Tennis Hits the Books
Live the Best Story of Your Life: A World Champion’s Guide to Lasting Change is a book by Bob Litwin that haunted my nightstand at the top of my “next to read” pile for well over a year. I have been simultaneously highly interested in this book, and yet also somewhat ambivalent about the book during this timeframe. In retrospect, I wish I could have mastered the mood to dive into it earlier.
Bob Litwin is a World Champion senior tennis player with an interesting career that includes coaching tennis as well as career and life performance. His client list includes prominent Wall Street financial firms, executives, and athletes from other sports. In a way, the book is the application of what he learned playing tennis applied to winning at the game of life.
Live the Best Story of Your Life cannot be completely categorized as a tennis book. While it appears on Amazon’s “Tennis Coaching” best seller list, it also appears on the “Business Mentoring & Coaching” list as well. The anecdotes and examples presented in the book draw from his tennis play, life experiences, and his clients. He has made a positive difference in a lot of people’s lives.
After giving the book a thorough read, I have positioned the book in mind relative to the Inner Game of Tennis. While Inner Tennis focuses on positive self talk in the moment, Live the Best Story of your Life draws a much broader arc. It can very much be regarded as a companion piece to Inner Tennis. It is where the overall arc and theme of positive self talk is architected.
The essence of the book is harnessing the power of the stories that we tell ourselves to effect positive change. That change can come on the tennis court, but it is not confined to those dimensions. It applies equally as well to relationships and career situations as well.
The book is organized to include 33 “coaching sessions” which ultimately boil down to sticking points that can be encountered when an individual sets out to reframe how they are thinking about their life. This involves writing a new “story” that we tell ourselves about our life. The new story becomes reality over time.
Since I completed my reading of the book over the weekend, I have been contemplating my own personal stories and trying to work out the place in my life where I should attempt to give the techniques presented in the book a try. It is an interesting thought exercise. I have… a lot of opportunities for application.
It is probably one of the more unusual tennis books that I will ever recommend. In fact, I am not even sure if it is a tennis book at all. I have long held that tennis is a crucible for the development of life skills. This book is tangible application of that leap.
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