echnique, which is the verbal description of how to perform a skill. Technique is the province of Self 1. In a traditional tennis lesson, the learner is loaded up with technique right from the start: Keep your wrist locked! Keep your elbow straight! Turn sideways to the ball! Get your racquet back early! Keep your eye on the ball! Transfer your weight as you swing! Swing low to high! Follow through! Self 1, in possession of all of this theory, wants to put it into practice immediately. Self 2, however, will go through a gradual process of learning from experience with or without the theory. So Self 1 gets impatient and tries to take over from Self 2, and that’s where the trouble starts. Gallwey’s conclusion is that the less Self 1 knows, the less likely this is to happen.
The second requirement is to de-emphasize ego. The involvement of the ego creates pressure. We’ve all experienced this: When you become focused on the need to succeed–especially when others are watching you and you realize that failure would be embarrassing–you suddenly begin to feel as though even the simplest, most familiar actions have become very difficult to execute. In sports, this effect is called “choking”. According to Willingham, choking is what happens when people lose faith in their unconscious abilities and revert to their conscious, explicit mode of control–in other words, when Self 1 takes over from Self 2. Gallwey’s advice to the learner is to cultivate a Zen-like detachment from the ego (“letting go of the self” and so on).But not everyone is able to suppress their own ego in this way. What is of more practical import, in my opinion, is Gallwey’s prescription for the coach, which is to avoid expressing too much focus on success and failure. This is important because it is more or less the opposite of traditional coaching wisdom.
The third requirement is to pay attention to the outcomes of actions. Most people think they do this already, but for the most part they are wrong. One of Gallwey’s most interesting observations is that novices often fail to observe what happens when they hit a bad shot, apparently because it is too painful to watch. Sometimes they literally cover their eyes when they miss. The trouble with this is that the feedback from where that shot lands is critical to Self 2’s gradual, feedback-based learning process. This is where a coach can help, setting up exercises in such a way that learners are highly focused on seeing outcomes clearly regardless of whether they are “good” or not.
So that is Gallwey’s theory, or at least my slightly fractured version of it. The real question is, does it actually work? Well, it happens that Harry Reasoner did a sixty minutes piece many, many years ago that makes a pretty good case for the effectiveness of Gallwey’s approach. (If you look on youtube, you may be able to find the video—if so it’s well worth watching.) Reasoner actually recruited people who had never played sports to come and take a lesson from Gallwey, which he filmed.
In the video, a student, who is holding a racquet in her hands for the first time, stands to the side as Gallwey and a partner hit the ball back and forth. Gallwey instructs the student to say the word “bounce” whenever the ball bounces, and “hit” whenever the partner hits it. When she has done this for some time, Gallwey kicks the partner off the court and puts the student in his spot. Gallwey continues to hit balls with the same location and pace, and instructs the student to keep saying “bounce-hit, bounce-hit”, with the word “hit” now being uttered when the partner would have hit the ball. A few more balls go by, and Gallwey then suggests that, if the student feels like it, she can try swinging her racquet, but he cautions her to keep focused on maintaining an accurate “bounce-hit” cadence—what happens when she swings is not important. The student does indeed swing the racquet, and, having by now internalized the precise timing of the ball’s arrival, she is able contact it squarely on the first try. When you see this on the video, it’s utterly amazing