. Mort Orman here and today I want to start another three-part series of articles on how you are much more capable of eliminating stress than you believe.
To kick off this series, I’m going to focus on how tennis can cure you of stress.
This is not to argue that playing tennis, as a sport, can drastically reduce your stress, but rather to suggest there is a huge lesson we can learn from the sport of tennis—and many other sports as well—which can make all the difference in the world regarding how much (or how little) stress we experience.
Enter Tim Gallwey
Back in the mid-1970s, while I was in the third and final year of my internal medicine residency at Mercy Hospital in Baltimore, I took up the sport of tennis, having not played the game at all during my childhood.
Around the same time, a very popular book was released by Tim Gallwey called the Inner Game Of Tennis.
This book and it’s author became so famous that Gallwey ‘s unconventional tennis teaching approach was even featured on a major network TV during prime time.
He was also frequently asked to do live demonstrations at major professional tennis events, to show how he could consistently pick random tennis novices from the stands and have them hitting decent tennis shots in just a matter of minutes.
Gallwey’s initial success also spawned a series of additional Inner Game books, such as the Inner Game of Golf, Inner Skiing, the Inner Game of Music, the Inner Game of Work, and eventually, the Inner Game of Stress.
Through his inner game books, concepts and innovative teaching methods, Tim Gallwey became one of the founding pioneers of modern sports psychology.
He also expanded his reach to include corporate and business consulting, as well as teaming up with two forward-thinking medical doctors, Ed Hanzelik, M.D. and John Horton, M.D., to publish the Inner Game Of Stress in 2009.
What Does Tennis Have To Do With Stress?
So what key principle did Gallwey discover about tennis, more than 40 years ago, that can help tennis players and non-tennis players alike to cure their modern day stress?
Quite simply, it is that human beings—all reasonably intelligent human beings—have vast innate capabilities (for example, to play tennis well) that they don’t know they have, and that conventional training/coaching programs aren’t designed to bring out.
Gallwey started out as an education major at Harvard. He was also an excellent tennis player and rose to become Captain of Harvard’s tennis team.
When he graduated from Harvard with his education degree, he wasn’t completely sure what he wanted to do.
So while waiting to figure out his future, he starting giving tennis lessons just to earn some income.
Then A New Idea Got Born
He started teaching tennis to his students the same way the game had been taught to him, and the way all tennis teachers approached the task of taking inexperienced players and making them into good or even great competitors.
And like most other tennis teachers, he quickly discovered there was a lot of frustration, failure and hard work involved in getting other people to finally play good tennis.
Then, one day, a novel idea occurred to him.
In his mind, he totally “flipped” the established teaching philosophy on its head.
He allowed himself to consider the following alternative “reality” about people and about tennis instructors:
- What if people who never played the game of tennis before already had the innate athletic ability to play the game well, only they (and their teachers) didn’t know it?
- What if all the instructional details on how to properly grip the racquet, execute a forehand, hit a backhand, crush a serve, etc., which tennis teachers were fond of giving out, were actually getting in their students’ way, making it even more difficult for their natural, inner player to shine through?
- And most importantly, if this were “true,” what are the implications for how tennis teachers could radically alter their teaching approach to produce better tennis players faster, and easier for everyone involved?
So after thinking about this alternative reality for a while, Gallwey decided to do something most of us would never have the courage to do.
He decided to try this “low probability of success” theory on the very next student who came to him.
To his surprise, the student learned to play very good tennis, very quickly, and without all the standard instructions and training techniques that everyone else thought were absolutely required.
He then kept exploring this “parallel universe” with additional new students, and he eventually discovered how to improve his non-traditional teaching techniques even more.
What’s The Moral To This Story?
The point of this story is that in the 1970s Gallwey first “fantasized,” in his own mind, that human being have much more inner capability than they (or other tennis teachers) gave them credit for…and then he went out and actually proved that this was true!
He then applied this same unconventional coaching philosophy to empowering people in other sports, in the business and the corporate worlds, and eventually to reducing their stress.
Here’s what Gallwey and his fellow physician authors say in the Introduction to their 2009 book The Inner Game Of Stress:
“Our core belief of the Inner Game is that every person has the internal wisdom to bypass the frustrations and fears that pull them into the negative cycle of stress…we [all] have the natural ability to be wise and calm in the midst of the barrage of daily external struggles.”
In my next two posts this week, we’ll examine this inner game of stress in more detail.
But for now, I just thought you’d want to know that there is indeed something important about ourselves, and about human stress, that we can learn from a tennis teacher, albeit a very wise and “unconventional” one.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
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