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This week, an unlikely book: “The Inner Game of Tennis.” I’m not a tennis player, yet this book hits my top five. I also just heard that Michael Lewis credits this book for bringing fun into his life, so, there’s that endorsement. I recently re-read it with an eye toward parenting. I think it has a lot to teach us about how kids learn and how to cultivate and protect their curiosity. And it may help us rediscover that curiosity within ourselves.

Unlike many Happy Volcanoes favorites, this book doesn’t rely on neuroscience, experiments, or rats (always with the rats!). Well, okay, there are the day-to-day experiments the author, W. Timothy Gallwey, has executed on himself and his students for decades as a tennis coach and pro. However, the book—originally published in 1974—was prescient of many brain discoveries, including a Happy Volcanoes mainstay: no upper-brain learning will happen if the nervous system is scared or dysregulated.

Gallwey’s basic thesis is that we are of two minds: one mind does the doing (let’s call this the “doing mind”), and a second mind that instructs, witnesses, or judges this doing (let’s call this the “thinking mind”). Have you experienced an internal conversation, “you shouldn’t have done that, you should have done this?” You are talking to yourself. Don’t worry; we all do it.

Gallwey asks us to use this internal conversation to consider who is talking to the doer and who is the doer?

Who is you and who is yourself? Wow.

In Gallwey’s experience, when the thinking brain is in judgment mode, the doing mind gets stressed. Facial muscles tighten, breathing constricts, teeth clench, and your racquet grip is tightened (remember, this is a tennis book). In short, we use energy counterproductively. Judgment can be scary. We’ll talk in subsequent weeks about what might be going on here from a physiological point of view.
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The neuroscience version of this: how do you react if you’re scolded, “YOU DID THAT INCORRECTLY!?” Probably with defensiveness. “It’s your fault!” … Fault? Still a tennis book.

As Dan Siegle has talked about, that’s the fear center activated deep in the reptilian brain. Noted philosopher Marsellus Wallace commented that the sting of your inner voice is your pride. Unfortunately, there’s no space left for your problem-solving, learning, higher-reasoning, and problem-solving skills to be activated. The same thing might happen when your inner critic is doing the scolding.

In Gallwey’s words,

So, can you help your child learn everything as if they were learning to walk?

The answer is “yes.” It just takes a little…love. Get it? Love? Tennis? (Still a tennis book).

The first step in Gallwey’s learning process is cultivating awareness and observing whatever behavior your kid (or you) is working on. Help them notice the position of their body, the tightness of their face, their breathing, the ending position of their bat, what contact with the ball feels like…how to properly chew tobacco…you know, baseball stuff. Work with one point of awareness at a time.

We can help our kids cultivate awareness by removing judgmental language (even the positive kind) and replacing it with observations. Positive words like “that was a great shot!” remind us that there is a right and a wrong way of doing things, which takes brain energy away from observing. Instead, try, “the ball went really far.” You are trying to avoid the sentiment: “if he likes me for doing well, he will dislike me for doing something unwell.”

Second step: Give your kid a clear picture of the desired outcome (e.g., have your kid watch a professional throw a baseball, have them notice what the non-throwing hand does, what the feet do, etc.). Gallwey is a huge proponent of using images rather than words because it’s a much higher bandwidth way to share information and easier to remember. Show, don’t tell. Hey, that advice works for writers too!

Third step: Give your kid freedom to let their body imitate the pictured behavior. Let them make mistakes. We’re talking about practice.

Fourth step: Continue building non-judgmental awareness; continue using non-judgmental, descriptive language like, “You hit 50% of serves into the net.”

Fifth step (mine, not Gallwey’s): When it works, name it. Having a shorthand name for the very complex thing that your kid just learned can make it easier to recall.

This extended analogy from Gallwey summarizes what he’s going for. We’ll set this quote right here. Get it? Set???

Admin Deets:

Happy Volcanoes is going to go to a more irregular cadence, because kids, work, warming weather, and plant-sitting.

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