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For many years many have recommended The Inner Game of Tennis as a resource for improving your performance. I found it helpful — an article getting specifically into some aspects of the inner game is this one from 2010,
But now I’m rethinking things. Why? Because a major premise of The Inner Game of Tennis relates to an inner dialogue, and,
News flash: Not everyone has an inner dialogue/monologue
There have been some articles come up in recent years on the topic of the inner dialogue or monologue, easily found with a simple search. Basically, depending on the source you read, an estimated 50-70 percent of people have no inner monologue, or, stated another way, only one in four people have an inner monologue. Clearly there is a spectrum on this, and we only experience how we actually think. How other people think is a total mystery to us.
In short, I believe it is probable that if you have no inner monologue the Inner Game books will be an interesting curiosity with little personal impact.
I’ve used the book as a reading assignment in my pedagogy class for years now – with students writing an old-school book report on it. Nobody ever said to me “Dr. Ericson, but I have no internal monologue and the book doesn’t make sense.” But surely it did not make sense to probably quite a number of students!
I personally have a very active internal dialogue
In my own case, the book makes total sense and was very helpful for me to calm my inner dialogue in auditions and performing. In particular, for some years it was part of my routine to re-read the book before professional auditions.
But to that I will add that I also have noted that things kind of mentally “synch up” at times too, the inner dialogue comes and goes. When I’m teaching, for example, there is no internal dialogue, my thoughts happen as I speak them. When I’m writing though, it is all guided by the inner voice, if that makes any sense.
For people with no internal dialogue …
I think probably your best performance tactic relates to visualizations. For me, visualizations do very little, although mental representations of how the music is supposed to sound are really important, which may be a type of visualization. But for someone with a much less active inner dialogue, I think visualizations could be an effective tactic.
And really, reader out there with no inner dialogue, you could be at an advantage over me. I can only imagine what it would be like to have no inner critic causing me to lose focus and impact my ability to perform.
This is pretty deep …
It would be a big challenge to study, but I wish someone could study a large group of very fine horn players and see what in the world is actually going on inside. It would be interesting to know if as a group they had any trends in terms of their actual inner game, or if the spectrum was the same as the general population. Maybe some very motivated DMA student can take on the project.
Image from this article by Bruce Hembd
