via Why good golfers make good managers – Executive Travel Magazine.

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..

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?.

What is stopping us maximising our performance?

To answer that question, you should look at the work by Timothy Gallwey, called the Inner Game. The Inner Game as developed by Gallwey in 1974 builds on the notion of “Potential” and “Performance”. There is a gap between potential and performance which Gallwey describes as the thoughts which you have when going about an activity. These thoughts can be better described as “Interference”. Interference then is the self doubting thoughts you have that get in the way of your potential and reduce your resulting performance.

As Gallwey proposes, our performance is limited by interference caused by our thoughts. In a typical work place, that is not the only place interference comes from.

via Simply Organised: Maximise your performance by minimising your interference?.

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.

Regularly take time to step out of your own shoes and get into your boss’s. A great way to do that is to do what top leadership coach Tim Gallwey calls transposing. Transposing consists of asking three questions as if you are the person you’re trying to work with or influence. The questions are: What am I thinking? How am I feeling? What do I want?

Scott Eblin’s post “How to Influence Your New Boss, Part II” explains a practical application of what Tim Gallwey calls “Transposing”