A Conversation with Tim Gallwey

After several years of planning, production recently launched for Tim’s upcoming “Inner Game” television special targeted for initial broadcast on Flagship PBS Station WGBH later this year.

As part of this new “Inner Game” media initiative a “Conversation with Tim Gallwey” was also filmed.

From “Inner Game of Tennis” to his recently released book “Inner Game of Stress” Tim provides us with an all encompassing and enlightening commentary about his work, his journey and his “Inner Game”.

“A Conversation with Tim Gallwey” DVD is now available on this site and is priced at 49.95.
Please use the “BUY NOW” link on the right to order on the right.

via Golf Hypnosis Leads to Success Over The Inner Game of Golf | Alain Silberstein watches.

Timothy Gallwey in is book “Inner Game of Tennis” described the war. He identified the “Self 1″, the logical, judgemental, mathematical, verbal, competitive, time orientation LEFT BRAIN hemisphere that constantly battles against the “Self 2″, the creative, spontaneous, intuitive, emotional, orientation in space, and in charge of life support RIGHT BRAIN hemisphere.

via Tennis Super-learning Program Stretching Is Important Part | Healing Sports Injuries.

via Book Review: The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green « The Practice of Practice.

Nic Askew has been making a series of beautiful short films that he calls Soul Biographies, each film features Nic's guitar music in the background and a poignant message from the featured subject of the film.

Nic decided to re-release this old clip “At the feet of a wise man” about Tim Gallwey's transcendent experiences when he met with a 13 year old boy from India who offered him the key to self knowledge.

I share it both in recognition of Nics work and for the wisdom it contains

Martin Dewhurst

via At the feet of a wise man – Ecademy.

via Muslim Youth for Truth: “My friends made me do it.” How to deal with peer pressure and getting the courage to finally say NO..

The inner zone of excellence is a key part of what is known as the “inner game” of business. The concept of the “inner game” was developed by Timothy Gallwey as a way of helping people to achieve excellence in various sports (e.g., tennis, golf, skiing, etc.), music and also business and management training. Fundamental to the inner game is our ability to stay in a high performance state when confronted with difficult circumstances.

via Robert Dilts « Nadine36hypnotherapy’s Blog.

Inner game is what enables you to act. Nothing less, nothing more.

The Longer Answer

Timothy Gallwey first coined the term ‘inner game’ in his book The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance. He wrote that “every game is composed of two parts, an outer game and an inner game”; where the outer game is fought against another opponent and the inner game is fought against your own inner doubts and fears.

via What is Inner Game?.

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.

Malibu Times

Malibu author Tim Gallwey’s new book helps stressed individuals stay balanced.

“Inner Game of Stress” Malibu author W. Timothy Gallwey (center), with doctors and co-authors Edd Hanzelik, M.D. and John Morton, M.D. Through “The Inner Game of Stress” Gallwey hopes his readers outsmart and circumvent stress. Photo by Marie Catherine Toulet

By Patrick Timothy Mullikin / Special to The Malibu Times

Published: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 11:16 AM PDT

Stressing over which stress-relief book to buy?

Sounds silly, but minor stress, such as fretting over which book to buy, has become part of daily living. We simply grin and bear it and move along.

Major stress? That’s another matter. Malibu author W. Timothy Gallwey estimates that up to 75 percent of all visits to primary-care physicians are for stress-related complaints or disorders.

Simply stated: stress is making us sick, even killing us.

“The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life’s Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential,” the latest in Gallwey’s “Inner Game” series, is being touted as the only book on stress you’ll ever need. And while that’s quite a claim, Gallwey is quick to back up this statement, making it clear his book approaches the stress issue from a completely different direction.“It doesn’t deal with stress management. The whole idea of the strategy around stress is not to try to fight it, but to try to build an inner stability so that when the inevitable stressors come your way, they won’t throw you off balance,” Gallwey said last week during a phone interview from his Malibu home.

“In other stress books we see mostly diets, exercise, buy a puppy, various things to alleviate your current stress. You have to have the stress already to apply those books.”

Through “The Inner Game of Stress” Gallwey hopes his readers outsmart and circumvent stress.

What he and co-authors Edward Hanzelik, M.D., and John Morton, M.D, offer readers in “The Inner Game of Stress” is a series of steps and exercises-preemptive strikes, if you will-to keep stressors at bay and “to discover your inner stability so you can respond to inevitable life stressors before they happen.”

At first blush this sounds like New Age psychobabble, but Gallwey et al. do in fact present the reader with concrete-some of it common sense-examples of how to discover this inner stability, including: The STOP (Step back, Think, Organize and Proceed) Technique; The Attitude Tool: Feeling resentment? Try gratitude; The Magic Pen: Use it to develop your ability to open up your intuition and wisdom; The Transpose Exercise that allows one to imagine what the other person thinks, feels, wants-and develop empathy, kindness, and better relationship skills; The PLE (Performance, Learning, and Experience) Triangle that uses goals to redefine success and enhance enjoyment.

The book can have the feeling of a PowerPoint presentation at times, making it an easy read, and Gallwey makes references to the stress seminars he and his colleagues conduct. (A few of the case studies are, in fact, about seminar attendees who have put Gallwey’s principles to test, with positive results.)

Sprinkled throughout the book’s three sections-“The Game of Stress,” “Outsmarting Stress,” and “The Inner Game Toolbox”-are case studies written by Hanzelik and Horton (hence their billing as coauthors) illustrating the effects of stress on health and showing how Gallwey’s principles have helped these patients. These “Patient Files” are at times austere, even Kafka-esque, in their descriptions: “When Ruth, a young woman in her thirties, first came to my office,” writes Hanzelik, “she was desperately unhappy to the point of being suicidal. On the face of it, Ruth had every reason to be happy, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for in life. She was consumed by a relentless inner dialogue led by the Stress Maker.”

The “Stress Maker” that haunts Ruth, we learn from Gallwey, “is another name for fear, doubt, confusion and ignorance, an inner voice that unless vanquished or diminished can lead to stress.”

Each chapter ends with an exercise to put Gallwey’s principles to test. In the case of the “Stress Maker,” it’s a how to bypass your stress maker: “Review the bothersome fear you noted above and see if you can bring the Stress Maker down to size. How much of the fear is real, and how much is invented? What would your voice say to bypass the Stress Maker’s concepts rather than buy into them?”

The obvious question: Does the book work?

Although the book was released on Aug. 18, the reaction so far has been positive, Gallwey said. “We had a book launching in mid-August and 400 people came to it. Lots of people had read the book already and were extremely enthusiastic about it,” he said.

Gallwey said he uses the book’s principles all the time in his own daily life, with positive results, and hopes the book will help others, too.

“I have a feeling of compassion for people who are depriving themselves of a really high-quality life because of stress. There’s a choice. There’s a real choice, and I hope more and more people will take that choice, through my book or any book or anything that can help them.”

Copyright © 2009 – Malibu Times