Timothy Gallwey: How to hack your flow state

Bill Gates became a much better businessman because he played tennis. That’s because he read a book on tennis: “The inner game of tennis” by Timothy Gallwey. The book changed his life. So much so that Gates agreed to write a forward for it when it was due for republishing.

Timothy Gallwey teaches about two games of tennis.

The outer game that you play against the opponents. And the inner game that you play against yourself: your concentration and your self doubts and your anxiety. If you win the inner game, the outer game becomes much easier to win.

Most people unfortunately start with the outer game. How to serve aces and how to volley and how to play backhand. They focus on the strategy and fall into the trap. Tony Robbins calls it:

The tyranny of how

It’s when you are all gung ho and excited about a goal. And start focusing on how you’ll achieve it. But then you get stuck. Because who are you kidding? You’ve never done it before, and so your mind is extremely uncertain. The more you focus on the how, the more excuses your mind makes.

It’s your mind’s survival instincts. “Unknown” is a threat. Excuses allow you to remain safe.

Focusing on the how also shows you the gap between your current reality vs what you need to achieve. And this gap causes anxiety. So you over complicate. You procrastinate. You find distractions. And your game suffers.

There is a prerequisite step that needs to be taken before you start learning how to do something. Before the strategy.

You have to start with your state. You have to prime your emotional physiology. Fix your inner game first.

Performance = potential - interference

You can have immense potential, but if your inner mind interferes, you can never perform well. So you have to start with quietening the judgement, the self doubt, the fear.

Reduce interference. Reduce continuous self evaluation and judgement. Reduce predictive anxiety and fear. How can you reduce interference? By shifting your focus.

If you go to any traditional tennis coach to improve your game, they would start with how to correct your grip, have proper footwork, and manage your body position.

If you go to Gallwey, he would say forget all of that. You already have the potential - your body already knows how to see the ball and hit the ball, as long as you can reduce the interference. So just shift your focus. Every time the ball hits the ground, say “bounce.” And every time the ball touches the racket, say “hit.”

Would you be surprised to know that Gallwey’s way outperforms the traditional coaches’ strategy on how to play tennis?

Why does Gallwey’s weird strategy work?

Because focus is a zero sum game. When you focus on the sensory input, you cannot focus on the self-judgemental part of the brain at the same time. When you have to say bounce and hit, you now cannot focus on your stance and judge. You have to keep an eye on the ball.

When your judgement processing part of the brain is no longer in control, your anxiety dies off. Your inner critic remains silent. And thus your body moves more fluidly and hits the ball better without interference!

When you’re not focused on hitting the ball well, you will hit the ball well!

How can you implement this idea while not playing tennis? You give your brain a sensory job. See the ball. Or count the number of blue ties in the room. Or analyze the loudness of the speaker’s voice and silently say 5 when loud and 1 when it’s a whisper!

Give it a sensory job. Focus on something visual or auditory. So the awareness moves away from how you have to do your job. Reduce the judgement and the interference and you will say the right things in the meetings and you will do the right things at work!

It’s no surprise that everyone from Bill Gates to Tom Brady to Al Gore credits Gallwey’s book on tennis for improving their game!

Action Summary:

• You already have the potential to win. You just need to get out of your own way. Build safety for your own mind. Focus on letting it do something it already knows.

• Performance = potential - interference. Reduce the interference before you focus on improving your potential. And your performance will improve faster.