Can a book about tennis from the 70’s improve your teaching skills…and maybe even make you happier?

Want to know a counterintuitive little trick that could give you an advantage in your next friendly tennis match, round of golf, or pig-tickling competition? (hey…you do you!)

Tell your competitor that you have noticed that their technique is especially good that day, and ask them if they are doing something different than usual. This sneaky “compliment” is likely to take them out of natural performance and put them into their head.

If you would rather psychologically torture yourself instead of a friend, then the next time you are playing a musical piece that you know well or are engaged in another skill that you have internalized, start giving undue attention to how well you are doing, or to specific, normally unconscious elements of the activity— the speed or precision of your fingers across the frets or keys, the components of your golf swing, your feet during a dance, or your social savviness or vocabulary when engaged in a conversation in your native or a non-native language.

Flow

You might say that in the situations above, the transition from more implicit, unconscious activity to more explicit, conscious, judgemental thinking, pulls one out of a state of flow, or at least makes it far more difficult to enter one.

Most of us have experienced the state of flow at one point or another in our personal and professional lives. Time seems to disappear or move much more rapidly than normal and our performance is at its peak and feels effortless. Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who named the term flow and dedicated his professional life to studying and and explaining it, summed it up as “optimal experience,” and insisted that a happy life is a life that contains many of these peak moments.

Building on Csikszentmihaly’s work, cognitive scientists John Vervaeke and Leo Ferraro have further explicated some of the things that make flow such an optimal state both affectively and cognitively, including increased pattern recognition, greater capacity for insight and enhanced implicit learning.

According to Csikszentmihaly, the tasks conducive to getting into a flow state have the following conditions:

• A clear goal or objective
• Concentration on the task at hand without distraction
• Autonomy over how to achieve the goals
• Immediate feedback
• A balance between challenge and skill level—the task should require one to stretch their skills

A lot has already been said about flow and language learning, and a quick Google search will show plenty of blog posts, podcasts, published research, and even marketing material about language programs and classes which are supposedly designed with flow in mind. As with the application of other psychological concepts to education, the quality of the content ranges from thought provoking and promising, to questionable, to—as a zoomer might put it—cringe.

Regardless, the concept is still worthy of the attention of both language teachers and learners. While pursuing my M. Ed, I did action research on what would happen if the above five conditions were prioritized in the classroom and everything improved: learning outcomes, student retention, Aha! moments and affect (the proportion of “wow, that was an awesome hour that flew by” increased for both students and myself). This is rather unsurprising, and anyone already familiar with SLA basics can probably see parallels between the flow principles and good language teaching. A well designed TBLT cycle typically matches, for example, most or all all of the criteria above.

The Inner Game

In the 70’s, while Csikszentmihaly was still doing research on flow and 20 years before his book would first be published, a professional tennis coach, W. Timothy Gallwey, was making his own discoveries on the matter. At just 134 pages, his book The Inner Game of Tennis, one of the first real works of sports psychology, would go on to inspire millions, many of whom don’t even play tennis.

Why would a book about tennis be so influential even to non-tennis players? Because either intentionally or unintentionally, it’s not actually a book about tennis. It’s a book about natural learning, effortless action, tacit knowledge, and zen philosophy—told through a particularly relatable and concrete example: the sport of tennis.

For me, it belongs on the shelf somewhere near the Tao te Ching, Flow, Thinking: Fast and Slow, The Master and his Emissary, and a book about the ancient Chinese spiritual and philosophical concept “wu wei” called Trying Not Try. All of these works, the origins of which spanning millenia, geography, and cultures, uncover the same core concept…effortless action… but in my opinion, The Inner Game is one of the most accessible and practical. And it has implications for the way we teach and learn languages.

The “inner game” is the psychological conflict between the two parts of ourselves alluded to above—the one who effortlessly plays the piano piece, gracefully… tickles the pig…or flows in a conversation or dance or tennis match; and the other one, who gets in the way, criticizes, judges, condemns, worries, and overanalyzes. Flow, and by extension, peak performance and enhanced learning, is the experience one has when the former takes charge and latter quiets down.

But despite our best efforts to create the conditions for optimal experience, it’s not always as easy as following a checklist of propositions. We all know the feeling of “getting in our own way” or “getting stuck in our head,” while trying to get back in the zone, and feeling as if we are locked out.

Two selves: In Tennis and Foreign Language Learning

While teaching tennis, Gallwey began to notice that these seeming two “selves” were at work in his students, and that they had important implications for performance and learning success.

Self 1 is the conscious self. The ego. The one who tries. The one with explicit knowledge. The voice in your head.

Self 2 is the unconscious self. The one that knows how to swim, ride a bike, understand and speak a langauge, behave in a certain cultural context, or do any number of other extremely complex human activities of which the rules and principles can’t be fully articulated. The one with tacit knowledge.

