Book SummaryThe Inner Game of Tennis, by W. Timothy Gallwey

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Inner Game of Tennis

In The Inner Game of Tennis, tennis pro and educator Timothy Gallwey explores the mind games that exist both in tennis and the rest of our lives.

He argues that we aren’t practicing and learning correctly and suggests a new method that is based on the concepts of playing an inner and an outer game, governed by two selves, one that relies on instinct and the other that governs the thinking mind.

The Mental Game of Tennis and the Inner and Outer Selves

To unlock your full potential as a tennis player, understand that tennis is a mind game. It is played more with yourself than with your opponent, and there are strategies to improve your relationship with yourself.

Gallwey calls the two selves “Self 1” and “Self 2.” Self 1 governs what he refers to as the “ego-mind,” and Self 2 governs the body and instinct. The “ego-mind” is what chastises you when you do poorly and compliments you when you do well.

Players are most successful when they can quiet Self 1 and let Self 2 take over, but this is rare.

While observing a tennis match, it’s obvious that most competitors are physically straining in unnecessary ways—their faces tighten or they curse at themselves. This is a manifestation of an inner self that is not well-calibrated and an ego that is working too hard for control, leading to physical reactions.

The goal is thus to play without thinking too actively or “over trying.” Good players of course still have to exert significant effort on the court, but there’s a difference between this and trying too hard, which almost always involves getting angry at yourself.

Players who have achieved mastery of the Inner Game are good at three skills:

• First, figuring out their own desired outcome
  • Example: Wanting to hit a forehand deeper in the court
• Second, trusting Self 2 and not interfering too much
  • Example: Not thinking too hard about the mechanics necessary to hit the forehand farther before swinging
• Third, thinking about themselves “nonjudgmentally”—noticing what is happening without passing a value judgment on their performance
  • Example: Staying calm when you inevitably hit a few into the net

Each of these adds up to the idea of “relaxed concentration,” which is the Platonic ideal of a successful tennis player—fully in control and fully relaxed at the same time.

Understanding Self 1 and Self 2

You can’t quiet Self 1 and listen to and trust Self 2 if you chastise or judge yourself.

You already know how to listen only to Self 2 because this is how you learned as a child—without judgment.

Quieting Self 1 thus requires non-judgmental observation. This is done in multiple ways:

• Think about hitting a forehand: Hit a bunch of forehands without worrying about where they’re going and without chastising yourself. Instead, observe your own body closely and notice how you are hitting. This should produce an immediate change in your stroke.
• Make your mind act like a mirror—simply parroting back your motion without any positive or negative reaction to the motion itself or to the outcome.
• Don’t consider errors to be bad, consider them to be a part of development.

We can think of “trying hard” as Self 1 castigating Self 2, while “effort” is the physical exertion it takes to do well.

After you let go of self-judgment, you can find self-confidence. Begin thinking about your body differently—it does all kinds of incredible things (talking, walking, reading) without any noticed effort. Considering this, it doesn’t make much sense to constantly denigrate yourself. An important maxim here is “trust thyself”: Allow your body to complete feats without constant interference from the ego part of your mind.

Then, begin to think about desired outcomes: Ask your body for the results you want, the form it should move in, and the qualities you see in others that you want. You won’t reach all of this right away, but remember not to pass judgment, and let your body learn what it does not know and complete what it does know. You’ll realize that without this judgment, a lot of your mechanics will fix themselves naturally.

Some instruction is certainly useful, but take instruction you’re given, like “keep your wrist tighter,” and see how it feels for you. Try out different tightnesses and notice, without judgment, what happens to your body and your shots. Consider a couple examples:

• Joan is taking a tennis lesson because she’s hitting most of her forehands right on the frame. It quickly becomes obvious that she’s trying so hard to hit the ball anywhere but the frame that she’s hitting more on the frame. Her coach tells her to try to hit the ball on the frame, and she hits fewer on the frame. Then, he tells her to apply her focus not to her racket at all, but to the ball coming at her. She hits barely any on the frame.
• Jack has a bad backhand and he knows what’s bad about it: He brings his...

