“I don't play tennis, Al,” I responded, confused.

“It's not about tennis,” he explained. “It's about attitude. About changing it, becoming master of it.”

via David Ellison: The game of self-control – Inside Bay Area.

quote Coaching ‘is the teaching of technical skills, but it is not teaching’ quote

Gallwey then applied these principles to the corporate world in The Inner Game of Work, his precept being that there is always an inner game being played in your mind – no matter what outer game you are playing.

Coaching can take numerous forms, the most influential being transformational coaching for business leaders and executives.
What to expect from your coach – Times LIVE.

biking

via Skills Q&A: How To Flow Over Drops – BikeRadar.

“Read this simple analogy and see if an alternative to the judging process doesn't begin to emerge. When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as 'rootless and stemless.' We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don 't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care and nourishment it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is “(p.21).

via Positive Expectations: Learning to Play Free of Judgment.

It all goes back to Timothy Gallwey. Before Gallwey, coaches were people who wore whistles around their necks.

Coaches helped people get better at physical tasks. That meant they mostly dealt with sweaty people, except for swim coaches who dealt mostly with chlorine-blind people.

That changed in 1974, the year Gallwey published The Inner Game of Tennis. He shifted the focus from what was happening on the outside, to what was happening in the mind of the tennis player.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history. Gallwey tells the story of the Inner Game on his web site. It’s compelling, but it won’t answer the question about whether you should hire a coach.

What’s important about the Gallwey story is that The Inner Game was the faint beginning of what is now a hot field: coaching. Now there are coaches for all kinds of things that don’t involve sweaty physical activities or even whistles.

via Three Star Leadership Blog: Leadership Development: When to hire a coach.

But it’s important to get to exactly what we mean. Let’s take an excellent Pete Carroll profile that I reread a few days ago (for obvious reasons).

On page 4:

People who know him best invariably seize upon fun to describe Carroll, either saying it’s fun to be around him or that he’s forever having fun. His emphasis on fun comes mainly from his DNA but also from his reading, specifically W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, a 122-page book with a cult-like following. (The latest edition features a foreword by Carroll.) Using tennis as a prism through which to view all human endeavor, Gallwey says we focus too narrowly on results. “The three cornerstones of Inner Game,” he tells me, “are Performance, Learning, and Enjoyment . Usually people put Performance first, and Learning and Enjoyment are almost absent.”

If we focused more on Enjoyment and Learning, Gallwey says, we’d perform better and we’d be a lot happier: “You look at a child. He learns while he plays. Anything he tries to do, or win at, he’s playing, he has a wonderful time doing it. They’re not separate things for a child. That means to me these things are inherently built into human beings. Most human beings, you have to coach what’s already inherent—that is, the drive of excitement to learn and keep learning, and the drive to enjoy. It gets really covered up when winning is everything. I agree with Lombardi: Winning is everything. It’s just what your definition of winning is.”

via Various Provocations: Performance, Amateurism and Professionalism.

The SUN program is based on a model of Business Management /Sports coaching developed in England. The value of this approach to coaching is revealed in Tim Gallwey’s books, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Work. In his tennis book, Mr. Gallwey noticed that most tennis coaches focus on the act of hitting the ball. His approach is to focus on what happens between hits. It is the focus on “between the meeting approach” that contributes to making SUN a unique and effective coaching program.

Shanks!
Devoted the last 6 months of my golf life to short game practice, and mainly trying to understand and execute Stan Utley’s techniques. I had been happy enough with my long game and my distance and consistency, but was sick of not scoring any better for many many years.. perpetually stuck in the low 80s barrier.

So for about 6 months I averaged probably at least an hour per day of short game practice, overall. I didn’t playl. Occasional driving range to make sure my long shots were still ok. Usually I would head over to the practice area in a public course near my house, in the AM before work, and then sneak again over there at lunch, for another session. Logistically I was lucky in that it’s easy for me to get over there.

Yeah, that’s a lot of practice. Some days I would skip, but I would go more often then not. I was able to grasp, absorb and improve my facility with Utley’s various methods for chipping, pitching, putting, bunker and recovery. I read all his books and watched all his golf channel and youtube vids over and over again, religiously.

My technique improved. I often would find myself looking like a genius on the pratice area. But I started having a problem. It usually started when I would move to working on slightly longer pitch shots from tighter lies. I would start shanking– often combined alternatively with fat shots. Horrible!!

It started to become a very consistent pattern… I would get to the practice area, hit a bunch of great shots and then at some point start shanking. I would gradually deteriorate, shanking more and more until I would eventually stumble on something that would make them go away, I’d hit great shots again and feel like a hero once more. I would think it was licked, only to have it return again, the very next day, usually as soon as I started trying the tougher lies again. Frustrating!!

Very very frustrating. Started to get me thinking about throwing in the towel. One who shanks doesn’t deserve to play golf! The dreaded shank!! Most golfers don’t even want to say the word!

I developed all sorts of theories as to what was causing them: ‘Pitching from tight lies is hard and causes tension, and the tension makes me flinch and shank.’ or ‘I get tired and my swing stops working’ or..’i'm too old (48) and golf is just too hard’, or.. ‘my setup is wrong, Im too closed, and if I try to swing on a single plane (i.e. flat) as utley advocates, then I’m misaligned and at that point I have to shank.’

I started laying down a club as a reference point for my allignment, and that helped, but wasn’t a cure. They returned after I would stop using the club.

I firmed up my grip and left arm and increased my arm swing length somewhat and that seemed to help, but ultimately I knew that was a bandaid and sure enough they came back.

