Review: The Inner Game of Tennis

I just finished The Inner Game of Tennis [ad] by Timothy Gallwey, which has been on my reading list for over a decade. I happened to see a copy featured in a bookstore and bought it as a plane read. It’s short and sweet at under 200 pages, which I love. I should say to start that it’s not about tennis. Well, it is, but everything in this book is applicable to every sport and possibly every physical activity. I’m not sure if it applies to mental activities yet, but it might. I definitely think it applies to language learning. The thesis is that your inner self judges you while you try to do something and causes you to do it poorly. The “Inner Game” is a set of techniques to quiet this voice (he calls it Self 1) so that the body (Self 2) can play and get into a flow state. I think it works for language learning because you should just be engaged in the conversation or content, not judging your accent or fretting over whether you got every word. It’s possibly a more physical than mental…