

This caused Tim to ask that fateful question: What is going on in the mind of the player? How is learning really taking place?

This inquiry is at the heart of Tim's exploration and yielded much fruit over the years. As John described in article one, Tim discovered that we all tend to get in our own way. We worry about making mistakes, tell ourselves what to do, judge ourselves, get easily distracted, and play many inner games, like trying hard to impress our friends and have perfect technique, among many others.

But he also discovered something equally important that many players and coaches have forgotten about. We all have a natural ability to learn, the same ability we had as children when we learned to walk and talk, do somersaults, and ride a bicycle. With little to no interference from a busy mind.

This led to the foundational principle of the Inner Game:

As you can easily see from this formula, if we want to improve our performance, we can develop our talent and potential and/or learn how to reduce our self-interference. When a player or coach learns how to do both, learning is accelerated, playing often becomes more enjoyable, and performance is optimized.

So how did Tim discover the Inner Game method? The exercises, tools, and what is often described as "teaching or coaching through inquiry." Simply put, by experimenting. By being willing to try new approaches and possibly fail in his attempts.

Over the course of the next several months, Tim discovered two critical factors that would be helpful for any coach or player to learn. The first was how important is to create a safe environment for learning. By safe, I mean mostly mentally and emotionally safe.

When someone feels safe in their body, they are more likely to access their parasympathetic system, which is better known as the "rest and digest" system. Feeling safe enables "relaxed mobilization" for learning, exploration, and discovery. Feeling unsafe triggers the fight or flight system, which greatly interferes with learning.

The second was how valuable it is to guide the player's focus of attention to what was critical—what is often called "guided discovery."

Monkey Mind

Focusing attention tends to quiet the "monkey mind" and keep it from getting in the way of learning and doing things we already know how to do. When placed on something critical to the process of hitting a tennis ball—like the ball or a person's footwork and balance—the brain receives high quality, highly relevant information that creates the possibility for optimal learning and performance. And it tends to also stop the incessant thoughts and concerns a player has as the ball is approaching.

One of the early experiments Tim did, which John described in article one, was to simply demonstrate for the student how to hit the ball or how to serve, without giving any instructions to fuel the mind's thinking. This produced wonderful results.

I appreciate reading how John took that ball and ran with it, far deeper than Tim did, through the use of imagery, video, and visual modeling. And in my early days learning from Tim, I too discovered that providing a visual image for a student worked wonders. And when you add music to the mix, it helps create a safe, fun environment.

In fact, we know now from neuroscience that this is in large part due to what are called the "mirror neurons" in our brain. Watching and observing someone perform a task is an effective way to learn. I remember reading an article about a sushi chef school in Japan, where the students watched a master chef for three years before they were allowed to prepare the sushi.

Here's an Inner Game question though: if this method is so useful and effective why are more coaches not using it? Why do coaches still rely so heavily on giving technical instruction, when there are other possibly more effective ways to coach?

We will explore this in the next article.