The human nervous system the most complex and intricate intelligent system on the planet, consisting of 100 billion (!) neurons and the connections between them. Self 1 utilizes an estimated 5% of that capacity, and Self 2, the remaining 95%. So a crude way of thinking of this could be that the 5% thinks its job is to do what only the 95% can. Both of the selves are essential to human functioning and flourishing, but the balance and relationship between them are essential. Not only can Self 1 not do Self 2′s tasks, but it can interfere with them. The resulting decay in performance after commenting on your opponent’s tennis serve or focusing on how well you are doing in a highly-skilled activity are examples of Self 1 stepping in out of turn; the ego getting in the way.

By now, if you are familiar with the discussion in SLA around implicit and explicit knowledge of an L2, you might be able to see where I am going with this.

Letting Go

Yoda was on to something when he said “do or do not, there is no try.”

By its nature, Self 2 cannot try. It does. It is a goal-oriented cybernetic machine that makes thousands of unconscious computations whenever you do anything as simple as carry a cup of coffee without spilling it something as intricate as playing a Chopin piece. It performs naturally at its current developmental level of skill and competence. That doesn’t necessarily mean flawlessly. It means to the best of its current potential given the context and conditions.

Self 1 tries. Self 1 says “No, put your hands here. Stand like this. Play the notes like this. You’re doing it wrong.” It even says, probably in Donald Trump’s voice, “Wow, great job today. You are great. The best.”

The first step to quieting Self 1, according to Gallwey, is to learn to let go of judgements about one’s performance.

In tennis, this might be letting go of what the mind thinks should be and becoming aware of what is. This could range shifting from “ughh…I really want to win this match” or the more specific “why is my serve so shit today?!” to just relaxing and letting things happen, and maybe, as Gallwey notes, gently moving one’s conscious attention to something like the seams of the ball as it moves towards them—anything that takes the mind off of judgements but keeps it present in the game.

In speaking a foreign language, it might be more like shifting from “my level should be higher…my English sucks compared to my colleagues” or “if I don’t sound smart in this conversation, people are going to think I’m stupid ” to an attitude of “It will be interesting to see how this conversation goes” or “I hope I find out something interesting about this person in our conversation.” These kinds of coaching cues can help gently direct learner’s attention to more productive places.

In both cases, the act of letting go of judgement is an act of trusting Self 2 and accessing more of one’s capacities; of getting out of one’s own way and feeling more relaxed. And in both examples, the solution is paradoxically accepting rather than resisting judgement. Judging one’s judgement creates even more resistance and makes Self 1 all the louder.

Also, importantly, the performer isn’t engaging in positive thinking or delusional affirmations about their competence, which is just the other side of the coin of self-criticism. They are just noticing. And learning to relax.

The Two Selves in a Lesson Observation

Here’s a (hopefully) relatable example.

You’ve been teaching a class that’s been going really well. The group dynamic is great, you have autonomy over the curriculum, and you know everyone is having a great time and learning each class. You and your students frequently show symptoms of a contagious case of flow. If you are of the Dogme persuasion or otherwise utilize a materials-light approach, these lessons may even have required minimal to no planning time.

You decide that this particular group would lend itself well to your next observation. As you prepare for the observation, Self 1‘s voice gets louder and louder. “This has to be perfect. I really hope to make it as good as these classes have been going! I need to capture the magic in this lesson to really show my skills. I better plan rigidly and rigorously.” You probably didn’t sleep well the night before due to nerves. During the lesson, you pay way too much attention to yourself and to the clock and to making sure you get through your plan. You are in your head.

Lo and behold, the lesson doesn’t go nearly as well as it normally does. Self 2, the one there for you with all of your skills when you are relaxed and paying more attention to your students than to your own performance, seemed to have abandoned you entirely. The class dragged on, and you don’t really know if your objectives were met. You walk away slightly disappointed and wishing that just once, you could perform in an observation as well as you do when no one is looking. You’d have been better off, paradoxically, not caring what happened in the first place.

When an archer is shooting for nothing, he has all his skill. If he shoots for a brass buckle, he is already nervous. If he shoots for a prize of gold, he goes blind or sees two targets He is out of his mind His skill has not changed. But the prize divides him. He cares. He thinks more of winning than of shooting And the need to win drains him of power.

Chuang Tzu

Yet, how often do language classes put students in this very position? One in which they are there to make a performance, to demonstrate their skills, to prove their competence, instead of enjoy the ride, get into flow, play and be challenged?

Hopefully, by now, I’ve managed to make a convincing case that state of relaxed concentration is the most conducive to performing at one’s best, that trying to hard is likely to backfire, and that the shift out of an over reliance on the conscious mind can’t be forced but gently directed through subtle shifts in one’s attention…and that this has been illuminated by psychology, cognitive science, and ancient spiritual teachings, as well as on California Tennis courts in the 1970’s.

