I was describing this project to an old friend a few weeks ago, and he recommended that I check out The Inner Game of Tennis, by W. Timothy Gallwey. My friend is an amateur musician, an amateur athlete, and a scientist who loves poetry, so when he tells me that a book that’s ostensibly about tennis has some interesting ideas that might be applicable to sight-reading, I take him seriously.
Having just finished the book, I am glad he recommended it.
According to Gallwey, the “inner game” of tennis is the struggle to maintain a calm focus on the task at hand, and avoid forms of effort and patterns of thought that effectively sabotage that focus. He identifies two aspects of the self: self 1, who analyzes, instructs, judges and shames; and self 2, the intuitive self that executes physical skills in real time.1 He asserts that many tennis players suffer (that is, they suffer personally, and also their gameplay suffers) as a result of an abusive dynamic between self 1 and self 2, in which self 1 tries to control and shame self 2, which would be far more capable of learning without self 1’s interference. He recommends that self 1 should learn to appreciate the remarkable natural capacity of self 2; instead of lecturing and insulting self 2, it should cultivate a calm, open, appreciative, non-judgmental observation of self 2’s actions, thus freeing up self 2 to make adjustments and improve.
My first reaction is that the problem Gallwey describes is definitely a problem I have. My goal here is to become more comfortable sight-reading chamber music on the viola, and I have mostly approached this in terms of cultivating the skill of sight-reading and adjacent skills. Frankly, though, it’s been clear to me for some time that musical skill development per se is only part of the issue.
My experience with sight-reading is very inconsistent. In the best-case scenario, I do sometimes achieve a state of calm focus and transcendent absorption in the task at hand, and that is really delightful … but it is not my usual experience. To adopt Gallwey’s terminology, frequently when I start to make mistakes self 1 gets angry and frustrated and takes it out on self 2, who gets increasingly withdrawn and timorous and therefore prone to making more mistakes. Sometimes when things have been going well, self 1 starts to take a premature victory lap; this often leads to mistakes and generally makes the experience of playing less enjoyable even when it doesn’t. At other times, self 1 gets bored and starts thinking about extraneous —often unpleasant— things, distracting and demoralizing self 2. In short, self 1’s anxious desire for validation is at best an unpleasant distraction and at worst leads to devastating spirals of self-sabotage.
This all seems pretty much in line with Gallwey’s account. There’s one important thing I frequently notice that Gallwey doesn’t describe, though, which is that I perceive myself as having an additional responsible super-ego self that wants self 1 to calm down and give self 2 a chance. This self (call it “self 0”) successfully rides herd on self 1’s more destructive tendencies most of the time. However, when I am playing music, self 0 is busy trying to get me to play music and can’t keep self 1 in check. Self 1 is bored and unsupervised, and gets itself into trouble just as students do in the same circumstances2.
I appreciate Gallwey’s framing that the goal here should be to improve the relationship between self 1 and self 2. Gallwey spends some effort trying to draw the the reader’s attention to self 2’s extraordinary natural endowments. He encourages the reader to cultivate sense of awe in observing self 2’s profound capacity for intuitive improvement when self 1 furnishes a calm focus upon a particular goal. He suggests that just as good parents don’t micromanage or judge their children, and good teachers don’t micromanage or judge their students, so too self 1 should enjoy and cherish and attentively observe self 2 in a posture of loving respect3.
As a teacher, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to help my students to take in critical feedback without experiencing it as an attack. I tell them, in all sincerity, that I believe this is a life skill that will prove ultimately even more valuable to them than analytical writing and and reading comprehension. I have generally thought about this within the framework of Carol Dweck’s Mindsets. As wikipedia summarizes them:
According to Carol Dweck, individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their views about where ability originates, from a fixed to a growth mindset. An individual's mindset affects the "motivation to practice and learn".
People with a fixed mindset believe that "intelligence is static", and little can be done to improve ability. Feedback is seen as "evaluation of their underlying ability" and success is seen as a result of this ability, not any effort expended. Failure is intimidating, since it "suggests constraints or limits they would not be able to overcome".Those with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges, give up easily, and focus on the outcome. They believe that their abilities are fixed, and effort has little value.
Those with a growth mindset believe that "intelligence can be developed", and their abilities can be increased by learning. They tend to embrace challenges, persevere in the face of adversity, accept and learn from failure, focus on process rather than outcome, and see abilities as skills which are developed through effort. Feedback and failure are seen as opportunities to increase ability, signaling the "need to pay attention, invest effort, apply time to practice, and master the new learning opportunity".
Gallwey’s thesis seems to draw many of the same conclusions as Dweck’s. Both emphasize the importance of recognizing one’s current ability level as a temporary state of being rather than a permanent verdict upon one’s capacity for accomplishment. Both of them argue that people who are able to experience challenge and failure as an opportunity for learning rather than an attack upon their intrinsic personal value will be able to navigate challenges more willingly and capably, and ultimately achieve greater mastery.
I don’t think these two paradigms disagree in any particular way, and I suspect they have some synergy. The major difference is that whereas Dweck mostly focuses on changing the subject’s belief about ability and the brain in order to make him more motivated, Gallwey focuses on changing the subject’s habits of thought in order to make his effort more productive. Gallwey starts with Dweck’s argument that we should believe in our (self 2’s) capacity for growth, but then he identifies some subjective strategies a person might attempt in order to bring one’s thought patterns into accord with this belief in practical terms.
