The Inner Game of Tennis: The classic guide to the mental side of peak performance

If you think you are controlled by a bad habit, then you will feel you have to try to break it. A child doesn’t have to break the habit of crawling, because he doesn’t think he has a habit. He simply leaves it as he finds walking an easier way to get around.

and then an alternative pattern of behavior, which serves the same function better, emerges quite effortlessly.

allow yourself to focus on whatever most interests you about the movements of the pro you are watching. Self 2 will automatically pick up elements of the stroke that are useful to it and discard what is not useful. With each new swing, observe how it feels and how it works. Allow the natural learning process to lead you toward your best stroke. Do

“Hold the foil as a bird, not so loosely that it can fly away, but not so tightly that you squeeze the life out of it.

I can’t describe how good I felt at that moment, or why. Tears even began to come to my eyes. I had learned and he had learned, but there was no one there to take credit. There was only the glimmer of a realization that we were both participating in a wonderful process of natural learning.

So I believe the best use of technical knowledge is to communicate a hint toward a desired destination.

Clearly, positive and negative evaluations are relative to each other. It is impossible to judge one event as positive without seeing other events as not positive or as negative. There is no way to stop just the negative side of the judgmental process. To see your strokes as they are, there is no need to attribute goodness or badness to them.

When the mind is free of any thought or judgment, it is still and acts like a mirror. Then and only then can we know things as they are.

A brief explanation of the meaning of “game.” Every game involves at least one player, a goal, some obstacle between the player and his goal, a field (physical or mental) on which the game is played and a motive for playing.