Both teachers and students can benefit from getting better at the skill of relaxed concentration, and teachers can learn to support learners in directing their attention, in addition to planning lessons that create the conditions for flow.

But that’s all about performance… what about learning itself? Don’t we have to adhere to a rigorous, conscious, and painful learning process before we can earn the right to perform at our best?

Natural Learning

In fact, the parts of The Inner Game that resonated with me the most as a language teacher and learner (and musician and cook and writer and father and fitness enthusiast, but let’s stay on track) were the ones about learning. Gallwey doesn’t differentiate between learning and performance. The conditions that facilitate performance also facilitate learning.

As mentioned above, flow—which we’ve also linked to a quieting of the ego mind and an increased trust in the unconscious self during skilled activity—has been shown not only to be extremely enjoyable and to improve performance but also to enhance pattern recognition, implicit learning, and capacity for insight. Those familiar with SLA findings (and those who have ever learned one or more second languages) will likely connect those three affordances to the language acquisition process. After all, languages are learned mostly, if not totally, implicitly. (Also, hat tip to Geoff Jordan and his great blog, which really helped me to start understand SLA research).

We acquire language when we are busy doing other things, like understanding messages and interacting meaningfully. Language is far, far too complex to teach or learn explicitly. Being able to articulate “rules” and acquiring them for real use are two totally different processes. (Anecdote: in my first months of teaching post CELTA, I remember looking at a New English File coursebook teacher’s book lesson plan and reading something like “OPINION / SIZE / AGE / SHAPE / COLOR / ORIGIN / MATERIAL / PURPOSE is the correct order of adjectives in English” before an activity that explicitly presented these preceding explicit practice activities. I knew nothing yet of SLA, and had barely grasped basic explicit English grammar rules myself, and I thought…thats impossible….who would ever learn a foreign language? These poor, poor students.”)

Gallwey himself wouldn’t argue that one would acquire tennis skills merely by osmosis, but he also didn’t believe that you could force the learning process. The corollary to let it be, if one hasn’t yet mastered a skill, is to let it learn. He discovered that there was a natural development to his tennis students’ technique. Skills develop naturally when one’s attention is used properly. In a chapter on natural learning, he writes:

The actions of Self 2 are based on information it has stored in its memory of past actions of itself or of the observed actions of others. A player who has never held a racket in his hand needs to let the ball hit the strings a few times before Self 2 learns how far away the center of the racket is from the hand holding it. Every time you hit a ball, whether correctly or incorrectly, the computer memory of Self 2 is picking up valuable information and storing it away for future use. As one practices, Self 2 refines and extends the information in its memory bank. All the time it is learning such things as how high a ball bounces when hit at varying speeds and varying spins; how fast a ball falls and how fast if comes up off the court; and where it should be met to direct it to different parts of the court. It remembers every action it makes and the results of every action, depending on the degree of your attention and alertness. So the important thing for a beginning player to remember is to allow the natural learning process to take place and to forget about stroke-by-stroke self-instructions. The results will be surprising.

The Inner Game of Tennis, Trust Self 2, Page 39

There are important differences between language acquisition and tennis, of course, and some of the analogies in the book speak for the fact that it was written 50 years ago (like humans having a a computer memory). But in many ways, the quote above could be talking about language development as much as tennis skill development. One needs repeated interaction with rich input in numerous, diverse contexts. The field of SLA shows that there is a natural development to language acquisition that cannot be altered but can be sped up when given optimal conditions. And one needs to pay attention; not to the judgemental voice in their head nor overly so (if at all!) to grammar and other formal properties of language, but to the meaning of the text or the interaction. The appropriate use of one’s attention is key to both the affective and cognitive elements of the inner game.

More Juicy Bits from The Inner Game of Tennis That Might Resonate with Language Teachers and Learners

“For the teacher or coach, the question has to be how to give instructions in such a way as to help the natural learning process of the student and not interfere with it.”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tenis

“When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis

“The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own surprising ways to surpass its own limits again and again. Moreover, while overcoming the common hang-ups of competition, the player of the inner game uncovers a will to win which unlocks all his energy and which is never discouraged by losing.”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis

“Focus is not achieved by staring hard at something. It is not trying to force focus, nor does it mean thinking hard about something. Natural focus occurs when the mind is interested. When this occurs, the mind is drawn irresistibly toward the object (or subject) of interest. It is effortless and relaxed, not tense and overly controlled.”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis

“But of course the instant I try to make myself relax, true relaxation vanishes, and in its place is a strange phenomenon called “trying to relax.” Relaxation happens only when allowed, not as a result of “trying” or “making.”

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis

“Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present.”

W. Timothy Gallwey

“Negative judgment of the results of one’s efforts tends to make one try even harder; positive evaluation tends to make one try to force oneself into the same pattern on the next shot. Both positive and negative thinking inhibit spontaneity. 

W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis