l around in circles on the face of the racquet for ten minutes straight. Actual tennis did not occur until several lessons later. I’m still bitter about that, in case you can’t tell.
In contrast, my daughter got to start hitting tennis balls, which were bounced to her by an instructor, ten minutes after the start of her first session of her beginning tennis camp. Throughout the camp, she and her fellow students spent most of their time with racquets in hand, hitting real tennis strokes. Instructors kept them focused on simple outcomes, while being careful to avoid ratcheting up the pressure. Results were dealt with dispassionately—data points to be considered, not indicators of individual success and failure. There was no detailed presentation of theory about stance, grip, swing, and so on–instruction was brief and to the point, and coaching inputs were confined mostly to specific, individualized suggestions that learners could put into practice immediately, and that slowly built on one another over time. By the end of the camp, which was about four hours total, most of the kids could hit a variety of surprisingly solid shots including ground strokes, serves and volleys. My daughter emerged feeling confident about the skills she’d learned. “I think I’m going to be better than you at tennis,” she confided to me in a whispered aside. I think so too, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
I think the improvement in how tennis lessons are taught is to a significant extent due to the influence of one man: Timothy Gallwey, a tennis playing Harvard graduate who in 1974 wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis.
Gallwey describes the travails of the tennis novice as being the result of a struggle between two inner selves: Self 1—“the teller”—and Self 2—“the doer”. Self 2 learns physical skills through trial and error, building competence reliably, gradually and unconsciously. Self 1, on the other hand, is good with theory, but not with execution. Skills like tennis are the natural province of Self 2, but Self 1 has a bad habit of losing confidence in Self 2, and trying to take over. This usually results in a significant degradation of performance. Learners in the grip of their Self 1, Gallwey observes, tend to be stiff and awkward, attempting through sheer force of will to make their bodies do the right thing. Learners being guided by their Self 2, in contrast, find that successful execution seems to come naturally, almost without their having to make any conscious effort.
Gallwey’s argument is presumably meant to be taken as a metaphor, but it may be closer to the literal truth than anyone would have thought. Daniel Willingham, a Psychologist at the University of Virginia, has done a series of experiments showing that subjects playing a simple video game can learn to improve their performance in two different ways: by being explicitly taught the underlying patterns that control the game, or by implicitly learning those patterns through practice. What is interesting is that these two modes of learning seem quite separate and distinct, as evidenced by the fact that subjects who learned implicitly often cannot describe the patterns to which they are clearly responding. What is even more interesting is that the brain activity of subjects who are playing the game using implicit knowledge is different in location and character from the brain activity of subjects playing the game using explicit knowledge. In other words, Gallwey’s Self 1 and Self 2 may turn out to describe real components of the brain. Of course, a careful scientist would feel compelled to attach a long list of caveats to a statement like that, but I prefer, for the moment, to just enjoy the crazy long-shot possibility that a pop-psych metaphor might actually turn out to be an accurate psycho-physiological theory.
Gallwey’s general prescription for success at learning tennis is all about learning how to “quiet” Self 1 and “trust” Self 2. Three key things need to be done, according to Gallwey, in order to accomplish this goal.
The first requirement is to de-emphasize t