Building Inner Stability
BUILDING INNER STABILITY
(from The Inner Game of Tennis)
Perhaps the most indispensable tool for human beings in modern times is the ability to remain calm in the midst of rapid and unsettling changes. The people who will best survive the present age are the ones Kipling described as “those who can keep their heads while all about are losing theirs.” Inner stability is achieved not by burying one’s head in the sand at the sight of danger, but by acquiring the ability to see the true nature of what is happening and to respond appropriately. Then Self 1’s reaction to the situation is not able to disrupt your inner balance or clarity.
Instability, in contrast, is a condition of being in which we are more easily thrown off balance when Self 1 gets upset by an event or circumstance. Self 1 tends to distort its perception of the event, prompting us to take misguided actions, which in turn leads to circumstances that further undermine our inner balance—the basic Self 1 vicious cycle.
People ask, “So how can I manage my stress?” Courses are taken, remedies offered, yet often the Self 1 stress continues. The problem with “managing stress” is that you tend to believe it is inevitable. There has to be the stress for you to manage. I’ve noticed that Self 1 tends to thrive when it is fought. An alternative approach is simply to build on your stability. Support and encourage your Self 2, knowing that the stronger it gets, the more it will take to throw you off balance, and the quicker you can regain your balance.
Self 1 stress is a thief that, if we let it, can rob us of the enjoyment of our lives. The longer I live, the greater my appreciation of the gift that life itself is. This gift is much greater than I could have imagined, and therefore time spent living it in a state of stress means I am missing a lot—on or off the court. Maybe wisdom is not so much to come up with new answers as to recognize at a deeper level the profundity of the age-old answers. Some things don’t change. The need to trust oneself and grow in understanding of our true selves will never diminish. The need to let go of the lenses of “good–bad” judgment of ourselves and others will always be the doorway to the possibility of clarity. And the importance of being clear about one’s priorities, especially the first priority in your life, will never become less important while you still have life.
Stress is easier than ever to come by in a time when pressures come toward us from all corners. Wives, husbands, bosses, children, bills, advertising, society itself, will continue to make their demands on our lives. “Do this better, do this more, be this way and don’t be that way, make something of yourself, be more like him or be like her, we are now instituting these changes, so change.” The message is no different from “Hit the ball this way or hit the ball that way, and you’re no good if you don’t.” Sometimes the demands are put so sweetly or matter-of-factly that they seem an innocent part of life; sometimes they come so harshly that they provoke action out of fear. But one thing is for sure: the pressures from outside will keep on coming and in fact could easily accelerate in pace and increase in intensity. Information is exploding, and with it the need to know more and stretch our competencies. While the demands of work are increasing for most people, so is the threat of losing one’s work.
The cause of most stress can be summed up by the word attachment. Self 1 gets so dependent upon things, situations, people and concepts within its experience that when change occurs or seems about to occur, it feels threatened. Freedom from stress does not necessarily involve giving up anything, but rather being able to let go of anything, when necessary, and know that one will still be all right. It comes from being more independent—not necessarily more solitary, but more reliant on one’s own inner resources for stability.
The wisdom of building inner stability in such times seems to me to be an obvious requirement for successful living. The first step toward inner stability may be the acknowledgment that there is an inner self that has inherent needs of its own. The self that has all your gifts and capabilities, with which you hope to accomplish anything, has its own requirements. They are natural demands that we didn’t even have to be taught. Each Self 2 is endowed by birth, regardless of where that birth took place, with an instinct to fulfill its nature. It wants to enjoy, to learn, to understand, appreciate, go for it, rest, be healthy, survive, be free to be what it is, express itself and make its unique contribution.
Self 2’s needs come with a gentle but constant urging. A certain feeling of contentment attends a person whenever he or she is acting in sync with this self. The fundamental issue is what kind of priority are we giving the demands of Self 2 in relation to all the external pressures? It is obvious that every individual must ask and answer this question for himself or herself.
I, like anyone else, have to learn something very important—how to distinguish the inner requests of Self 2 from the outer demands that have been “internalized” by Self 1 and are now so familiar in my thinking that they “sound like” they are coming from me. Being self-employed for twenty-five years, I admit that I have been my own worst stressor. But slowly I have found that the demands I’m trying to fulfill when I’m stressing myself are not really my own, but ones I have “picked up” or “bought into” for perhaps no better reason than I heard them early in life, or because they seemed to be so generally accepted. Soon they begin to sound right—and are therefore easier to listen to than the subtle but insistent urging of my own being.
One of my favorite interviews with a tennis player was one that took place with Jennifer Capriati when she was fourteen years old. At the time, she was playing in world-class women’s tournaments and doing remarkably well. The reporter was asking her how nervous she got when she was playing against some of the best players in the world. Jennifer responded that she didn’t get nervous at all. She said she considered it a privilege to play with these players, something she hadn’t been able to do up until that time. “But surely when you are in the semifinals of a world-class tournament, and being only fourteen, with all the expectations that are on you, you must experience some stress.” Jennifer’s final answer to all the reporter’s probing for her fear was simple, innocent and, as far as I can see, pure Self 2. “If I was feeling frightened playing tennis, I don’t see why I would do it!” she exclaimed. With that the reporter stopped her questioning.
Perhaps the cynic in us wants to say, “But look at what happened to Jennifer later.” Yes, she may have lost a few rounds to Self 1, but the match isn’t over in a single victory or a single defeat. Self 1 doesn’t give up easily, nor does Self 2. That Jennifer’s Self 2 is fully intact, I have no doubt. We could well take inspiration from her example at fourteen of putting fear in its place.
