The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

So the question that remains is how one person’s greater level of experience can help another person. The short answer is that a valid instruction derived from experience can help me if it guides me to my own experiential discovery of any given stroke possibility.

Judgment results in tightness, and tightness interferes with the fluidity required for accurate and quick movement. Relaxation produces smooth strokes and results from accepting your strokes as they are, even if erratic.

It is when competition is thus used as a means of creating a self-image relative to others that the worst in a person tends to come out; then the ordinary fears and frustrations become greatly exaggerated. If I am secretly afraid that playing badly or losing the match may be taken to mean that I am less of a man, naturally I am going to be more ups

Nevertheless, I do not believe that ultimately the mind can be controlled by the mere act of letting go—that is, by a simply passive process. To still the mind one must learn to put it somewhere. It cannot just be let go; it must be focused.

The more you can bring yourself to put trust in the natural process that is at work, the less you will tend to fall into the usual interfering patterns of trying too hard, judging and thinking—and the frustration that inevitably follows.

Habits are statements about the past, and the past is gone.

In short, “getting it together” requires slowing the mind. Quieting the mind means less thinking, calculating, judging, worrying, fearing, hoping, trying, regretting, controlling, jittering or distracting.

In other words, the key to better tennis—or better anything—lies in improving the relationship between the conscious teller, Self 1, and the natural capabilities of Self 2.

“No teacher is greater than one’s own experience.”