Book Review: The Inner Game of Tennis, W Timothy Gallwey – and coaching

The Inner Game of Tennis is actually written for tennis teachers and explains how to help students experience what good shots feel like so they can become better players. The ideas have a lot of crossover to coaching and impacted early coaching ideas a great deal since its publication in 1974. 

Gallwey devised the idea of two selves. Self 1 is the judgmental person, evaluating progress, giving instructions, and making the player try hard. Self 2 is the person’s “doer”, where the person experiences flow, confidence, and can see the goal of a shot. This is helpful to me as a coach – if I can help the person see their goals and approach them with relaxed concentration, rather than judging their progress, they will more naturally make progress. 

Gallwey says that the player should visualise the goal and experience what a good shot feels like because “the native tongue of Self 2 is imagery” (41). In coaching we also want our coachees to visualize their goals, and experience them in a tangible way. I was asking one of my coachees to describe her goal of being an engaged parent. What would it look like to her? What are other people saying? What does she see and hear? When it becomes more vivid to her, she can sense that she has accomplished it already. In Gallwey’s words, she can naturally move towards her envisioned goal. I have also noticed this when doing a goal setting session with a coachee. He talked for almost our whole session about a move he wanted to make to another country and how it would be to create the life he wanted for his wife and baby. I kept him focused on describing this goal until it was vibrantly real to him. Then in the last couple of minutes I asked him what he would like to do to move himself closer to the goal this week. There was no need to do any work with options, he was immediately able to choose actions and he was excited to do them. 

Another of Gallwey’s principles is to help the player focus on something (not a performance point) to still the inner chatter of Self 1. For example, he asks players to focus on the seams of the tennis ball as it comes towards them. This is not required for the shot but helps the player ignore their judgmental voice and feel what they want to achieve. I see a parallel to coaching here as well. We want to help coachees look beyond what they see as problems to the end goal. As coaches we are not judgmental of their progress and we encourage them to examine was is real at this moment instead of judging it. Gallwey says players should observe their strokes in a detached manner to gain information about the way they are doing it now. This corresponds to Reality questions such as “Where are you now on a scale of 1 to 10 with this goal?” or “What have you done so far?” We ask these questions of coachees so they can see where they are and what is working now. Doing this in a factual, non-blaming way helps them see where they are compared to where they want to go. 

Gallwey talks a lot about the tennis teacher’s detachment. He writes that when ne noticed and praised a shot that went well, it negatively affected the subsequent shots of the player: “my compliment had engaged their judgmental minds” (29). Instead of this he says that he thinks “the final authority stays inside” (67), meaning that the player should observe their own shots and not think that the best way to play is the way given by a teacher or a professional player or a book. This reminds me of what my coaching trainer has said so many times, that the coachee is a “totally outstanding person, capable of astonishing things” (TOPCAT). As a coach my job is to believe in the coachee’s ability to dream big dreams that are right for them, and to walk alongside them as they plan what they want to do to meet those dreams.