The Inner Game

So now Pete Carroll is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. Jim Moore of SeattlePI tracked him down at his first press conference and eventually got in a few questions. Here is what he wanted to ask, but read the full story,Carroll: “God of all coaches, but also a regular guy” for the rest.

I had precious little time with Carroll. I wanted to ask him about one of his favorite books, “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallwey, and why it meant so much to him.

I wanted to ask him about people who have been influential in his life such as psychologists Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung, and Buddhist meditation master Chogyam Trungpa and Zen master D.T. Suzuki. In Coach Pete, we might have a Phil Jackson on our hands.

I wanted to ask him about about being a Grateful Dead head and why Bruce Springsteen’s “Growin’ Up” made such an impact on him in the summer of 1999.

And of course, I wanted to ask about his three kids and one grandkid, his friendship with Will Ferrell and support of President Obama.

But I went with the old standby instead and asked him to tell me about his dogs. The golden was special because she was a family dog who was with the kids while they were growing up.

His wife found the border-collie mix on the Internet and she arrived at Carroll’s home with a broken leg.

“She’s got a wacked personality,” Carroll said. “She runs our life.”

Tags: Carroll, innergametennis, JimMoore, PeteCarroll, Seahawks, Seattle

A recent post on Bob’s Weblog, GROW a way to grow in life and business, breaks down some of the basics in 2 of Tim Gallwey’s books, The Inner Game of Tennis and The inner Game of Work.

Gallwey was a tennis coach who was frustrated by the limitations of conventional sports coaching methods. He noticed that he could often see the faults in a player’s game, but that simply telling him what to do to improve did not bring about lasting change.

For instance, if a player were not keeping his eye on the ball, most coaches would give advice such as: ‘Keep your eye on the ball.’ When a player received this sort of instruction he would try to do what the coach was asking him and watch the ball more closely. Unfortunately, no one can keep instructions in the front of their minds for long, so players usually slipped back into their old habits and both coaches and players grew increasingly frustrated.

So one day, instead of giving an instruction, Gallwey asked:

`Can you say “bounce” out loud when the ball bounces and “hit” out loud when you hit the ball?’

In order to do this, players had to keep their eyes on the ball but no longer had a voice in their heads repeating the words ‘I must keep my eye on the ball.’ At this, their play started to improve markedly and the Inner Game method of coaching was born.

From then on, whenever Gallwey wanted a player to change, he no longer gave instructions but would, instead, ask questions that would help the player discover for himself what worked and what needed to change.

The first stage in this process would be to set a target for the player. For instance, in a situation where a player was serving out a lot of the time, Gallwey would ask him how many first serves out of ten he would like to get in. In this way, together, they created a clear Goal.

Then he would ask the player to serve ten balls and see how many he got in. In this way he helped the player define his Reality.

The next stage might be to ask him to observe what he was doing differently when the serve went in from when it went out, thereby helping the player to get in touch with his Obstacles. The player for instance might observe that when he threw the ball up to a certain height it tended to go in whereas if he threw it lower it tended to go out. Once an Obstacle was identified it became straightforward to identify Options to get around them.

In this way by really looking at what was actually happening, rather than getting stuck in trying and getting frustrated, players learnt for themselves what they needed to change in order to meet their serving targets. This gave players a clear Way Forward.

In the example using Gallwey and his tennis players, the basic methodology of GROW was present from the start.

A number of principles have been developed out of Gallwey’s experience with tennis players. While they originate from sport, the same principles can be applied to many learning situations. For example:

1 It is more effective to focus your attention on a relevant aspect of what is actually happening while you are learning, instead of what you ‘should’ be doing or trying to get it ‘right’ according to someone else’s perspective. This may seem blindingly obvious; however, in practice it rarely happens. In our tennis example the player would probably be focusing on trying to remember what the last coach said about serving and would then become more and more frustrated if his attempts at improvement did not work.

2 The best learning happens when we are focusing on the present. This means we are not struggling to prove or remember something but rather making discoveries as we go along.

3 We can easily interfere with the learning process by, for instance, trying to look good or using a lot of unfocused effort. The less we interfere with our learning, the faster we progress

Tags: coaching, GROW, GROW process, inner game, problem solving, sports coaching, Tim Gallwey

Here are two great examples of the Inner Game in practice. The story comes from the Grapevine Blog. You can read the entire post there.

Helping You To Work It Out
In preparation for my skiing holiday I bought Timothy Gallwey’s book, ‘Inner Skiing’. I have long admired his approach to learning and coaching. He tackles this topic with great skill. He explains that the coach needs to help the learner focus their attention in the right area (or shine the light on the right area as he puts it) so that the individual can learn.

