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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
Even once we have learned a better way of approaching learning and playing tennis, there are all kinds of mind games that we play with ourselves and our opponents that preclude us from being as successful as possible. It’s useful to learn what these games are so that we can understand better how to make changes to our game permanent and focus better on the court.
Tennis players will often do something called “grooving” strokes—they will hit a ball in a certain way so many times that a habit or “groove” is created. This can screw with a player’s head, because even if she is starting to focus more on Self 2, old grooves can be hard to break out of because they become physical.
The solution to this is not to try to break out of old habits but to learn new ones. Swing without conscious control and then picture the result that you want. Hit with a picture of the result of the swing in mind and watch what happens. Don’t try to change the way you are hitting, try to change the outcome. Don’t try to hit your forehand with a tighter wrist, try to hit it deeper into the court. This can help create a new groove.
We need to use imagery to communicate with our bodies. Here are three strategies:
Focus occurs not when you’re trying too hard to focus on something, but when you’re legitimately interested in something.
A lot of this success comes from a player’s ability to focus. We should be focusing our awareness on the here and the now.
Lots of players fall into the trap of thinking about past points they lost or future points they hope to win, which can spiral into thinking about winning or losing the match. Soon, they won’t be playing the game in front of them at all, just a game with themselves.
All this focus and ability to quiet the mind, though, will be not that useful if you don’t understand what game you are playing. People play tennis for lots of different reasons—Gallwey divides them into different “games”:
Most people play a combination of these games with themselves, and each game has its own set of obstacles, like wanting badly to beat your opponent or feeling the need to lose weight. We should figure out what game we are playing with ourselves so we can better understand the obstacles in front of us and how to overcome them.
One of the most essential lessons for improving your mental health through tennis is to attempt to remove your play from your self-worth. This can significantly help your life off the court as well.
The key is to stop using competition to derive your own self-worth but also to continue to get a lot out of playing. This is only doable if you can find other obstacles and challenges to overcome that will make you feel good about yourself.
Winning is only valuable if the goal itself is of value to the individual. Find a personal victory and attempt to accomplish it. In this way, competition and cooperation can be indistinguishable: Each player can become an obstacle to the other one in reaching an ultimate goal. One player can be pushing the other to improve strokes while the other can serve as an opponent that’s particularly difficult to defeat. These obstacles stop being negatives that drain on your self-worth and become positive challenges to overcome. If the obstacles are easy, the ultimate goal won’t be of as much value.
By finding our goals, understanding our obstacles, and quieting our mind with nonjudgmental observation, we can play the same kind of Inner Game that we’ve learned to play on the court everywhere in our lives.
Rather than attempting to manage stress, we can work on stability: Self 1 can become so dependent on a job or a relationship that we think we can’t live without those things. We can find freedom from a lot of stress if we realize that we can let go of attachments to our comfortable job or relationship and still be okay.
Figure out what you need and what is important to you, and then, like on the tennis court, set your own goals for success. Focus Self 1 and allow Self 2 to do more work without so much criticism.
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:
Now, consider the lesson where the pro scales back her comments significantly:
Commentators often describe players who are playing particularly well as playing “out of their mind” or “over their head.” Think about a lower seed in a tournament who upsets a great player by simply outplaying them. There’s an understanding, even if it isn’t said out loud, that when someone is playing “unconsciously” they’re actually more aware of their surroundings. What they’re not doing is thinking too actively or “over-trying.”
So the Inner Game is all about learning to play unconsciously without trying too hard to do just that.
To understand the two selves, consider what players often say to themselves on the court—it’s all technical:
When players fail at these technical instructions, they start scolding themselves.
When players talk to themselves this way, the “I” doing the talking and the “self” listening are, in essence, two different selves. We’ll call these “Self 1” and “Self 2,” and they are at the very center of learning the Inner Game.
The key to improving your tennis game (and the rest of your life) is to improve your relationship between Self 1 and Self 2.
