Timothy Gallwey

So Phil, starting with Galloway himself, because I think a lot of people maybe have heard of the inner game without quite knowing what it says.

So Tim was a Harvard-educated tennis coach who, in the early 1970s, noticed something that probably shouldn't have been possible.

When he left his students alone to practice, they often improved faster than when he was actually coaching them.

Not slightly faster, dramatically faster.

He started investigating why and what he found.

It governs working memory, analytical reasoning, verbal instruction, step-by-step conscious processing, and critically, the ability to monitor your own performance, self-judgment.

When you're learning a new skill, the prefrontal cortex is doing the heavy lifting.

It's holding the verbal instructions from your coach, elbow up, weight forward, follow through, keeping them in working memory and translating them into deliberate motor commands.

[gentle music]

I'm Tim Gallwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis.

Tennis is about excellence, and if you find out that excellence is natural, is part of my being, let it show you.

Self-doubt is the enemy of excellence.

Um, and that requires writing for yourself.

So I think the best use case for your brain is that if you wanna stand out, you're gonna have to be different than, than this homogenized mean.

I see AI as a powerful tool, and in the context of what we're doing here, building this, you know, taking Tim Gallwey's body, uh, archive, uh, life's work, source wisdom for performance psychology, and, um, distilling it into something that will help people on a daily basis work with negative self-talk or what, what Tim Gallwey, Gallwey would, in the inner game would call self one.

But AI can be used as a powerful tool for self-awareness, as like a A magnifying glass and a flashlight sort of in the, in the darkness of your inner world, right? Not to re- and, and very importantly, not to replace you as a writer or as a thinker, but to help recognize patterns.

It says, "The greatest loss in life is the difference between human potential and actual performance." The greatest loss in life is the difference between human potential and actual performance.

Timothy Gallwey, the author of The Inner Game of Tennis, offers a very simple framework for this.

His framework is performance equals potential minus interference.

Performance equals potential minus interference.

Then the second part, we often talk about this quote on the show.

It comes from Timothy Gallwey, a tennis coach but author of the book called The Inner Game, that performance is equal to potential minus interference.

And the potential are those people in the room, and if we were able to get them to co-create and collaborate together, the potential is off the scale, but the debt is the interference.

Now I'm gonna extrapolate to what you were just saying around the human beings, and this is, this happens with so many leaders and, and particularly technical ones like, say, someone that might have been a, could be a nurse or could be a software engineer or something like that.

I was in graduate school at University of the Pacific, and my master's teacher, uh, knew a, a guy that he had met, guy named Michael Murphy, a guy that was one of the founders of, of Esalen back in the day, a Stanford grad and all that.

Um, and he had heard about this guy named Tim Gallwey, and he eventually got to go visit him in San Francisco.

The whole class went as kind of a field trip.

We had dinner and sat around and kicked it around and, and was in-- just basically introduced to Tim and his work.

And, uh, that's all you could ever hope for.

That connection between sports and business.

So The Inner Game, when it came out, uh, the book was doing well and Tim Gallwey was still a pro at his tennis club in, in, in Carmel, and he was sort of figuring out, you know, "Okay, am I gonna continue to be a teaching pro or am I gonna go y- you know, write more books or..." I think everybody, including himself, was very surprised that the book was selling more than a couple, you know, 100 copies.

And, uh, Tim says that he, he was approached one day by this guy, I'm, I'm sh- kicking myself for not remembering his name, but he was sort of a famous, um, guy in corporate American history, John something.