This narrows down the field but does not rob you of the experience of working it out for yourself. What it does is make learning easier and more fun.

On a personal note, if you are a skier of any level of skill I would highly recommend this book. My friends noticed quite a leap in my skiing skills this year and it was purely as a result of reading this book. (When I say ‘leap’ I don’t mean to say I was making jumps or anything like that….). More on that next week.

The neuroscience I am familiar with (and you will have read about here on many occasions if you have been getting this for a while) backs up his approach completely.

By saying that the report must be more ‘academic’ the tutor has not narrowed the field enough for my friend. (Or for me – I don’t really know what she means.) She needs to give my friend a piece of text, it can be on any subject at all, but needs to be in the correct style (whatever she thinks it is) and then ask my friend a question that will focus her attention in the right direction.

It’s Not That Easy
Of course I’m making it sound easy, but helping others to learn is a great skill. It’s very much about asking the right question. This takes a lot of thought and practice.

But It Works
I once met Timothy Gallwey. I asked him for some advice with a client we’ll call Mike. He had a student working with him for a while. The student had a very poor level of meetings skills and was also very shy. Mike wanted to help him improve his skills, but was concerned about upsetting him.

Tim suggested that Mike ask the student to identify what he thought were effective and ineffective meetings behaviours over the following two weeks.

Two week’s later Mike gave me a ring. ‘You’ll never believe this,’ He said. ‘That student came to see me this morning and said ‘My meetings skills are really bad, can you help me?”

With not much help the student improved drastically.

As Tim explained to me, all the student needed was for his awareness in the right area to be raised. From the neuroscience we know that this means he was then getting the correct feedback in order to learn.

Tags: Advantage, attention, awareness, focus, learning, Unfair

Trevor Hill authored this article on the ELS Teachers Board:

We all have dreams – outcomes we would really like. But often the obstacles seem too great. So they stay dreams, never making it into reality.
We feel stuck, so we try to get on with day-to-day tasks and struggle to ignore the frustration. This is a heavy brake on our performance. In his brilliant book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ Tim Gallwey first showed a new way to look at this:

Performance = Potential – Interference

Gallwey found that, as a tennis coach, his clients improved their game much more as he told them less what to do. Giving instructions appeared to interfere with their learning.

Instead he focused on helping the client increase their self-awareness, finding then more of the player’s potential automatically became real. Moving on from tennis, Gallwey’s approach has been applied in many other fields. It seems universal, so we can apply it too.

This means that if we are unable to reach the goals that really matter to us, we can turn the situation around by reducing the interference we experience.

Tags: frustration, inner game, inner game of stress, interference, Performance, potential, stuck

W. Timothy Gallwey’s bestselling Inner Game books–with over one million copies sold–have revolutionized the way we think about sports. And now, after twenty years of applying his Inner Game methods to the royal and ancient sport of golf, Gallwey brings us this completely revised edition of his classic The Inner Game of Golf, nearly half of which is new material, published here for the first time.

A new review of the revised edition of The Inner Game of Golf. Read more at the Golfing Sense website.

Tags: Game, Golf, Golfing, Inner, reviews, Sense

About The Passion Diva

Lori is an authentic, engaging speaker and coach who shares her real life experiences with honesty and passion! Lori is the Founder and CEO of Foundation Coaching Group Inc. Foundation Coaching’s primary mission is to impact as many women as possible and share the vision of living passionately.

One area of coaching that touches my heart and soul the most is Stress Management. I was happy to be able to read and review this book when asked by the authors. As you might imagine I have read a LOT on the topic and more often than not it is several thousand words of meaningless drivel. I was pleasantly surprised when I dug into the book and I had to actually turn on my brain.
The book is broken out into three sections:
Part One: The Game of Stress, goes into great detail about what exactly stress is, where it comes from, acknowledging and understanding your stress and our reactions to stress.
Part Two: Outsmarting Stress, teaches how to become aware of your stress, shows you strategies to move past stress and how to take control of your life and the stress.
Part Three: The Inner Game Toolbox, describes in detail eight tools to overcome stress.
Throughout the book there are dozens of real world examples of how people worked through their stress or used a particular strategy. As a reader I like to see how other people work similar situations, these were timely and relevant. Each new concept also had a corresponding exercise that lead to new insights about yourself and the stress in your life.
By far the most valuable part of the book is the Inner Toolbox. Eight strategies that can have a significant impact on your life. Each tool is described in a step-by-step manner, includes exercises to cement the understanding and real life stories to share how other people successfully used these tools.
The simplest and easiest tool is the “Stop” and the one that I loved the most was “being the CEO”.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone that knows they have a stressed life and is ready to change it. I also think this book is great even if you feel your stress is under control that tools are ones that should be added to your personal box and can support you continuing your stress free life.

