Our History
How the Inner Game got off the tennis court and achieved corporate success for decades.
As a young man on sabbatical, Tim Gallwey spent a summer as a tennis coach. At the outset of one particular tennis lesson, he decided to delay teaching only to find that the student increased his rate and enjoyment of learning much faster than he had when Tim was actively teaching him.
He stopped and realized he was more committed to teaching than to the student learning. Tim decided to reverse his priorities. “Where does learning happen, and what’s going on inside the head of the student while the ball is approaching?” It was obvious. His should and shouldn’t teaching instructions were creating self-doubt, self-criticism, too much effort, and overly tight strokes.
When Tim replaced the traditional control mechanism of should and shouldn’t with invitations to try heightened awareness and relaxed concentration, the student learned naturally by using what felt good and what worked.
This is how we all learned as children to crawl, walk, and run. In the use of simple awareness, three things reliably increased: rate of learning, enjoyment of play, and the student’s confidence that they could learn from experience.
Following the success of the inner game in individual and team sports, the corporate world took interest, followed by the emergence of life coaching and corporate coaching, a new profession, as did the new profession of sports psychology.
Over the past forty years, Tim have written seven books on the subject of how to merge inner connection with outer performance.
In 2012 The Inner Game Institute was created to bring Inner Game concepts and techniques to a greater number of people and organizations. The Institute quickly expanded to other countries and cultures.
Today we are honored to offer our services in more than 30 countries.
About Tim Gallwey
As a boy, Tim Gallwey was a nationally ranked tennis player in his division and later captained his Harvard University team. On what was meant to be a sabbatical from a career in college administration, Gallwey worked as a tennis instructor in Monterey, CA.
Initially, he focused his efforts on giving traditional instructions with mixed results. He soon discovered that if he invited his students to focus their awareness on their strokes as they were, technique evolved naturally and seemed to self-correct. Players using Gallwey’s methods improved far more rapidly than usual, and without self-criticism or trying so hard to “do it right.”
From this discovery came Gallwey’s first book, The Inner Game of Tennis, which has sold over two million copies. Other books in the Inner Game series include applications to Golf, Skiing, Music, Work, and Stress.
In the years after his first book’s release, readers even began to employ the Inner Game methods to their lives off the court, and Tim moved into applying The Inner Game methods of change to corporate work. His long-term clients included Apple, AT&T, The Coca-Cola Company, and Rolls Royce where he applied The Inner Game of coaching for Leadership, Sales, Change management, and Teamwork, Gallwey’s work has often been credited as the foundation of the new fields of corporate and life coaching.
