Inside Story

It all started one day in the early 1970s, Tim Gallwey says, when he “was a little bored” while giving a tennis lesson. The San Francisco native wasn’t the first, or last, teaching pro to experience this feeling while feeding balls and barking commands at a wayward student. But he was likely the only one to turn his moment of lassitude into a life-changing, sport-changing epiphany. For Gallwey, less has always been more.

“The guy had a backhand problem,” Gallwey remembers four decades later. “This time, instead of telling him what he was doing wrong, I let him swing away at it for a while. Pretty soon I noticed that his backhand was getting better without any instruction at all.”

The sight was a difficult one for a pro to believe, but it made Gallwey wonder: Was he more committed to his own teaching, rather than his student’s learning? Then a question came to his mind that he had never asked before: “What was going on inside the head of the player while the ball was approaching?”

The answer, once the question had been asked, was obvious to Gallwey: The man doubted that he could perform the instruction he’d been given, which forced him to try too hard to do it, and tighten up in the process.

More epiphanies soon followed. Instead of telling a beginner how to hit a forehand, Gallwey had her watch as he hit 10 of them. When she took the racquet from him, she said, “I noticed the first thing you did was move your feet.” Then she proceeded to hit a perfect forehand, just as Gallwey had demonstrated. There was only one problem.

“She hadn’t moved her feet!” he says, laughing at the memory. “And that was the one thing she had thought to do.”

A few weeks later, another student with a backhand problem approached Gallwey and said, “I take my racquet back too high.” He knew this, he said, because five different teaching pros had told him the same thing. This time Gallwey wasn’t bored, but he was hungry.

Thinking about lunch, he looked over at the club’s dining room, which was covered in reflective glass. He had an idea. Rather than become the sixth pro to tell his student that his take-back was too high, he had him swing in front of the mirror instead.

“Now he could see that it was too high,” Gallwey says. “He believed what the other pros told him about his swing, but now he knew where his racquet was from his own experience.”

When they were facing the net again, Gallwey told the student, “Don’t try to lower your racquet. Just be aware of it at the back of the swing.” He couldn’t understand at first; he’d never heard an instruction that said be aware of how something is, rather than do something the way you should.

Over the next 10 shots, the student’s take-back went from neck to chest to shoulder to waist to below the waist. “Those are topspin backhands!” he shouted with glee after the 10th ball.

“Then he asked,” Gallwey says, “‘What did you tell me? I want to remember.’ But I hadn’t told him anything. The change took place without him trying to do it right.”

The experience became the core of Gallwey’s inner game method: “Before you try to change something,” he says, “become more aware of the way it is. Awareness itself will cause the change if you’re clear about the desired outcomes, and you don’t try too hard.”

Forty years later, Gallwey is at his home in Malibu, CA, trying to make another student—this reporter—aware of the inner game that he discovered that day. He is in his living room, rather than on a court, which is appropriate because over the last four decades his epiphanies of the early ’70s have resonated far beyond tennis. At 77, he spends much of his time coaching executives in the boardroom or hosting them on weekend retreats.The former captain of the Harvard tennis team now presides over an Inner Game empire. The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974, was followed by Inner Skiing, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Winning, The Inner Game of Music, The Inner Game of Work and The Inner Game of Stress.

“I’m shocked at the number of uses people have made of Inner Game,” Gallwey says. “Even in a sport like football, which is not much like tennis. When Random House first printed it, they said they would be happy selling 20,000. It went well past a million.”

With its talk of “letting it happen” and “finding your groove,” The Inner Game of Tennis might sound at first like a Zen, “be the ball” relic of California in the New Age 1970s. And it was certainly a product of its moment. The book was published in the first flush of the tennis boom, when the upper-crust sport left the country club for the public park and was taken up by 30 million hackers across the nation. Many of these new players had no idea how frustrating this seemingly simple game could be. Gallwey met them every day, and he soon found that his solutions to their individual problems on court had universal applications off of it. Tennis, it turned out, was a pretty good test run for life.

“It’s a game,” Gallwey says, “where you pretend that it matters if a ball goes over a net. In the end, of course, it’s just going to go back in the can. Players also pretend that it’s all about winning, but if that were true, why don’t you just play someone you know you can beat every time? What we really want is a challenge, and what tennis teaches us is how to overcome doubts and fears.”

