Inner Game Revisited

I was prompted by my wife to write something this morning, after sharing with her some reflections on rereading Tim Gallwey's Inner Game of Tennis.

I took up tennis in high school to avoid contact sports, and belonged to the book of the month club. When I was 14, one of the selections was Gallwey's book, and so I bought it, unaware of what I was getting into as a small town farm kid with no knowledge yet of all that had gone on in in the 60s counter culture other than what I heard in popular music on the radio. It is the oldest book I still have, complete with the frayed edges, faint smell of smoke and slightly water damaged pages as it survived a house fire in the early 80s.

Today, looking back, I see that as a naive adolescent, I was initiated into many of the concepts and practices that I later came across in many other forms. Rereading this book I could notice the fundamental value of non judgmental awareness, the idea that our interpretation of an experience is separate from the actual experience, a basic version of Argyris' ladder of inference, a version of Arbinger's collusion. Of course ideas of meditation, the value of quieting the ego driven mind and detachment were all there as well, finding their way into my psyche. I didn't have anyone to talk with about these things at the time, and very few reference points from other facets of my enculturation and education. The terms just kind of floated around inside me, awakening something but not having a good outlet. 

I did try out the practices on the court. I have memories of fleeting moments when I caught glimpses of it actually working, seeing my serve hit the corner of the service court with blazing speed and power, my ground shots gaining power and accuracy. But most of all, I recall the aspect of calmly noticing all of this with a detached sense of witnessing devoid of judgment. 

Sharing this with my wife, I talked about how these ideas are often referred to as perennial wisdom. The fundamental aspects of our lived experience in the human condition have not changed much. We have always had people around who accessed or touched on these facets of our inner life. What is ever changing is the language a person has to express any of this in a given period of history or culture, as well as the forms of practice laid out, and evolving tools refined with each generations ability to take another step in refining, elucidating and making distinctions in evolving contexts.  

This encounter with Gallwey was a marker along my journey of ongoing curiosity about the inner landscape of leadership. Being, knowing and love are all components of this. Bringing a robust map to the territory of navigating this inner landscape as we are faced with ever more complex challenges of leadership has been my personal and professional focus for a few decades now, and I'm looking forward to engaging with others sharing this curiosity here in this space.