Finally I saw that they weren’t going away completely. I would need to come to terms with them, or just stop playing. Then I started to think more about shanks in general, and decided that shanks had a bad rep that was undeserved; I convinced myself that a shank was no better or worse than a fat or thin shot, just different. An unfairly categorized mis hit. That kind of thinking oddly seemed to help and reduce the tension or whatever it was that was causing them to begin with, but they still didn’t go away completely, and clearly I wasn’t going to be breaking 80 very much with them being so “abundant”.

Finally I decided that my only hope was to take it a step further. I decided I would truly welcome the shanks. I borrowed a method that I got from Tim Gallwey’s golf book that I read long ago, called “welcoming the yips”. Sure enough when I really allowed myself to shank and really started to feel and focus on what was actually going on, something really cool happened: I started focusing on the heel of my wedge. Without trying to control it, I just focused on it, to see what it was doing exactly. Then it happened: I felt myself leaning in towards the ball slightly during the process of the swing. And as soon as I became aware of it, the instability felt really noticable– like a big ship teetering in the waves.

The cure seemed clear.. stop doing that leaning thing!! It made sense that the leaning could cause both shankin and the fat shots. But I knew from the inner game book that trying to avoid something doesn’t nessesarily make it go away, and often strengthens it. So I focused instead on expressing stability during the swing, and kept on focusing on the heel of the club, and just noticing whether I leaned in or not and how much, without trying to control it.

Well– in short, Bingo. No more shanks. I’m happy to report that I’ve been doing much better the last few days, and ‘they’ are being held at bay. I’m feeling much more confident now and I even think I’m getting ready to play again. Will keep you posted as to my progress. Dang shanks!

Was reading the above book and wanted to share part of what I have read about his experience gained from being a tennis coach…

Learning takes place within the student. The student makes the choice that ultimately control whether learning takes place or not. He then realised that the student was responsible for the learning choices and the coach was responsible for the quality of the external learning environment. Allowing the student to be more aware of the choices he was making and the reasons behind those choices was an essential part of this learning process. The student felt more in control and as a natural consequence was willing to accept more responsibility, and exercise greater initiative and creativity in achieving their goal.

Experience comes with three principles – awareness, choice and trust. Awareness was about knowing the present situation with clarity. Choice was about moving in a desired direction in the future. Trust was the essential link that enabled that movement.

The greater the external challenges accepted by an individual, team or company, the more important it is that there be a minimum of interference occurring from within. No matter what culture you work in, what kind of work you do, or what your present level of competence is, both inner and outer games are always going on. Progress will always be dependent on both.

They are like two legs of a person; one leg represents the external challenges and the other represents self. As a culture and current situation, we have placed too much emphasis on mastering the outer game and making changes in the external world. With science, technology, and the modern information explosion, we have developed a relatively long outer-game leg. But our understanding and control of the Inner Game has not evolved equally.

We have a profound need to better understand, and learn to make changes in the domain we call ourselves. This will only happen if we change in ways that are in harmony with our true nature, not at war with it.

Can brain training help you in the real world? Definitely! Tennis Coach Timothy Gallwey has argued for years that you will do better at learning even a sport such as tennis if you become conscious of how your mind naturally learns. The same principle applies to most domains of experiences.

The human consciousness is the awareness of oneself as a being that thinks and learns. Consider the difference between your consciousness and its closest relation, emotional awareness. Since the time of Freud (who lived from 1856 to 1939), we as a society have become skilled interpreters of how dreams, fears, conflicts and emotional attachment affect our experiences and actions. In spite of our high level of emotional awareness, few of us achieve a high level of mind consciousness. Otherwise educated and sophisticated people have virtually no awareness of how they solve problems, discover ideas, assimilate and manage information, or adapt to change.

Is it is important to develop your mental prowess? A human mind is an instrument of enormous power. The similarities between the workings of your mind and the mind of a major scientist (such as Einstein) or a revolutionary thinker (such as Freud) are great, while the differences are subtle. To make the most effective use of your mind, you need to be aware of what it does as you think and learn. Strange as it may seem, you only have to learn to use the ability the mind that you already possess. That is why mind consciousness is such a powerful asset. With the right techniques, you can train your mind and improve your memory and accelerate your learning.

You can never totally be the master of your mind any more than you could ever totally be the master of your body, but you can guide it. Your heart keeps beating, your lungs keep breathing, your ears keep hearing, and the rest of our body keeps working, for the most part, whether you tell it to or not. In the same way, your mind keeps assimilating information and reinterpreting your experience. But neither are you obliged to let your mind master you. Think in terms of the analogy with your body. You can tell your eyes where o look and your feet where to step. With exercise you can influence how far you can run, and with training you can even affect how rapidly your heart beats. With memory training, if you observe your mind and understand it, it will exceed your expectations. If you continually train your mind with the right memory techniques, it will serve you well in years to come.

With subtle change in your observation skills, you can guide your own learning in the same kind of way that a government regulates a country’s economy. Economists offer methods for the government to avoid both an over heated inflationary economy and economic depression. They track business cycles and prescribe remedies to contain the excesses that could derail economic growth at any point.

Your mind goes through learning cycles in the same way that the economy goes through business cycles. If you understand the cyclical patterns of your own mind, you will be able to keep the growth of your own mind magic on trick as well.

Can brain training help you in the real world? Definitely! Tennis Coach Timothy Gallwey has argued for years that you will do better at learning even a sport such as tennis if you become conscious of how your mind naturally learns. The same principle applies to most domains of experiences.

Adapting to life in the information age will in essence be no different from adapting to any other dramatic change in living conditions. Futurists such as Alvin Toffler and business experts such as Peter Drucker tell us that power in the information age will come increasingly from the mind. That can mean only one thing, in the future, even more than before, you will have to rely on your own natural ability That should not be cause for alarm. Your natural ability is entirely adequate as long as you are skillful in putting it to good use.