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapters 1-2: Tennis as a Mental Game

In The Inner Game of Tennis, tennis pro and educator Timothy Gallwey explores the mind games that exist both in tennis and the rest of our lives.

He argues that we aren’t practicing and learning correctly and suggests a new method that is based on the concepts of playing an inner and an outer game, governed by two selves, one that relies on instinct and the other that governs the thinking mind.

While the greatest tennis players in the world are remarkable physical athletes, tennis is primarily a mental game. It is almost always your mind that keeps you from unlocking your true potential.

Most pro tennis players don’t complain about any sort of physical limitations. Rather, they complain about mental limitations, their Inner Game: They play better in practice than in games, or they get nervous and lose concentration during big points.

However, most pros focus on the Outer Game. Consider the typical tennis lesson:

• The tennis pro, not wanting to disappoint her client, will give her technical advice on basically every stroke.
• The client, now constantly overthinking about how she can improve her game, will have dozens of technical lessons spinning in her...

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 3: Working on Self 1

The biggest obstacle to success on the court and off is “self-judgment.” Letting that judgment go and turning it into something more productive will improve your tennis game and your life.

The greatest successes on the court and off come from quieting Self 1, or the “ego-mind,” the part of your mind in charge of praising and chastising yourself. Great music, art, and tennis playing all come from the unconscious mind, Self 2. So how can you quiet Self 1 so Self 2 takes control?

Nonjudgmental Observation

Tennis matches involve second-by-second positive or negative judgments: frowns after poor shots, satisfaction after good ones, sometimes literally yelling at oneself.

Judgment provokes a thinking process:

• First, something is judged as good or bad: “That serve stunk.” The player then starts thinking about how to recreate the shot if it was good or how to not do it again if it was bad.
• After this, generalizations begin: After a few bad shots, “That was one bad serve” turns into “I have a bad serve,” which turns into “I’m bad at tennis,” which turns into “I’m bad in general.” These judgments are self-fulfilling.

(Shortform note: This can sometimes happen...

Shortform Exercise: Quiet the Mind

It can be useful to practice some of Gallwey’s strategies off the court.

Think about the last time you were frustrated while working toward a goal, anything from feeling a stitch in your side while trying to run more miles than usual to screwing up a sales pitch to a potential new customer. What did you say to yourself?

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 4: Believing in Self 2

Now that we’ve discussed getting rid of self-judgment and quieting Self 1, we’ll move to finding self-confidence. This will allow you to give yourself over fully to Self 2.

Your body performs all kinds of effort unconsciously—talking, reading, doing the necessary things to survive. All of this is completely removed from Self 1—you don’t have to actively tell yourself to do any of these functions.

Think about this in relation to tennis—there are all kinds of calculations that Self 2 does just to do something like return a serve: calculate speed, wind, direction, how quickly to swing, and so on. This is all done in somewhere around a second. The human body can clearly do remarkable things on and off the tennis court—you just have to use it correctly.

We should be proud of the incredible things we can do rather than embarrassed by the things we cannot. It doesn’t make much sense to be denigrating ourselves all the time for failing to complete actions that are remarkable. Additionally, Self 2 can pick up new skills very quickly. We should get excited about the new skills that we are learning.

Respecting Self 2

Most of the problems previously described here,...

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapters 5-6: Finding Proper Technique and Making It Permanent

Physical technique is also, of course, an important part of a successful player’s game. Trusting Self 2 can improve your physical as well as your mental game.

At times, you’ll have to and want to give your body instruction. This should be based on the natural learning your body does already. You already know how to learn, so don’t try to interfere with that process.

• Think about animals: Young animals are taught how to walk or swim or run by their parents, who give them only the slightest amount of instruction and some encouragement, and then allow their young to repeat and learn the activity themselves.

Technical instructions are a modern innovation. Experience had to proceed instruction or technical knowledge, because how would that knowledge have been acquired in the first place? Verbal instruction comes from people with experience, but when it’s passed on to people with no experience, it’s harder to understand. There’s a huge split between mind and body.