Freedom from stress happens in proportion to our responsiveness to our true selves, allowing every moment possible to be an opportunity for Self 2 to be what it is and enjoy the process. As far as I can see, this is a lifelong learning process.
I hope by now you have understood that I am not promoting the kind of positive thinking that tries to assert mentally that things are wonderful when they aren’t. And not the kind that says,“If I think I’m kind, then I am; if I think I’m a winner, then I am.” As far as I’m concerned, this is Self 1 trying to make a better Self 1. The dog chases its own tail.
In most lectures that I have given recently, I remind myself and the audience that even though I come from California, I don’t believe in self-improvement, and I certainly don’t want to improve them. Sometimes there is a stunned response. But I don’t think anyone’s Self 2 needs improvement from birth to death. It has always been fine. I, more than anyone, need to remember that. Yes, our backhands can improve, and I’m sure my writing can get better; certainly our skills in relating to each other on the planet can improve. But the cornerstone of stability is to know that there is nothing wrong with the essential human being.
Believe me, I do not say this without due regard to the depths of disruption that can be caused by Self 1, but out of a knowledge born from personal experience that there is always a part of us that remains immune to the contamination of Self 1. Perhaps I have to learn and relearn this fact because I was conditioned so early to believe the opposite: that somehow I was bad and had to learn to become good.
The part of my life spent trying to compensate for this negativity by being extra good has been neither enjoyable nor rewarding. Although I usually managed to live up to and sometimes surpass the expectations of those I was trying to please or appease, it was not without a cost to my connection with myself. My explorations of the Inner Game of Tennis helped me to see in a very practical way that Self 2, left to its own resources, did very well on its own. I expect I’ll never outgrow the need to renew trust in myself and to protect myself from the voices, inside or out, that undermine that trust.
What else can be done to promote stability? The message of the Inner Game is simple: focus. Focus of attention in the present moment, the only one you can really live in, is at the heart of this book and at the heart of the art of doing anything well. Focus means not dwelling on the past, either on mistakes or glories; it means not being so caught up in the future, either its fears or its dreams, that my full attention is taken from the present. The ability to focus the mind is the ability to not let it run away with you. It does not mean not to think—but to be the one who directs your own thinking. Focusing can be practiced on a tennis court, chopping carrots, in a pressure-packed board meeting or while driving in traffic. It can be practiced when alone or in conversation. It takes as much trust to fully focus attention when listening to another person without carrying on a side conversation in your own head as it does to watch a tennis ball in all its detail, without listening to Self 1’s worries, hopes and instructions.
Stability grows as I learn to accept what I cannot control and take control of what I can. One cold winter evening, on my first year after graduation from college, I learned for the first but by no means the last time about the power of acceptance of life and death. I was alone, driving my Volkswagen bug to Exeter, New Hampshire, from a small town in Maine. It was near midnight when my wheel skidded on an icy curve and spun my car gently but firmly off the road and into a snowbank.
As I sat in the car getting colder by the second, the gravity of my situation struck me. It was about twenty degrees below zero outside, and I had nothing other than the sport jacket I was wearing. There was no hope of keeping warm in the car while it was stationary, and there was little hope of being picked up by another car. It had been twenty minutes since I had passed through a town, and not a single automobile had passed me in that time. There were no farmhouses, no cultivated land, not even telephone poles to remind me of civilization. I had no map and no idea how far ahead the next town might be.
I was faced with an interesting choice. I would freeze if I remained in the car, so I had to decide whether to walk forward into the unknown in the hope that a town might be around the very next corner, or to walk back in the direction from which I had come, knowing that there was certain help at least fifteen miles back. After deliberating for a moment, I decided to take my chances with the unknown. After all, isn’t that what they do in the movies? I walked forward for about ten steps and then, without thinking, pivoted decisively and walked back the other way.
After three minutes, my ears were freezing and felt as if they were about to chip off, so I started to run. But the cold drained my energy quickly, and soon I had to slow again to a walk. This time I walked for only two minutes before becoming too cold. Again I ran, but again grew fatigued quickly. The periods of running began to grow shorter, as did the periods of walking, and I soon realized what the outcome of these decreasing cycles would be. I could see myself by the side of the road covered with snow and frozen stiff. At that moment, what had first appeared to be merely a difficult situation began to look as if it was going to be my final situation. Awareness of the very possibility of death slowed me to a stop.
After a minute of reflection, I found myself saying aloud, “Okay, if now is the time, so be it. I’m ready.” I really meant it. With that I stopped thinking about it and began walking calmly down the road, suddenly aware of the beauty of the night. I became absorbed in the silence of the stars and in the loveliness of the dimly lit forms around me; everything was beautiful. Then without thinking, I started running. To my surprise I didn’t stop for a full forty minutes, and then only because I spotted a light burning in the window of a distant house.
Where had this energy come from that allowed me to run so far without stopping? I hadn’t felt frightened; I simply didn’t get tired or cold. As I relate this story now, it seems that saying “I accepted death” is ambiguous. I didn’t give up in the sense of quitting. In one sense I gave up one kind of caring and was imbued with another. Apparently, letting go of my grip on life released an energy that paradoxically made it possible for me to run with utter abandon toward life.
“Abandon” is a good word to describe what happens to a tennis player who feels he has nothing to lose. He stops caring about the outcome and plays all out. It is a letting go of the concerns of Self 1 and letting in of the natural concerns of a deeper and truer self. It is caring, yet not caring; it is effort, but effortless at the same time.