Tags: CHALLENGES, DISCLOSURE, EDD, EIGHT TOOLS, empowering guide, EVERYDAY STRESS, GALLAWAY, GAME SERIES, GUIDE TO MENTAL HEALTH, HEART AND SOUL, inner game, inner resources, John Horton, LANGUAGE ENGLISH, OUTSMARTING STRESS, PHYSICIANS, PSYCHOLOGY EXPERT, RANDOM HOUSE, sports psychology, STRESS MANAGEMENT, SUCCESS DETAILS, VOLATILE WORLD, W. Timothy Gallwey, WORLD GAME

Ben Hogan scoffed at the idea. Jack Nicklaus spurned it. Gary player scorned it. Among the game’s most respected legends, they disdained the idea of using a sports psychologist or a mental coach to help them win. Instead, these players preferred to retain the stubborn independence that drove them to succeed. They provided their own mental golf tips. They didn’t need a sports psychologist or mental coach. For a long time, this approach dominated on the Tour.
Today, more and more sports psychologists are advising golfers about golf’s mental side. They’re also writing books about it. One noteworthy book is Tim Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Golf, fashioned after his breakthrough book, The Inner Game of Tennis

Read the rest of this article on Tincanradio

Tags: Beating, Golf, Lesson, Tiger, Woods

Here is an excerpt from Pete Carroll’s WIKI page. Go there for the full story.

On offense, Carroll is known for using an aggressive, nonconservative play-calling that is open to trick plays as well as “going for it” on 4th down instead of punting the ball away.[57] <#cite_note-ESPN080907-56>  Because of his aggressive style, the USC Band has given him the nickname “Big Balls Pete.” At football games, when Pete Carroll decides to go for it on 4th down, the USC band will start a chant of “Big Balls Pete” that carries over to the students section and the alumni.[58] <#cite_note-LAT082607a-57>[59] <#cite_note-LAT102207-58> [5] <#cite_note-Esq09-4>
On defense, Carroll favors a bend-but-don’t-break scheme of preventing the big plays: allowing opposing teams to get small yardage but trying to keep the plays in front of his defenders.[60] <#cite_note-LAT092207-59>
Carroll draws coaching inspiration from the 1974 book The Inner Game of Tennis, by tennis coach W. Timothy Gallwey </wiki/W._Timothy_Gallwey> , which he picked up as graduate student at the University of the Pacific; he summarizes the philosophy he took from the book as “all about clearing the clutter in the interactions between your conscious and subconscious mind” enabled “Through superior practice and a clear approach. Focus, clarity and belief in yourself are what allows you to express your ability without discursive thoughts and concerns.”[61] <#cite_note-LAT082607-60>  He wrote a foreword </wiki/Foreword> for a later edition, noting that athletes “must clear their minds of all confusion and earn the ability to let themselves play freely.”[22] <#cite_note-NYT110208-21>  He also cites influences frompsychologists </wiki/Psychologist>  Abraham Maslow </wiki/Abraham_Maslow>  andCarl Jung </wiki/Carl_Jung> , Buddhist </wiki/Buddhism>  meditation</wiki/Meditation>  master Chögyam Trungpa </wiki/Ch%C3%B6gyam_Trungpa>  andZen </wiki/Zen>  master D. T. Suzuki </wiki/D._T._Suzuki> .[5] <#cite_note-Esq09-4>

Tags: Carroll, coaching, Gallwey, Innergame, Seahawks, tennis, USC

A brief bio of Myles Downey, founder of the School of Coaching in the UK.

Myles Downey is the Founder and Managing Director of The School of Coaching in the U.K., which he established in association with The Work Foundation (formerly The Industrial Society), with the aim of “developing great coaches who can transform the performance of individuals and teams in organizations.” The School specializes in working with the leadership and management population to improve business performance.
Mr. Downey is recognized as one of the foremost coaches in Europe and has worked with some of the most successful organizations in the World; across most of Europe, North and South America, Asia and in the CIS, and in a variety of businesses, from professional service firms, banking, manufacturing, oil and gas, brewing and distilling, retailing, construction and information technology. The predominant part of his work is in coaching senior executives and leadership teams.
He is the author of “Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach’s Coach.” He also contributed to “Coaching for Leadership Development” and to “The International Guide to Management Consultancy.” Articles published through the School of Coaching include “The Place of Coaching in the Line-Managers Role” and “Buying Executive Coaching.” He has appeared twice on BBC Radio 4.
Mr. Downey was studied architecture and practiced in Dublin. Then, having read “The Inner Game of Tennis,” by Tim Gallwey, he began to work as a coach, initially in sport and then in business. He moved to London and was a founding member of a small, successful consultancy, which the Economist Intelligence Unit acknowledged in 1993 and in 1995 as the leading provider of Executive Coaching in the U.K., which he left in 1995 to investigate a wider variety of approaches to maximizing learning and performance. He established the School of Coaching in 1997.

