The Two Games We’re Always Playing
Welcome to a new series: Books & Insights - where I dig into what I'm reading and the uncomfortable realizations that follow. This month: The Inner Game of Tennis
I recently reread chapters from The Inner Game of Tennis, I often draw parallels from sports psychology to business contexts. I’ve reflected before on consciousness and subconsciousness, continuing that thought.
In life there are always two games:
External - with an opponent, with the market, with circumstances.
Internal - with yourself, your doubts, thoughts, tension.
Inside us are two players:
Self 1 (consciousness) - the mind that controls, evaluates, criticizes.
Self 2 (subconsciousness) - the body, skill, intuition. It knows how, if you don’t interfere.
The paradox: to play better - you need to stop trying. Accuracy comes through trust in the subconscious, not through effort.
Tim Gallwey captured this perfectly: “The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence, and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”
The Question That Changes Everything
Why do you play? - To measure up? - To prove you’re worthy? - Or because you’re interested, it’s alive, you want to understand yourself more deeply?
This question matters more than you think. Because the answer determines which game you’re actually playing.
When you play to prove something, Self 1 takes over completely. Every move becomes evidence in a case you’re building - either for or against yourself. The mind narrates constantly: “Good shot. Bad shot. You’re falling behind. They’re watching. Don’t mess up.”
And Self 2, which actually knows how to play, gets drowned out by the noise.
As Gallwey observed: “When a tennis player is ‘on his game,’ he’s not thinking about how, when, or even where to hit the ball. He’s not trying to hit the ball, and after the shot he doesn’t think about how badly or how well he made contact.”
The Scoreboard Trap
Clay pigeon shooting - When you start looking at others’ results on the scoreboard - a quiet but destructive dialogue switches on inside:
Why not me? Am I worse? I missed it again...
Each miss stops being just a shot. It becomes an accusation. And from that moment you’re not learning - you’re defending yourself. Though the real game is always with yourself. And a miss is just a signal, not a verdict.
I’ve watched this happen countless times. Someone walks up to the line, confident, loose, hitting targets. Then they glance at the board. See someone else’s score. And something shifts. The shoulders tense. The breathing changes. The next shot goes wide.
What happened? Nothing in the external game changed. The targets are the same. The gun is the same. But the internal game just got hijacked.
The scoreboard isn’t the problem. Comparison is. The moment you make it about relative position instead of absolute performance, you’ve handed control to Self 1. And Self 1 doesn’t shoot clay pigeons - it shoots you.
The result? “Obviously the mind is anything but still and the body is tight with trying.”
Business Is the Same Game
In business it’s the same. I play to win. I’m not a proponent of business-zen without results or purely lifestyle business. Pleasure is when you see your result on the scoreboard, not just moving. Though of course there are elements where the process, rhythm, beauty of the game matter.
Business can be part of life, but shouldn’t be only a lifestyle.
Let me be clear: I’m not advocating for detachment from outcomes. I care deeply about results. I want to see numbers go up. I want to win. But there’s a difference between playing to win and playing not to lose.
Playing to win means you’re focused on execution, on learning, on the next move. You’re in the game.
Playing not to lose means you’re focused on protection, on what you might lose, on what others are doing. You’re in your head.
When I’m in flow, business decisions feel intuitive. Not impulsive - intuitive. There’s a difference. Impulsive is reactive. Intuitive is drawing on pattern recognition that you’ve built over years, but accessing it without the commentary.
The deals that worked best were the ones where I trusted what I knew without needing to prove I knew it.
Consider what Gallwey found: “As a new pro, I too was guilty of overteaching, but one day when I was in a relaxed mood, I began saying less and noticing more. Errors that I saw but didn’t mention were correcting themselves without the student ever knowing he had made them.”
The Silence Before the Shot
Here’s what I’ve learned from both clay shooting and building companies:
The quality of your performance is determined in the moment before the action, not during it.
Before you pull the trigger. Before you send the email. Before you make the call. Before you walk into the meeting.
There’s a moment where you can either step into noise or into silence.
Noise sounds like: “Don’t screw this up. Remember what happened last time. They’re watching. This matters too much.”
Silence sounds like nothing. It feels like readiness. Like you’re already seeing the target break before you’ve fired. Like the outcome is already there, and you’re just catching up to it.
This isn’t visualization in the cheesy sense. It’s not sitting there imagining yourself on a podium. It’s a sense of the right move. Self 2 knows. It’s processed thousands of situations like this. It has a pattern. But it can’t speak up when Self 1 is screaming.
The book describes this state perfectly: “When the player is in this state of concentration, he is really into the game; he is at one with racket, ball, and stroke; he discovers his true potential.”
What Gets in the Way
It isn’t a lack of skill that is an obstacle. It’s interference.
Self 1 interferes in predictable ways:
Overcorrection. You miss once, so you adjust. Then you overadjust. Then you’re adjusting. Now you’re not shooting anymore - you’re managing a theory about shooting.
Premature evaluation. You judge the result before you’ve even processed what happened. “That was terrible” becomes the data point, not the actual mechanical reality of what occurred.
Borrowed standards. You start measuring yourself against someone else’s game, someone else’s timeline, someone else’s definition of success. Now you’re not even playing your sport anymore.
The game hasn’t changed. The interference has.