Think about Self 1 and Self 2 as two distinct humans:
If this problem is related to trying too hard, and the answer is to relax, how far should we go? How much “trying” is enough? The answer is that there is a significant difference between “trying hard” and physical effort. We can think of “trying hard” as Self 1 castigating Self 2, while “effort” is the physical exertion it takes to do well. Think about the following example of Joan hitting a forehand:
Example: Joan’s Forehand
Joan comes in for a tennis lesson complaining that she is constantly hitting the ball on the frame rather than nicely on the strings. Her eyesight is fine and she appears to be limber enough. But when her coach serves her 10 forehands, she hits eight on the frame.
Next, he asks her to try very hard to hit all 10 on the strings, expecting worse results. She actually manages to do a little better, hitting only 6/10 on the frame. After that, he asks her to try to hit balls on the frame. She hits 4/10 on the frame and takes this at first to mean that she can never do what she tells herself to. She says this in frustration, but it actually might be the key to improving her game.
Next, he asks her to focus on the seams of the ball and not on the frame or the center of the racket at all. She hits 9/10 well, only 1/10 on the frame.
Joan didn’t exert less actual physical effort, she just exerted herself in a more productive way. She trained her focus on the ball rather than on not screwing up.
Players who successfully master the Inner Game are good at three specific skills:
Each of these adds up to “relaxed concentration,” which is the Platonic ideal of a successful tennis player: fully in control and fully relaxed at the same time.
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?
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:
(Shortform note: This can sometimes happen even if you’re playing well. If you’re too results conscious and you happen to get unlucky or play a more talented player than you, you can start generalizing and getting angry with yourself without reason.)
Considering your own moments of peak performance—when you did great on a test or performed an impressive athletic feat—you’ll probably notice that your mind actually wasn’t working too hard and was one with your body.
This focus without an attempt to concentrate is “childlike”: Success on the court shares a lot of similarities with the way a child picks up speech or walking from simply observing and not worrying about mistakes.
We can see this often when players are volleying at the net—the ball is coming so quickly back and forth that base instincts have to kick in. This is more difficult to achieve when players have more time to think and Self 1 has more time to take over.
There’s a difference between letting go of judgment and ignoring mistakes. If you have control over your mind, you will notice a mistake but not assign a negative value to it. You can still fix actual mechanical issues this way if you have any—notice the reason a shot is going out without labeling it “bad.”
Rather than bad, errors are part of development. A player’s tennis game improves a lot from making errors. If you notice your stroke without judgment, you can make quick adjustments to it without pressure.
The key is to have your mind act like a mirror. Reflect what happened accurately without passing judgment on what’s in front.
Example: Jack’s Backhand
Jack says he has an erratic backhand. His coach asks him what’s so bad about it. He says he brings his racket too high on the backswing and that five pros have told him this, he just can’t manage to fix it. This is slightly absurd on its face, because theoretically if he knows the problem he should be able to just bring his hands down.
Jack takes some practice swings and his swing starts down but then his hands rise right before he connects with the ball. He asks if he’s doing better, and his coach tells him his backhand is fine, it’s just changing a bit. His coach then brings him over to a mirror and asks him to practice there. For the first time, looking in the mirror, he’s able to see for himself rather than have someone tell him that he is in fact bringing his hands too high. He’s surprised and amazed by this—he had to see it for himself. He begins to change and rather than congratulate himself, he’s just surprised by how it felt.
He’s very appreciative of his coach, and his coach asks, “What did I teach you?” Jack gets confused, but he finally answers that his coach got him observing his backhand more closely than before.
As soon as Jack stopped actively trying to change his swing and just watched it, he was finally able to change it.
This leads us to the concept of awareness. A good player should always be aware of where the ball is and where the racket head is. They should see and feel what they’re doing.
Instruction should be based around this as well: not “bring your racket lower” but “consider where your racket is right now.” If you ask where your racket should be, the coach should simply decline to answer, still asking the player to just be aware of where it is. Once again, this will lead to observing with detachment and then better results.
Note: The positive thinking that’s often found in self-help books is also often harmful because it can easily be criticism in disguise. A tennis player will compliment herself for hitting a shot well, and then she’ll feel the need to hit every shot like that one. The same problems arise.