Tags: MylesDowney, SchoolofCoachin

From the blog Davids Inner Basketball Shooting, author David Ranney talks about the great influence that Tim Gallwey and The Inner Game had on his career and coaching style.

Let me get started by telling you my story and how I got into playing and teaching these peak performance concepts.

• I started playing in tennis tournaments when I was 10 years old.
• I was ranked #2 in Southern, CA in the 15 & under. I was ranked #2 in Southern, CA in the 18 & under.
• I was nationally ranked #6 in Singles as a Junior
• I was nationally ranked #3 in Doubles as a Junior
• I had the honor of representing the U.S. at Junior Wimbledon where I got to the Semi-finals.
• I played on the Junior Davis Cup team
• I played on the USC tennis team and the three years I lettered varsity we were National Champions.

As You Can See,
I Was A Pretty Good Tennis Player But Not A Great One.

But, I Had A Big Problem.

My Attitude Stunk And I Was Very Negative.

I Used To Yell And Scream On The Tennis Court

Because I Would Get So Incredibly Frustrated.

I thought that if I could only stroke the ball perfectly I would never miss. But of course, I couldn’t do that every time, and boy did I try hard. And, my attitude was horrible.

I Hated Myself For
Getting So Angry And Frustrated, But I Couldn’t Stop.

I had no idea why I played badly at times, and I didn’t have a clue as to how to turn my game around when I wasn’t playing well. I never beat players who were just a little better than I was. Remember I told you that I was ranked #2 in Southern California in the 15 and 18 and under. Well, a player named Jerry Cromwell was the one who was ranked #1 and I never ever beat him. I don’t think anyone tried harder than I did but I just could beat him.

After college, I began teaching tennis the traditional way until my conversion to teaching the Inner Game when I was in my 30s. What happened was that one day I was reading the LA Magazine about an instructor who was teaching the Inner Game of Tennis. His name was Tim Gallwey. I knew I had to have a lesson from this man, and I was determined to go to the ends of the earth to find him. As it turned out, he was right there in my hometown of Los Angeles.

To make a long story longer, I took two lessons from Tim, and he completely changed my life. In the first 10 minutes into the lesson, I felt that the weight of the world was taken off my back. I never got angry or yelled again – an amazing accomplishment since I had already spent all of my tennis life getting upset with my play. It was the best lesson I ever received and it changed my life forever.

To sum it all up,
I felt like a completely new person
when I was on the court.

I will be forever grateful to Tim Gallwey for showing me how to make this change. His book, The Inner Game of Tennis, has been my “Tennis Bible” and is truly one of the best books ever written on the mental aspects of playing sports. You can find his book in most bookstores.

In the 25 plus years since then, I have been studying the mental game so that I could achieve the state of mind that would allow my body to play at its very best. I wanted to know how to play “out of my mind” every time I played. The concepts I will present to you here will show you how to do this. These concepts, as you will see, are easy to talk about, but it takes practice to get there.

However, it is a process and you can use them for the rest of your baseball life just as I do in tennis. I am at an age where ones game is supposed to be going “over the hill” but I am still learning new things about myself and my tennis game is actually getting better. Maybe, I can’t run as well, but if I can get to the ball and hit it, I just don’t miss very often.

As to my basketball experience,
admittedly it isn’t very much.

I played first string on the Jr Varsity basketball team in high school when I was a junior, but I didn’t even try out for the varsity team when I was a senior because I needed to concentrate on my tennis. So, as far as actually playing that was about it.

I Taught Tennis To A Very Good Basketball Player

However, when I lived in Victoria, B.C., I play tennis with a fellow who was one of the best, if not the best, basketball player in Victoria. He was good friend and I wasn’t teaching tennis for money in those days but I did spend a lot of time working with him on his tennis. He then took what I taught him in tennis and used it when he played basketball. Needless to say, he found the concepts I teach very valuable.

Tags: basketball, DavidRanney, Innergame, shooting