“Self 1 does not trust Self 2, even though the unconscious, automatic self is extremely competent. By thinking too much and trying too hard, Self 1 has produced tension and muscle conflict in the body. He is responsible for the error, but he heaps the blame on Self 2 and then, by condemning it further, undermines his own confidence in Self 2.”
Learning to Observe, Not Judge
Main thought:
Don’t compare.
Don’t interfere with yourself.
Don’t rush to act, learn to observe.
The real game doesn’t begin with a strike or a shot, but with the silence inside, visualization of a positive result, the sensation of pleasure from the game.
There’s a practice that helps: neutral observation.
When you miss a shot, don’t say “I’m terrible.” Don’t even say “That was bad.”
Just observe: “The shot went left.” That’s data. That’s useful.
When a product launch underperforms, don’t spiral into “We failed.” Observe: “Conversion was 2.3%, down from our 4% target. The traffic source mix was different than expected.”
This isn’t positive thinking. It’s not toxic positivity or pretending things are fine when they’re not. It’s removing the emotional charge so Self 2 can actually learn.
Self 2 learns from clean data. Self 1 learns from drama.
When you observe neutrally, patterns emerge. You start to see what actually drives outcomes, not what you were afraid might drive outcomes.
Gallwey tells the story of a student named Jack who couldn’t fix his backhand despite five pros telling him his racket was too high. When Jack finally looked at himself in a mirror - just observing, not judging - he was surprised: “Hey, I really do take my racket back high! It goes up above my shoulder!”
The breakthrough came from observation without judgment: “What was now clear was that he didn’t really know, since no one is ever surprised at seeing something they already know. Despite all those lessons, he had never directly experienced his racket going back high. His mind had been so absorbed in the process of judgment and trying to change this ‘bad’ stroke that he had never perceived the stroke itself.”
The Game Inside the Game
Here’s the secret: the external game is never really under your control anyway.
The market does what it does. The competitor does what they do. The shot breaks or it doesn’t.
But the internal game? That’s all you.
You can’t control whether you win. But you can control whether you interfere with your ability to play well.
And here’s what’s strange: when you stop trying to control the outcome and start managing the interference, outcomes tend to improve because you’re finally letting your actual capability show up.
Self 2 is better than you think. It’s absorbed more than you consciously realize. It has instincts that Self 1 can’t articulate but shouldn’t override.
The work isn’t building more skill, though that helps. The work is reducing the interference that prevents the skill you already have from expressing itself.
“There is a far more natural and effective process for learning and doing almost anything than most of us realize. It is similar to the process we all used but soon forgot, as we learned to walk and talk. This process doesn’t have to be learned; we already know it. All that is needed is to unlearn those habits which interfere with it and then to just let it happen.”
What Playing Actually Feels Like
When you’re in it, really in it, here’s what it feels like:
Time doesn’t slow down, but it doesn’t rush either. You’re not ahead of the moment or behind it. You’re in it.
There’s no gap between decision and action. You’re not thinking then doing. You’re thinking-doing as one motion.
There’s no commentary. The voice that usually narrates everything goes quiet. There’s just the game.
And afterwards, you often can’t remember the details. Not because you were unconscious, but because you weren’t observing yourself from outside. You were too busy being yourself.
That’s the state worth training for. Not confidence - presence. Not control - trust.
The book describes peak performance this way: “The concentrated mind has no room for thinking how well the body is doing, much less of the how-to’s of the doing. When the player is in this state of concentration, he is really into the game; he is at one with racket, ball, and stroke.”
Gallwey references the Zen master D.T. Suzuki: “As soon as we reflect, deliberate, and conceptualize, the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought interferes. Man is a thinking reed but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking.”
The Practice
So how do you get there?
You don’t force it. That’s the whole point.
But you can create conditions:
Notice when Self 1 shows up. Get familiar with its voice. “You always mess this up. Why can’t you be more like them? This is too important to fail.” That’s not you. That’s interference. You don’t have to argue with it. Just label it: “There’s Self 1 again.”
Return to breath. When you notice you’re in your head, take one full breath. Feel it. That’s you dropping back into your body, where Self 2 lives.
Find one thing to focus on. Not ten things. One. In shooting, maybe it’s the front bead of the gun. In business, maybe it’s the actual problem you’re solving, not how solving it will look. Give Self 2 something to lock onto.
Trust the preparation. You’ve done the work. You know more than you think. Let it come through without micromanaging it.
Play for the game itself. Not for the trophy, not for the validation, not even for the learning. Just because the game is interesting and you’re in it.
Gallwey’s insight here is foundational: “The main job of Self 1, the conscious ego-mind, is to set goals, that is, to communicate to Self 2 what he wants from it and then to let Self 2 do it.”
Set the intention. Then get out of the way.
The Real Game
We spend so much time trying to be better. Reading books, taking courses, optimizing systems, building discipline.
All of that helps. But sometimes the breakthrough is subtracting interference, and not just adding more.
The version of you that shows up when Self 1 finally shuts up? That person is more capable than you’ve let yourself be.
The real game - in sport, in business, in life - is against the interference between who you are and who you’re capable of being in any given moment.
Stop comparing. Stop interfering. Start trusting.
The shot you’re capable of is already there. You just have to get out of your own way long enough to take it.
What game are you really playing? And who’s winning: you or your interference? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.