Timothy Gallwey Quotes

American sports coach

Add quote

W. Timothy Gallwey (born 1938 in San Francisco) is an author who has written a series of books in which he has set forth a methodology for coaching and for the development of personal and professional excellence in a variety of fields that he calls "the Inner Game". Since he began writing in the 1970s, his books include The Inner Game of Tennis, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Music (with Barry Green), Inner Skiing and The Inner Game of Work. Gallwey's seminal work is The Inner Game of Tennis, with more than one million copies in print.

Bio from: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Not assuming you already know is a powerful principle of focus.

Acknowledgment of one’s own or another’s strengths, efforts, accomplishments, etc., can facilitate natural learning. Acknowledgment of and respect for one’s capabilities support trust in Self 2.

Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present.

When this occurs, the mind is drawn irresistibly toward the object (or subject) of interest. It is effortless and relaxed, not tense and overly controlled.

played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt and self-condemnation.

One thing that can be said about focus is that it is always here and now — that is, in present time and present space.

Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring.

If you reflect upon your own highest moments or peak experiences. You will probably also remember them as moments of great pleasure, even ecstasy.

If the former relationship was characterized by criticism and control, the symptoms of mistrust, then the more desired relationship is one of respect and trust.

The awareness instruction, on the other hand, asks only one thing of the conscious mind: Pay attention to what is happening. There is no doubt because there is no right way or wrong way, and there is no fear of failure because there is no externally implied standard for success. Yet the body learns because it is now free to focus on what feels good and to see for itself what works.

It seemed to me that the precision required to play good golf demanded much greater mental discipline than was necessary for good tennis. The reason for the low margin of error was not hard to discover: the speed of the club head that is necessary to hit the ball a long distance. The speed of the golfer’s arms on the downswing is not much greater than the speed of the tennis player’s arm on the serve, but because of the greater length and flexibility of the golf club, the club-head speed is much greater than that of a racket. If a club head traveling over 100 mph contacts the ball with a face open a mere degree or two, the ball can be sent off target many tens of yards. With those odds, it’s amazing that the ball ever does go exactly where we want it to. In tennis, the serve is the only shot in which the player initiates the action, whereas in golf he does so on every shot. It is interesting to note that if you miss your first serve in tennis, you get another try. Golf is not so forgiving! Further, in tennis a much larger surface hits a much larger ball a much shorter distance. Moving from tennis to golf was definitely going to require some fine-tuning of my concentration. The greater precision required in golf is also reflected in the manner in which the player addresses the ball. A tennis player can be pretty casual, or even a little flamboyant, as he sets up the service line, bounces the ball a few times, and serves. Most professional golfers display much more self-discipline. They seem to approach the ball in the same controlled, almost ritualistic way every time. Even their dress seems more meticulous. (I’ve often felt I could pick out the golfers from the tennis players at a cocktail party.) Meticulousness has never been my strong suit. There isn’t a family picture of me as a boy in which at least one shoe wasn’t untied. I could usually solve

If I was feeling frightened playing tennis, I don’t see why I would do it!

These people will try hard to win the respect they lack, and the winners will try equally hard not to lose the respect they have won. In this light, it is not difficult to see why playing well has come to mean so much to us.

I learned for the first but by no means the last time about the power of acceptance of life and death.

It is only against the big waves that he is required to use all his skill, all his courage and concentration to overcome; only then can he realize the true limits of his capacities. At that point he often attains his peak. In other words, the more challenging the obstacle he faces, the greater the opportunity for the surfer to discover and extend his true potential. The potential may have always been within him, but until it is manifested in action, it remains a secret hidden from himself. The obstacles are a very necessary ingredient to this process of self-discovery. Note that the surfer in this example is not out to prove himself; he is not out to show himself or the world how great he is, but is simply involved in the exploration of his latent capacities. He directly and intimately experiences his own resources and thereby increases his self-knowledge.