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?
How can you rephrase your self-talk so it reflects your mistakes without judgment?
What can you do to non-judgmentally observe your progress toward a goal in the future?
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.
Most of the problems previously described here, like giving too much self-instruction or trying too hard, come from Self 1 not acknowledging Self 2’s capabilities.
The maxim that we should all instead live by is “trust thyself.” This is not positive thinking. Rather, it is just allowing your body to hit the ball, or letting Self 2 do something like hit a powerful backhand.
Self 1 and Self 2 are a bit like parent (Self 1) and child (Self 2). Trusting parents will let their children try things and make mistakes because it helps them grow.
If there is no trust between Self 1 and Self 2, we will see the physical tightening previously discussed. If you exert too much effort, you use more muscles than are necessary. This both wastes energy and interferes with the action, because some tightened muscles don’t allow others to relax that need to.
This is clear in tennis—a relaxed wrist allows for a snap and more torque, adding more power to the ball. If muscles are too tight, the ball will be less accurate and slower.
We should trust tennis strokes like capable parents trust their kids to learn to walk. Don’t identify with the stroke, in the same way the parent wouldn’t identify with the child who’s unable yet to walk.
If your body already knows how to do something like hit a forehand, you should let it happen. If not, you should let it learn. The more Self 2 practices, the more the body learns. The brain picks up and stores things like what a nice stroke feels like, how quickly the ball comes at you, and so on.
Think about this like learning a dance:
Use imagery to communicate with your body. Here are three strategies:
If you have access to tennis courts, try these experiments:
Using these strategies, try to hit a stationary target with a tennis ball. Once you’re successful, move the target around to other places on the court, keeping in mind everything about not trying too hard and imagining the ball hitting the object. The ball will either hit the target or not—every time, notice where it lands, without passing judgment.
Choose a bad habit that you know you have on the court. Try the way you are used to trying to correct the habit and have a friend watch you and let you know if there are any changes. Then, don’t make any attempt to change your habit and just closely observe your results while hitting. Finally, use the imagery strategies just discussed—ask for results, form, qualities, or all three—and watch your results closely without judgment.
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.
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 lead.
Verbal instruction can sometimes lead to tennis players hitting good shots but thinking that they are doing something wrong because their form is different from what they’ve been told it should look like. This overcorrection can set people back very far in their games. Thus, we have to trust feeling more than verbal communication.
Nevertheless, some instructions are useful, so long as they guide one’s own discovery process. Think about the suggestion: “Keep the wrist tight while hitting the backhand.”
Gallwey includes some technical instruction here that he pairs with some awareness teaching. Consider here some common instructions for ground strokes, serves, and volleys, and how you should use observation to your advantage. Remember to use the instruction as a starting point, but to rely primarily on your own observations to figure out what works for you.
(Shortform note: Since the book was published in 1974, some of these techniques are outdated.)
| Instruction | Observation | |
| Ground Strokes | Follow through at the level of your shoulder. | Notice where you’re following through and how close it is to your shoulder. |
| Bring back the racket early. | Notice where your racket is usually when the ball bounces. | |
| Bend your knees and get down on the ball. | Observe how much your knees are bending when you hit. | |
| Swing up on the ball to produce more topspin. | Watch where your racket is connecting with the ball and how much topspin you’re creating. | |
| Serve | Extend your arm. | Feel how much your elbow is bending. |
| Toss the ball so that you connect with full extension. | Watch how high you’re tossing the ball, practice tosses without hitting the serve. | |
| Volley | Connect in the center of the racket. | Sense without looking where you’re connecting. |
| Plant the back foot. | Feel your weight and how much of it is on the back foot. | |
| Connect with the ball in front of you. | Observe where you’re connecting. | |
| Volley deep in the court. | Observe where the ball is landing. | |
| Don’t bring your racket back too far; punch at the ball. | Discern the minimum amount you can bring your racket back. | |
| Hit the ball before it drops to net level. | Think about how much space there is between the net and the ball when you connect. |
Even once we start learning about Self 1, Self 2, and the Inner Game, it's easy to fall back into bad habits.