In The Inner Game, Gallwey breaks down people’s psyches into two parts, Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is our controlling, judgmental side—the teller—the one who, after one of your backhands finds the net, might ask, “How could you miss that?” The “you” in that question is Self 2, the unconscious part of us that does all the work—the doer. The Inner Game is, essentially, a series of methods for getting Self 1 out of Self 2’s way.

“You’ve got a 10-cent guy in control of a billion dollar computer,” Gallwey says. “You have to learn to trust that part of the brain instead of trying to tell it what to do. Any added instruction from a teacher only makes things worse.

“Self 2 doesn’t speak English anyway,” he adds with a laugh.

The first key to Gallwey’s system was “focus of attention.” He wanted people to clear their brains of all the advice from Self 1 and simply “be interested in the ball.” To that end, Gallwey’s most famous drill is an exceedingly rudimentary one called “bounce-hit”: When the ball bounces in front of you, you say “bounce”; when you swing and hit it, you say “hit.” This served two purposes: To lengthen the time people focused on the ball, and to keep Self 1 busy so it couldn’t distract Self 2 with other thoughts.

From there, Gallwey moved on to his second and most important insight in The Inner Game: The benefits of “non-judgmental observation.”

“Self 1 is always judging what you’re doing,” he says. “Judgment is a means of control. In the minds of many people, whether or not you’re a good tennis player becomes linked to whether or not you’re a good person. That pressure only impedes you.”

Gallwey’s principles, despite their success elsewhere, aren’t widely taught in tennis anymore. But where The Inner Game made its mark and lives on is, fittingly, in the sport’s unconscious.

“Somewhere in my apartment is the yellowing copy that I bought 40 years ago,” says Todd Snyder, a teaching pro in Brooklyn, NY. “Thinking about it, my teaching style has slowly evolved over the years to incorporate more of the ‘your body knows what to do’ approach that Gallwey favored—one can only yell ‘get your racquet back’ so many times.”

Tim Mayotte, a Wimbledon semifinalist and head of the Mayotte Hurst Stevinson Tennis Academy in New Jersey, believes that The Inner Game “gives too much credit to the body for its ability to find great technique through a natural way of playing. To me, most people have to practice their way to making a shot seem ‘natural.’”

Gallwey sees another possible reason for The Inner Game’s lack of current influence in its original sport: It didn’t leave tennis pros with much to do.

“New coaches liked it at the time,” Gallwey says, “because it was simpler to learn. Experienced coaches saw it as a threat to what they did. And the top touring pros didn’t need it; they thought it was obvious. It was counter to the culture of tennis instruction, where the teacher is the one in control.”

It could be said that The Inner Game revolution of the mid-’70s was overtaken by another, more powerful revolution in the sport at the end of that decade. When Nick Bollettieri opened his academy in 1979, tennis instruction went from personal to industrial. Gallwey wanted to help each player find his or her own natural way of playing; Bollettieri wanted to teach as many players as possible the surest way to win. Children, with their oversized racquets and killer forehands in tow, were taught not to be “interested in the ball”; they were taught to pound it as hard as they could.

In Gallwey’s system, you don’t criticize yourself or try to correct for past mistakes; instead, you look to the future and “picture the desired outcome” of each shot. You don’t consciously try harder; instead, you “give your body the freedom to perform.” Most of all, you remember the difference between the goal of the activity itself—winning—and the real reason you’re doing it, whether it’s for enjoyment or improvement.

It’s that last suggestion that has allowed The Inner Game to find uses in spheres of life far from a tennis court. Galley talks now of “re-inventing The Inner Game” for a new time, when there’s a growing awareness that, as the CEO of Aetna, Mark Bertolini, recently told The New Yorker, “Companies aren’t just money-making machines.”

“The ideas seem more important than ever,” says Gallwey as he lists seemingly intractable problems like war, starvation and global warming. “We have a leadership problem. As people, we need to be aware of what’s important for the human race. Being a successful CEO isn’t the same as living a successful life.”

The difference between those two things is the same one that’s been at the core of Gallwey’s teaching, on court and off, since 1974. As that student of Gallwey’s with the bad backhand learned, if we look inside, we might be surprised at what we find, and what we can do.