Psychological Mastery and The Inner Game of Pickleball

World #1 Professional Pickleball Player Anna Leigh Waters, via FILA Pickleball Instagram

Our current times call for us to be more adaptable, resilient, and skillful. We need to enhance our human-centred abilities, including emotional regulation, efficient skill acquisition, and understanding the factors that drive effective execution. Part of what drew me to learn pickleball was the realization that the sport can be a great opportunity to work on self-mastery.

I believe a great way to develop ourselves is to seek challenges outside of our primary domains of expertise. When done with a particular focus, we can grow greatly from doing activities that seem to be just for fun. While learning pickleball has been incredibly enjoyable, it has also been a platform for working my muscles of psychological self-mastery — my inner game.

Pickleball itself is easy to learn, but difficult to master. While I could simply play it for enjoyment and physical health, I’ve decided to also leverage the activity to cultivate abilities of personal mastery such as deep self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and tapping into peak-performing flow states.

The title of this article pays tribute to W. Timothy Gallwey’s influential 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis, a timeless classic on how to achieve high performance through training our inner abilities. The book’s guidance has been tremendously helpful reminders as I take on this learning journey. Although my thoughts here are reflections on psychological mastery and the principles of peak performance related to learning a sport, these ideas of personal mastery also apply to effectively living life in general.

Drawing from Gallwey’s book as well as wisdom from other similar works, this article explores three ideas that can be helpful to anyone seeking to work on their inner game of whatever the pursuit happens to be. The three ideas are:

  • Steady Your Emotions

  • Practice Being Non-Attached, and

  • Calm Your Mental Chatter

Steady Your Emotions

Competitiveness, self-judgement, fear of looking foolish, and other such emotions come with the territory when learning an activity that involves playing against opponents. While these sorts of emotions have their benefits and can motivate us to strive, too much of them can lead to poor reactions and poor choices that limit growth. Even though pickleball is just a hobby for me, I know how contagious unwise, unhelpful emotional impulses can be to other areas of life. And in more important areas of life, immaturity around emotions can lead to harmful results.

I was surprised at how strongly the negative aspects of these emotions showed up in me during the early weeks of learning pickleball. I was intrigued by how my competitive impulses showed up, in a way that went beyond being helpful. I didn’t act out in any way I later regretted, but I was unnecessarily bothered by my poor play, losing games, etc. Working through them deepened my self-awareness and grew my ability to be skillful with these kinds of emotions.

Awareness is key to being able to regulate negative emotions. As Anthony de Mello advises in his book Awareness:

“What you are aware of, you are in control of. What you are not aware of is in control of you. You are always a slave to what you’re not aware of. When you’re aware of it, you’re free from it. It’s there, but you’re not affected by it. Awareness. Awareness. Awareness.”

Here is a practical approach to regulating emotions:

  1. Notice and observe: Know that emotions are just sensations that come and go. When engaged in an activity that you know brings certain emotions that you want to be more skillful with, make a point of being alert to noticing them. When the feeling shows up, listen to what it’s telling you. Observe it without judging it as “good” or “bad.” Simply be with it in quiet acceptance. Just hear it out.

  2. Let go: Decide what would be a healthy and helpful way to BE (emotionally), and let go of the extra level of emotion (usually some form of exaggerated fear). Keep what’s helpful, and let go of the rest. While this may require personal discovery, letting go can simply be a declaration you make to yourself.

  3. Embrace doing the reps: Being good at managing your emotions is an ability that can be built over time. Decide to embrace growing this important psychological skill. See the work as you would when building physical strength. Do your repetitions with a positive mindset and the results will follow.

When learning something new and competing with others, be deliberate about noticing and letting go of emotions that are not helpful. In my current day to day life, I don’t experience active competition with opponents. My ego is not accustomed to being threatened in that way. Being a beginner at a sport that has a competitive component has reacquainted me with my own emotional impulses. But rather than letting it negatively influence my attitude and behaviour, I have welcomed the opportunity to further polish my emotional intelligence maturity. This has resulted in more enjoyment of my learning and playing. Working on how I react emotionally to this new activity has also increased my emotional self-mastery in other areas of life.

Practice Being Non-Attached

By being non-attached, I don’t mean not caring about results. We can care tremendously about our development and the results we want to achieve while at the same time not being emotionally fixated on outcomes we can’t control. Being attached means we won’t be kind to ourselves unless _____. It means making our happiness, self-acceptance, and sense of accomplishment be conditional on things we can’t control.

In life, we cannot control winning or losing, whether someone likes us or not, whether the customer buys from us or not, how someone will react to what we say, etc. All we can control is our preparation, our attitude, how we show up, how we choose to see things, and how we act.

We need to drop exaggerated fears around risk, embarrassment, failure, and rejection. When we frame challenges outside of our comfort zone as opportunities for personal growth, we wind up taking actions that lead to becoming a more powerful human.

“The you who is not seeking anything … is as light and free as a butterfly. All you have to do is uncup your hands and let it soar. Your words will flow effortlessly.”

- Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation

Whether it’s writing a novel, playing pickleball, or doing a business presentation to important stakeholders: don’t be attached to outcomes you cannot control. Simply focus on being at your best in the moment.

For pickleball, I work on quieting my impulse to make it all about winning. I focus on acting without expecting. I point my attention to relaxing and allowing my play to flow. I focus on helping create an environment that my playing partners will enjoy.

As Timothy Gallwey wrote in The Inner Game of Tennis: “The difference between being concerned about winning and being concerned about making the effort to win may seem subtle, but in the effect there is a great difference... When one is emotionally attached to results that he can’t control, he tends to become anxious and then try too hard.”

Being non-attached to outcomes is a journey. It is a way of being that takes time to discover for yourself. It’s easy to be attached to outcomes we can’t control because we are so programmed to think that without “x” we would be devastated, or without “y” we would be a loser. We are conditioned to think that without this attachment, we would be lazy and unambitious, but that’s not true. If these sorts of fears is the main thing that motivates you, life will be more of a struggle. Your joys and successes will be more fleeting. Finding intrinsic motivation that doesn’t rely on attachment is not only more sustainable - it also results in more of what you actually want.

Let go of disempowering attachments.

Calm Your Mental Chatter

In the book Chatter, author Ethan Kross writes about The Nadal Principle:

“Although you might think that competing against world-class athletes and making sure you don’t pull a muscle are the most essential parts of professional tennis, that’s not true for (Rafael) Nadal, one of the greatest players in history. ‘What I battle hardest to do in a tennis match’ he says, ‘is to quiet the voices in my head.’”

We humans are highly alert to threats that risk our survival. We are wired to constantly scan for danger, and we have an inner voice that warns us of danger. Every waking moment, this inner voice directs us to act in ways that it thinks will keep us safe. The problem however is that this chatter can distract us from being at our best in activities that have nothing to do with actual survival. When we get lost in our survival impulses’ fears and self-criticisms, we disrupt the flow of our skills and knowledge.

In order to effectively deploy what we know through education and training, we need to get out of our own way. We need to quiet the mental chatter in our head so our skills can emerge naturally and without interference from the conscious mind.

Imagine what would happen if an Olympic diver actively thought about the nuances of their physical movements in the middle of a complex dive. The conscious mind would be a barrier to execution because it simply cannot process thoughts fast enough. What these elite athletes do is let go of conscious thinking about their technique and allow the trained movements to just come out. When you see a professional athlete run through a sequence of movements prior to execution, such as a golfer’s pre-shot routine, you are witnessing the process of quieting the chatter of the inner voice. This kind of mental process is an example of setting ourselves up to allow our best performance to emerge.

“One of the clearest lessons from contemporary neuroscience is that our sense of ourselves is anchored in a vital connection with our bodies. We do not truly know ourselves unless we can feel and interpret our physical sensations…”

- Bessel Van Der Kold, M.D., The Body Keeps The Score

Quieting mental chatter requires the ability to notice thoughts that are present, and then letting them pass. We can let go of mental chatter simply through the awareness of them, and by dropping into / tuning into sensations in the body. This is how top performing professionals achieve flow under pressure, in high-stakes situations.

Regardless of the performance — whether it be golf, tennis, pickleball, or a public speaking engagement: be present in the moment, settle into the body, let go of the inner critic’s commentaries, and allow your best to come out. This is a mindfulness skill that requires exploration, but anyone can achieve it.

Accessing Flow

In the words of pickleball world champion Ben Johns, this is about finding “your mental state that is the most helpful for you to perform at your best in a variety of situations.” And that “Just figuring out your best state at any given time is huge.”

Being able to access your high-performing flow state regardless of shifts in circumstances that might otherwise derail you is a fundamental ability of personal mastery. See this video for Ben Johns’ suggestions on how to “reset” in this way.

My methods for tapping into my calm flow state when playing pickleball:

  • A clear pre-serve routine that I execute prior to every serve: bouncing the ball three times, shift my weight back prior shifting it forward for the serve itself - all done with a specific rhythm.

  • Tapping my paddle with the palm of my hand prior to every point where I’m not serving, with the feeling of letting go of thoughts and settling into my body.

  • Tapping paddles with my partner after points, especially after lost points, to reset a sense of “it’s all good.”

In your professional life, similar methods for accessing a sense of calm prior to execution of a high-pressure performance can also be created and practiced. Examples may be:

  • Presence and Auditory Check-In: Sit or stand in a comfortable position. Be still and bring your attention to the present moment. Listen carefully and identify one thing you can hear. Take 10 seconds to simply notice that sound without judgement or analysis.

  • Tactile Sensory Check-In: Rub the tips of your finger together for 20 seconds, with deliberate and deep focus on how it feels.

  • Navy SEALs’ Box Breathing technique (explanation here).

Go Play

The inner game is a crucial part of performing at your personal best at every stage of learning, in any activity. Exploring how to navigate the mental and emotional aspects of challenging activities is a tremendously worthwhile endeavour. Excellence in this personal mastery skill is a superpower - one that leads to more direct pathways to become great at pretty much anything.

Now go play!