Tennis players (or golf players, or anyone else) will “groove” strokes: They’ll start swinging one way and then continue to swing that way, creating a deep habit or “groove” that becomes harder to change the longer it’s done. These patterns do serve a function—getting the ball over the net—and their success at getting the job done reinforces the pattern. However, although the habit might accomplish the goal, it often doesn’t do it efficiently or consistently.
When players are attempting to break out of grooves they don’t like, you’ll see them exerting a ton of energy, starting to do the thing they don’t want to and then gritting their teeth and correcting themselves.
Let’s consider the usual process of learning, which goes something like this:
So, how do you fix these grooves? The best way to learn is not to try to break out of bad grooves but to start new ones.
If you do these first two things, you should have a good idea of what you want to change in your stroke, such as more spin on your serve or more power that allows you to hit further into the service box.
In following this process, you can see new outcomes or habits and start to form better grooves.
This Inner-Game process is focused on nonjudgmental observation and manifesting better results. The criticism that’s so essential to the usual learning process is totally gone. Instead of trying really hard to learn things with Self 1, we let go and allow Self 2 to learn.
The great thing about this is we already know how to do this. Think about how children learn: When they’re learning to walk, they don’t chastise themselves for not knowing how, they just replace their habit of crawling with walking slowly. Sure, they fall down a lot at first, but who cares?
One potential pitfall here is the return of Self 1:
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.
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 things.
If you have access to a tennis court, try this exercise:
Say the word “bounce” out loud every time the ball hits the court and the word “hit” every time it hits your racket or your opponent’s. This will keep you focused on the ball and the rhythm of the game. Self 1 is kept busy tracking the bounces and hits while Self 2 can perform the work of positioning and returning the ball.
Focus will occur not when you’re trying too hard to focus on something, but when you’re legitimately interested in something.
Any exercise that suggests you can play “in the zone” every time with one simple trick is worthless because it is suggesting that you can think your way, with Self 1, into the zone. You can’t court Self 2 with Self 1, you need to do your best to quiet Self 1 and then Self 2 will come to the forefront. This involves trust.
If you are straining or squinting in any way, you are not really focused because you are trying too hard. Become truly interested in the patterns of the ball, and this focus will come.
One focus tactic is listening to the ball.
While you’re watching the ball, you also need to know where your racket is at all times. This introduces the concept of feeling, one of the most important in tennis. The slightest change in positioning or angle can produce very different results.
We are focusing our awareness on the here and the now:
Being alert is basically measuring how much you can be in the “now” every second. If you’re thinking about external things, that means that less of you is able to focus on what’s happening in front of you. It’s our wish for things to be different than they are right now that pulls us from the present. Tennis becomes only part of the game that you’re playing on the court; you’re also thinking about your opponent and your friends and other matches if you’re in a tournament.
In a match, usually the competition will keep you focused during each point, so the important moment is between the points. Think about the natural rhythm of your own breathing to maintain concentration in this case.
These experiments that improve your tennis game can also improve your life—we can use our senses to focus our attention more directly on whatever we want. It becomes much easier to tune out any other background noise in our consciousness.
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:
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 and what she doesn’t. Every game involves at least one player, goal, and obstacle.
Gallwey introduces three games, which he calls “Good-o,” “Friends-o,” and “Health-o-Fun-o.” Each of these have “subgames” and most people play hybrids.
Good-o: The general aim is to be excellent and the general motive is to prove you are “good.”
Friends-o: The main aim is to make or deepen friendships.
Health-o-Fun-o: Maintaining or improving mental or physical health and fun.
Most “serious” tennis players are playing some version of “Good-o.” People can begin at other places, but as they commit more time and energy to the sport, they begin to do things like set standards for themselves that are impossible to live up to.
This has more to do with the way our society is constructed than anything else: Everything is achievement-oriented, so tennis has to be as well, especially because it is naturally a competition. Gallwey knows this to be true from his own childhood and how he managed to get over his will to win the match at all costs.
