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.