He brings the concept of self 1 and self 2 existing in a relationship, and addressing self 1 he encourages the reader to base that relationship upon mutual trust and respect between self 1 and self 2. I find this to be an intuitively appealing framing that speaks to my experience.
Perhaps more important, he suggests an affirmative vision of what self 1 should be doing as self 2 attempts something challenging. To wit, he advises that self 1 should pay active, appreciative, focused attention to what self 2 is doing while suspending judgment about it.
I think both of these ideas might be useful to pitch to my students, and I shall likely attempt it next year.
My biggest area of reservation about Gallwey’s approach as applied to my own project is that, as I said in my introduction, part of my goal is to integrate my analytical mind into my music making. I find that Gallwey’s description of the relationship dynamics between self 1 and self 2 largely ring true for me, but I find myself cringing at the injunction that self 1’s best contribution is to get out of the way. I don’t appreciate my brain’s tendency to inject its ego into my music, but it seems to me that it should be possible to suspend judgement (in the sense of shaming) without suspending analysis.
When Gallwey talks about suspending analysis and judgement and observing, he doesn’t quite explicitly say that self 1 can contribute to the development of skills by consciously directing attention to the specific areas where self 2 would be best advised to improve. I’m not sure that he isn’t implying it, however. At present, I find it helpful to imagine that this constitutes a valid attentional strategy for self 1.
As I’ve indicated before, my current approach while practicing and sight-reading is to go into intensive curious observation mode. I am not treating this as a suspension of my analytical facilities, but rather as a prerequisite to them. It’s really helpful to collect data about one’s performance so that one can then sit down and reflect upon it and use it to devise new hypotheses about how to practice. It is in fact my sense that this kind of conscious reflection is actively very helpful to the development of expertise (I’ve started reading Ericsson and Pool’s book Peak, but I haven’t gotten far enough to write about it yet), and that’s all self 1.
For me, at least, self 1 gets up to trouble when it isn’t fully engaged. It’s my hope that this project itself, with its promise that if I collect data now I will have a chance to think about it later, provides the incentive for self 1 to enter a state of curious nonjudgmental observation that I hope Gallwey would approve, without ceasing to be itself. A great deal of the value of this whole project for me (including especially the techniques I’m porting from Gebrian’s book) is that it offers self 1 a constructive way to participate in the process rather than becoming a passive observer or a resentful saboteur. If we’re trying to improve the relationship between self 1 and self 2, let’s try to do that by respecting the strengths of self 1 as well as self 2. Let respect between the selves be truly mutual.
So far it has been extremely helpful for me to think about all of my musical output over the past few weeks as data to drive future improvements. That really has effectively stilled the crueler impulses of self 1 and made practicing more fun and less stressful. Here’s a snippet from my practice observation log from today, for instance:
It’s quite obvious though, that the major obstacle between me and being able to play this movement well is now not the fast licks but the double stops.
Oh dear, I’ve never been good a practicing double stopsOh good, I’ve always wanted to learn how to practice double stops. Maybe now is my chance!
This reminds me of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Confusingly, Gallwey’s “self 1” corresponds to Kahneman’s analytical “system 2”, while Galwey’s “self 2” corresponds to Kahneman’s intuitive “system 1”. However, both texts seem to agree that the intuitive self is much more capable and powerful than we tend to assume it is. For that matter, Jonathan Haidt comes to the same conclusion with his metaphor of the elephant (intuitive) and the rider (analytical). It thus seems fair to suppose that Gallwey’s general understanding of our mental architecture is shared by at least some psychologists.
This happens in a few other situations as well. It sometimes happens while I’m grading. It often happens when I wake up in the middle of the night. It generally happens when self 0 is busy or incapacitated and self 1 is bored.
This raises three excellent questions for me. First, do I currently achieve this ideal with my students? Second, do I currently achieve this ideal with my child? And third, supposing I do, am I able to translate that same affect over to self 2?
I try to get Self 1 to acknowledge the many things that Self 2 did right. Self 1 needs use both the good and the bad to generate hypotheses for improvement. My current problem is hitting backhand in pickleball. I've practiced the shots over and over, but I still I trouble executing them in a game. Surprisingly, Self 1 observed the similarity between backhand with a paddle and backhand with a Frisbie. If I visualize a Frisbie throw while I'm setting up for a pickleball backhand, I get a much better outcome.
With the viola, Self 1 kept saying, "Why is this so hard? It's just a violin, really." I kept switching back and forth between the two instruments a couple of times a week, once in a while switching within the same practice session. Eventually I stopped thinking of them as being different. Somehow, the two instruments, the two clefs, merged into one mental representation. Of course, the finger memory has two sets of instructions about how much to stretch the fingers, the bigger arc for the bowing, etc., but the trick was in separating that out as subroutines that are independent of the mapping from written note to basic positioning for played note.
I think of these things as examples of "you already know this." I'd guess that a lot of learning "leaps" are from finding the link from the current problem to a previously solved problem. That's a well-known technique in mathematics, but when it comes to physical actions, I'm very slow to discover the analogies.