The Inner Game of Tennis Book Review - Aryan Sachdev

For my last book review of the year, I wanted to read something that would be beneficial to me in more ways than to just learn new things. And this book, The Inner Game of Tennis, by W. Timothy Gallwey, did just that. To start off this book review, I just want to say that the concepts in this book can be applied to any sport, or even your daily life if you aren't interested in tennis. This book goes over how to reach peak performance in anything, but it makes examples about tennis and sports in general. 

At the beginning of the book, the author narrates a few experiences he had in the past that led to him writing this book. One specific example was when he was teaching a new tennis player (Paul). But instead of telling him what to do, like people normally do, he instead demonstrated it and then asked Paul to try hitting a few shots and see what works and what doesn’t. This showed him that people learn better when given the task to finish and the tools to do it, but not telling them how to do it. Gallwey uses many other examples along the way of teaching readers about the mental side of tennis. One topic that he focused on was how everyone has two selves. He calls them Self 1 and Self 2. Self 1 is the person inside your head that reprimands you or congratulates you based on bad or good things that you do. Self 2 is the part of your body that is carrying out the things that Self 1 tells it to do. When you are doing something like playing tennis, there are hundreds of things that can go wrong while you are playing a single point. This means that there are a lot of things that Self 1 can complain about, and then further compromise how the player is playing. The only solution to this is to silence Self 1 while on the court and look at a match from an analytical standpoint rather than an opinionated one. 

As someone who avidly plays tennis, this book was very useful to me. I would recommend this book to anyone who is either a beginner or more advanced at tennis, or any other sport. It was really informative about how people think while in high-pressure situations, and it has greatly improved my mental game since I finished reading it. I would rate this book a 5/5.