Example: Gallwey’s Childhood and Development
As a child, Timothy Gallwey dreamed of winning tennis matches. Every day during the summer he would run miles to the courts, where he would arrive hours before anyone else, practice forehands and backhands against the wall, and then play around 15 sets per day. He was playing Perfect-o with himself.
He improved and entered national tournaments, where he was often successful but also blew some games that he would replay over and over in his head.
By the time he got to college, he settled for being a “good amateur” and played varsity tennis for his school. He noticed that when he did well in school he did better on the court and when he struggled in school he would also struggle at tennis. After graduation, he taught and studied education, and began to realize that kids would interfere with their own capabilities. He applied this to coaching tennis and developed the Inner Game. This helped him tremendously with his own game, and so he entered into tournament play.
At his first tournament, he felt self-doubt creeping in, and fell behind in the match, as he wasn’t concentrating directly on the match in front of him. He was able to turn it around mostly because his opponent faltered at the end. As he embarked on his next match, he began to think of the best and worst-case scenarios for the rest of the tournament and realized what he wanted: to overcome his nervousness at tournament competition. It was about winning that Inner Game.
He lost the next match, but he felt that he had conquered his own goal by understanding it.
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?
How have the subgames that you play affected your life positively?
How have they presented challenges?
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.
If we don’t use competition to derive our self-worth, though, what kind of meaning should we be finding in competition and winning? And how can playing better help us in the broader scheme of our mental health?
This question is a difficult one—after managing to decouple competition and his self-worth, Gallwey himself had trouble finding motivation to compete.
To begin to answer this complex question, find the value in challenges and overcoming obstacles. The most accomplished someone can feel is when they have successfully used all of the skill, concentration, and general capability at their disposal.
Winning is only valuable if it helps you achieve a meaningful goal. Find goals that force you to exert yourself, mentally or physically, and then attempt to overcome the obstacles necessary to get there.
Your opponent can become a friend because she is doing her best to be a difficult obstacle, thus making the goal of winning valuable. Competition, in this way, can be indistinguishable from cooperation. Each player benefits from the other’s attempts to make goals difficult to reach.
Understanding this can also make you a better player: If you have worries or qualms about being competitive or trying your hardest, understand that in a sense, iron sharpens iron. Beating someone does not increase your self-worth or decrease hers.
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?
Now, consider your motivations for playing in that competition. What were they?
Considering your true motivations, how can you reframe the obstacles you faced as collaborators on your journey to conquer meaningful challenges? (For example, maybe your opponent is actually cooperating with you because she makes you work harder and play better.)
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.
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 telling yourself that you’re no good at dating and you’ll never find someone you like who likes you back.
Today more than ever, there are constant external pressures like this one that make us feel stressed out. There are demands from your job, your friends, and your family. Most people respond to this by attempting to “manage stress” or take occasional breaks to “unplug.” This usually isn’t that successful—what works better is building up inner stability.
We can do so by understanding that Self 2 has lots of demands itself that actually make us more stable, rather than the demands of Self 1 which make us less so. Self 2’s demands are anything from eating and drinking enough that we’re sufficiently energetic to wanting to learn new skills. Responding to these Self 2 requests helps us build this stability.
Most stress in modern life is caused by attachment—Self 1 becomes so dependent on a job, a relationship, or an idea that when change does come it’s threatening. Freedom from this stress is the recognition that we will be alright if we lose one of these things, so long as we continue to be able to live fairly comfortably.
Here, it’s important to distinguish between what Self 2 needs to operate well and what Self 1 has internalized as a need. A lot of demands that you place on yourself are derived not necessarily from what you need but from what you’ve been told somewhere along the way that you need.
There’s a distinct difference between this and “self-improvement”—everyone’s Self 2 is fine as it is, we just need to listen to it.
After all of this, readers may still be questioning what it means to win the Inner Game. The response is essentially impossible to give, although the question is important. It’s impossible to give because the moment that we give an answer, Self 1 will see a goal that can be conquered. This will add to our stress. The only way to “win” is for your Self 2 to be the only Self that knows when you’re conquering the Inner Game.