Can sports psychology improve your performance
Tennis should be a joy, it should be in the heart.
Björn Borg, one of the most successful modern tennis players
The concept of the Inner Game was developed by Tim Gallwey as a way of helping people to achieve excellence in various sports, e.g. tennis, golf and skiing, and also in music. More recently he has extended his ideas into business and management training, and they are clearly also highly relevant in all learning situations. The concept is quite simple. If we consider tennis, for example, people trying to develop their skills in tennis can spend considerable time concentrating on their ‘Outer Game’, e.g. how to stand, how to hold the racket, how to serve, etc. All this effort can cause considerable anxiety and tension for the player, and as a result performance suffers. By contrast, Gallwey proposes that the secret of success lies in one’s Inner Game, i.e. one’s whole mental approach, and that by progressively refining this, one’s game will be transformed. His approach therefore rests on the close interconnectedness of the way we think and the way we act.
Key Elements of the Inner Game
If you wish to win your ‘Inner Game’ Gallwey recommends that you should:
· develop the art of relaxed concentration
· not try too hard
The basic theory is that our bodies can naturally achieve excellence in many things, but that when we move into ‘trying mode’ we interfere with this natural ability, and performance suffers. Instead, Gallwey recommends that we become very relaxed, let go and move into ‘awareness mode’, in which we can visualise our performance. And so instead of having a busy mind – worrying, calculating, controlling – we achieve a quiet mind – focused, aware and centred. Such a state of mind is vital when learning to juggle for example, and it has much in common with that of meditation and with the right brain consciousness that people should adopt when drawing or painting. This kind of mind state is also referred to as ‘getting in the zone’.
Some other indicators of a mind in ‘awareness mode’ are as follows:
· A feeling of confidence and the absence of anxiety and self-doubt
· No obsession with success and no fear of failure
· An absence of competitiveness, the focus being on playing beautifully and excellently
· One’s peak performance comes without effort and when not thinking about it
Spirit Consulting Group works with teams and individuals to take the concept of ‘Inner Game’ and apply it to their own performance. It has been well documented that the most effective way to learn is through practical activities which allow reflection of ‘real’ performance. The ‘Inner Game’ draws on two key aspects of performance; the ‘outer game’ and the ‘inner game’. Our outer game is largely about physical technique, equipment, subject knowledge etc. All of these things allow us to physically create a performance and to some extent can aid good performance. Our inner game however, is the thing that creates the difference between good and elite performance consistently. Often our inner game gets interfered with by the anxieties, phobias and doubts that we have in relation to carrying out something and wanting so badly to do it well.
We help you and your team to explore what those interferences are and adopt techniques that can help overcome the interferences. As your inner game becomes stronger and the interferences become smaller so your performance begins to improve. We then help you to cement that learning by building good performance habits that will create the consistency you need to be an elite performer, all of the time.
To find out more about how the ‘Inner Game’ could help you or your business team call us on 01283 535562 or e-mail us andrew.hughes@spiritconsulting.co.uk.