In my nearly 20 years as a coach who integrated mindfulness and coaching, I frequently made reference to a concept that I learned as a teenager: the inner game. I’d learned about the inner game from a wonderful, wonderful book called “The Inner Game of Tennis” by Timothy Gallwey. Published in 1974, exactly as I was falling in love with the game of tennis, this book presented ideas that aligned beautifully with those I was learning about meditation and mindfulness.

I won’t go into the concepts in the book, (I do suggest you read the 50th anniversary edition) except to extract one key concept: mastering your mind is the key to optimizing your performance, no matter what your domain is (sports, business, arts, etc).

But what exactly is it that we are mastering when we master our minds? And who’s doing the mastering?

It’s by doing mindfulness practices that we come to understand that the voice we “hear” when we talk to ourselves is just a tiny fraction of all that we are. The inner voice is also not all that helpful much of the time, and yet we give it such a huge amount of attention that it might as well be our master. And it is a terrible master!

The practice of mindfulness is in many ways the practice of dis-identifying with the “speaker” of one’s thoughts, and putting the voice in its proper place, as an unreliable and fickle side-kick. It’s like an annoying child that runs along beside us from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep (if it will let us), endlessly pattering on about everything that’s going on, and making us want to scream “will you please just SHUT UP!”

That’s the beginning of the inner game, right there!

The realization that if you can’t make that voice shut up, then clearly, it’s NOT YOU. It pretends to be you, and if you believe it, well, it gets to be your master. If, on the other hand, you see it as the output of activity in the brain, and a very limited and ineffective point of view, then you are on the road to harnessing the much greater power of an integrated mind. You bring the power of your unconscious processes on line.

Once you can gain that mastery, your performance starts to be all it can be. Your natural talent and abilities will come into play, of course, as will the amount of practice you do. What won’t happen is the self-doubt and self-criticism that can massively get in the way of your best performance.

The inner game can be very challenging at times, but it delivers the goods. And it will improve not just your tennis game or your golf game, but also can help in almost every area of your life.

I highly recommend the book, even if you’re not a tennis player. And most of all, I highly recommend you explore the inner game and learn for yourself what a difference mastery over your mind can make.