People fear 3 things, Fear of Success, Fear of Failure and Fear of Change.

In order to be successful, we must play our inner game if we want to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent us from accessing our full potential”. Tim’s formula for success looks like this: Performance = potential-interference, P=p-i. According to this formula, performance can be enhanced either by growing “p” potential or by decreasing “i,” interference.

via » If this is My Life, How Come I’m Not in Charge Here?.

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 Tennis Server – Turbo Tennis – Confidence and “Slumps”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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