As a life coach, I help people to take control of their ‘inner game’, and therefore take control of their life.

“It’s the game of life. Do I win or do I lose? One day they’re gonna shut the game down. I gotta have as much fun and go around the board as many times as I can before it’s my turn to leave”.  Tupac Shakur

The term “the inner game” was introduced by Timothy Gallwey in his book The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance

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

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.

via NLP Coaching Training « Bryce Redford – The Bodymind Coach.

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

via CEO 2-9-10.

Tim Gallwey, who wrote “The Inner Game of Tennis,” said athletes such as Henin and Clijsters who devote their lives to sports starting as youngsters often have to get away from the game to regain control of their lives.Gallwey, 72, who was captain of Harvard University's tennis team in the 1959-60 season, said such athletes have a psychological advantage when they return from retirement.

“They’ve had time to step back out of the normal disciplines and grinds of any sport,” he said in a phone interview. “They get to come back with renewed energy and self-determination. Instead of something they have to do as a pro, it’s something they want to do. I admire them, because they’re going back with eyes open.”

via Henin Makes Australian Open Final on Own Terms – NewsFlash – MassLive.com.

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.

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.