PNTV: The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey (#189​)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today, another great book, the Inner Game of Tennis. Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Galway. Subtitle of this book is the Classic Guide to the Mental side of Peak Performance. Book was written in 1974. Good year. I was born that year. And it's literally the classic guide to mental training. All the modern thinkers and teachers are leaning at least in some way on this wisdom. Great stuff. Basic idea is of the inner game. There are two games we're playing whenever we're doing anything, whether it's tennis or another sport or our lives. There's the outer game, which is what we're used to thinking of when we think of a game, which is the score you're playing against an opponent, you have an external outcome, etc. He makes the point that we need to spend more time focusing on the inner game, what's going on in your mind, because that's what's actually driving your performance. As we've Talked about before, 90% of performance is driven by our minds. Therefore it's wise to spend some time thinking about it. Philosopher's Note. Bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite big ideas here. We'll start with the fundamental kind of tenant of the whole book, and this is that you have two selves. When you're playing tennis, for example, let's say you make a bad shot and you say to yourself, oh man, I can't believe I did that again. Hit it into the net. Can't keep doing that or we're going to lose this match. Come on, get it right. Stare, look at the ball, bend your knees, whatever. Now you have two selves in that conversation. You have the one who's talking and the one who's listening and doing right? Two selves, Self one and self two. Basically, self one is your conscious mind, your thinking mind, and self two is your subconscious mind, which is the one that actually does what you want it to do. Now, the whole point of winning the inner game is to learn to trust self to your subconscious self. Think about it right now as you watch this. Your unconscious mind is doing a ridiculous. That's the technical number, ridiculous. Billions and billions and billions of little transactions every single second. Your heart is beating, your lungs are oxygenating your body, you're digesting a meal you just had, and tons of other things are going on without you consciously thinking about it. So we want to get in the habit of trusting that version of ourselves more often. Heidi Grant Halverson says that self one in her terms is, well, I'll start with self two. Self two, your subconscious is like a NASA supercomputer and, and self one is like a post it note. Think about that. Self two, your subconscious, metaphorically speaking, is like a NASA supercomputer. That's how much it can do. Self one, your conscious thinking, analytical mind is like a post it note. Now, it's useful, but we want to focus on developing trust in our unconscious mind. That's the first big idea. That's the core cornerstone of the whole thing. So then the question becomes, well, how do we do that? How do we learn to trust ourselves more? Which leads us to the next big idea, which is we need to quiet our minds. If you're constantly thinking about how you're doing and what you want to do and gibbering and jabbering to yourself in your mind, you're going to have a really hard time letting it rip trusting yourself and just letting yourself perform if you're constantly judging yourself. So that's the first way that Galway recommends we learn to trust ourselves and specifically quit judging everything as good or bad. It's a huge idea. Whenever we do something, we say it's good or bad. That example, before you hit the ball, it goes into the net. Now, human tendency is to call that bad, but we don't want to do that. We just want to observe it cleanly. Galloway and all great teachers say, observe it cleanly. Notice you hit it into the net. Okay? That's a neutral data point. Doesn't need to be good or bad, right? And I talk about in the note that when we go through that process, we want to discipline ourselves to not allow the emotions to come in. We don't want self one to start going nuts on us. And one way to do that is by paying attention to Troy Basham who wrote Attainments Process. He called it reloading. After you shoot at a target, whether it's a tennis ball or a parenting thing or a sales pitch or whatever, if you hit your target, he says, you want to feast on that? Say great, awesome. Feast on it. You want to repeat that behavior. If you do okay, he says, say, okay. If you miss the target, don't get upset with yourself, simply say, needs work. Neutral needs work. Okay? And then he says, imagine what a perfect shot would have looked like or a significantly better shot. What would that have looked like? Replay that in your mind quickly and then move on. You're in the next point. You're in the next phase of whatever it is you're up to. You groove your subconscious with an image of what you wanted to see and you didn't. Get all up in your stuff in self one and bring you out of being present. Really cool idea. Quiet your mind. Third big idea. Act the part. He's got. A great example of how to learn to trust ourselves is three different ways. One is this quieting of your mind, not judging. Two is to imagine your ideal outcome, which we just talked about briefly. And the third one is to act the part, basically to request what is. How does he describe it? He says, asking for qualities. Asking for qualities. So the example is imagine a television producer comes up to you and says, hey, I hear that you are a great tennis player and you're an actor, and I want you to play a role for me. I want you to play the role of an extraordinary tennis player. Now, we won't look at anything other than you as you hit the ball. So don't worry about where the ball goes, if it goes into the net or off the court or whatever. But you do need to have this amazing sense of confidence. I want your face just to look like you have no doubt. You just hit the ball exactly where you wanted it to go. Have the mannerisms of a truly elite professional. Act that part, ask for those qualities. It's an amazing way to move out of self one to self two. You already have so much more intelligence you give yourself than you give yourself credit for. Just bring it up by playing the part, by acting as if you were that. So think about your life, whatever it is that you do, and imagine the greatest professional expression of whatever you do. What would that look like? Be that. Now, walk like that, talk like that, act like that, play the part. It's a really cool way to bridge the gap and to surprise yourself with your abilities. When he has his students do that in practice, it's amazing how much better they play. Really big idea. Fourth big idea is one we've been coming back to again and again. We have an alarm. One we've been coming back to again and again and again, which is to embrace challenges. He talks about the fact that when a surfer goes out and he's going to ride a wave, he's excited about the challenge. The challenge is required for him to have an opportunity to demonstrate his skills. The surfer isn't going out and taking the smallest wave possible. He's also not taking the hugest wave necessarily. He's taking one that meets his skills properly, which is how we get into flow, right? Mihaly Csikszentmi talks about this. He says flow is when our skills meet. The challenge challenge is on this line. Skills is here. Now, when skills and challenge meet, you're in flow. If you have really high skills, you need a really high challenge. But if you have really low skills and you have a really high challenge, that's where anxiety exists. You're going to get stressed out. On the other hand, if you have really high skills and you're in a low challenge, you're going to be bored. So what we want to do is properly line up our challenges with our skills. Enter flow. Challenges are good. They help you actualize your potential. He has an amazing section on competition and how it's actually an amazing thing when we embrace it because it allows us to do our best in the process, reach our potential and tap into latent capacities that we may not otherwise experience and and explore. Final big idea. Fifth one, don't fight your bad habits. He is a great example of a baby who doesn't get upset with itself because it has the bad habit of crawling. It just learns how to walk. It learns how to walk and it isn't upset that it used to crawl. It's just excited to create a new habit of walking. It's a better way to move around the world. So, so imagine if you approached your challenges like that. If you approached your quote, bad habits like that. Not with judgment, but just say, look, I'm going to choose a different way of being. It doesn't need to be hard to create a new way of being. I'm just going to start doing this new thing. Boom, done. Huge idea. Don't fight your bad habits, just create new ones. There you go. Quick look at the inner game of tennis. Challenges are good. Don't fight your bad habits. Act the part what the highest, best version of yourself do. What would a true pro in whatever it is you do do in this moment? Do that. Quiet your mind, quit judging everything and remember self 1. Self 2. Self 1 is like a post it note. Self 2 is like the NASA supercomputer. Let your subconscious take over more often by shutting down your mind and you're overthinking, over analyzing, et cetera and win the inner game. Alright. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.

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