Words can give an approximation or a description of actions or ideas or experiences, but they are not the actions or ideas themselves. This is why we learn so much better when our mind allows our bodies to...

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 7: Focusing on Success

Letting Self 2 take control is a simple concept, but it’s not easy, and it requires focus. Even when we can quiet our minds, we can still have trouble focusing on something specific.

• You can’t control the mind through a passive process—you have to learn to direct it somewhere.
• This doesn’t mean that the mind can’t be quiet—true focus includes having the quiet mind described earlier to find relaxed concentration.

Consider the process of watching the ball. Often, people think watching the ball includes watching the ball, thinking about the next shot, or worrying about what anyone watching will think if they flub it.

Instead, just focus on the seams of the ball as it travels. Focusing on this one specific motion will both actually help the player see the ball better and quiet the mind from thinking about anything else. Become absorbed in the pattern, and the body will do everything else naturally.

Don’t think that you know everything about the ball—stay engrossed and continue to look for oddities no matter how many tennis balls you’ve seen in your life. You don’t know how it’s going to bounce, nor do you know its trajectory or speed every time. Track those...

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 8: Mind Games on and Off the Court

We are all consistently playing games with different goals. Your goals in your tennis match may not be the same as your opponent’s. To achieve your goals, you have to figure them out and then conquer the obstacles to success, external and internal, in front of you.

It’s obvious that there’s more than tennis happening on the court—players are constantly talking to themselves, talking to each other, getting exasperated...the list goes on.

There is also variety in how people feel about the game being played in front of them. This includes varieties in motivation:

• Winning at all costs
• Wanting to look good on the court without caring about winning
• Not caring at all

These can affect play—for example, players who are ultra-concerned with winning at all costs might ironically be able to play very well until match or game points, at which time they have trouble closing.

There are also all kinds of subliminal games that are happening between players that are much more difficult to figure out.

As a player recognizes what (mostly ego-, Self-1-based) games she is playing with herself, she can discriminate and then discover what games she finds worth playing...

Shortform Exercise: Which “O” Are You?

While Gallwey’s examples are concerned primarily with tennis, his categorizations work for many things in life. In this exercise, you’ll consider your own motivations.

Choose a sport or activity that you do frequently and consider “Good-o,” “Friends-o,” and “Health-o-Fun-o,” along with their subgames. What games and subgames do you play? Why?

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 9: On Competition

Once we find out what game we are playing, we have to figure out what winning means to us. What’s most important is to disentangle winning and losing from our understanding of our self-worth. The worst kind of competition is usually when the participants are using it to derive their self-worth.

There are two contradicting views on competition in the West: Some believe it is responsible for society’s success, others that it is divisive and responsible for failure.

• Many children are brought up believing the former, and so every point becomes life or death. These children often turn into adults who want to succeed so much that they lose sight of everything else.
• Others rebel, pointing out the cruelty in this sort of society. In young people, this can manifest in a wish to fail. They don’t care that they lost because, according to...

Shortform Exercise: Cooperate With Your Competition

Consider how competition and cooperation can work together in your own life.

Think of a time when a competition didn’t go your way. Were you frustrated? Why?

The Inner Game of Tennis Summary Chapter 10: Playing “The Inner Game” in Life

Playing the Inner Game on the court can, as proven already, lead to development outside the court. Two clear benefits are better focus and a better understanding of yourself. But you can practice “The Inner Game” off the court as well. Almost every human activity, from asking for a raise to finding a significant other, will involve an inner and an outer game. One of the biggest benefits of knowing how to play the Inner Game is knowing how to quiet Self 1 to find, define, and finally overcome obstacles to reach goals.

Inner Instability, Inner Stability

Self 1 can produce significant instability if we listen to it too much. This is because Self 1 can often distort the meaning of an event. Think about a time that you went on a first date and didn’t end up having a second one. There are all sorts of reasons another date may not have worked out. But Self 1 is very capable at producing fears and delusions—maybe you start thinking about what you did wrong and then end by...