Masterclass with Tim Gallwey – The Inner Game of Coaching

Michel Wozniak: [00:00:14] Hi and welcome here we are today on this masterclass. I am here, Michel Wozniak with Nathalie de Marcé.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:00:24] Hi, everyone.

Michel Wozniak: [00:00:25] And we are privileged today to have with us Tim Gallwey. Hi, Tim.

Tim Gallwey: [00:00:30] Hi, Michel.

Michel Wozniak: [00:00:33] How are you doing?

Tim Gallwey: [00:00:34] And Natalie too.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:00:37] Hello.

Tim Gallwey: [00:00:38] At this moment I’m doing fine and I hope nobody wrecks that.

Michel Wozniak: [00:00:44] Excellent.

Tim Gallwey: [00:00:45] I’ll take responsibility for that.

Michel Wozniak: [00:00:48] Excellent. Ok, so we are here tonight for a Masterclass where we have about 600 people who registered from forty-three countries. We have received a lot of questions. We have synthesized those questions. So if you’re lucky enough, your question will be asked here to Tim. And yeah, I think we’re going to go as smooth as possible. Just a few words about Tim. Tim is for me a reference. He’s somebody I know of for many years because each time I was studying coaching in coaching schools or so we’re talking about Tim Gallwey, the Inner Game of tennis. Even in my trainings that I gave in coaching, I was talking about him. And once I said, OK, I need to go and train with him. That’s what I did. And I’m very happy today.

Tim Gallwey: [00:01:48] Two weeks ago.

Michel Wozniak: [00:01:49] Yeah, yeah. Two weeks ago, this was the Inner Game of sport. And last year at the end of the year, it was the trainers training, the facilitator training. So we’re really honored to have you here. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Gallwey: [00:02:05] I’m honored to be here. Really.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:02:08] The father of coaching.

Michel Wozniak: [00:02:10] Yeah. Modern coaching.

Tim Gallwey: [00:02:13] Modern coaching?

Michel Wozniak: [00:02:15] Yeah, because it’s modern. It’s good.

Tim Gallwey: [00:02:19] Coaching in a day of accelerating change.

Michel Wozniak: [00:02:25] Yeah. So also we are greeting a lot of people who are just saying hello now on YouTube. So hi, everyone, and we can start right away.

Michel Wozniak: [00:02:38] And the first question that has been asked is from Aurora, from Spain. And she said: I heard of you in my coaching training, but I didn’t clearly understand what Self One and Self Two are precisely. Could you explain?

Tim Gallwey: [00:02:57] Well, I hope it’ll be precise enough. Neither one can be defined. But you all have an experience, the voice in your head, telling you how good or not good you are at something. How to do, you should do it better and how you should not do to do even worse than you are now.

Tim Gallwey: [00:03:32] That’s Self One. And all the following comments he has to make in evaluating you, your performance and how are you looking to others. That’s the favorite of his.

Tim Gallwey: [00:03:57] Self Two. Very different, very quiet. The best two words to describe it is your inherent inner intelligence. It’s been growing during its experience of this life.

Tim Gallwey: [00:04:26] So.

Tim Gallwey: [00:04:28] Practice with the right focus coming from Self Two does make perfect or as perfect as you can be. At the time. So. The whole point of the Inner Game is to reduce the interference of Self One. Don’t try to quiet him. He’ll win. I guarantee. He’ll come in different forms, in different shapes, in nice voices and not nice voices. He’ll try everything to get control of you,

Michel Wozniak: [00:05:19] and make you think he’s the success and you’re the failure.

Tim Gallwey: [00:05:28] Self two.

Tim Gallwey: [00:05:37] It’s always there. But until you become a little familiar with it, it doesn’t make any sense to trust it. But even in the beginning of a tennis lesson, some people just keep on trusting it because it feels so good and it works so well that they don’t have to be told to trust it. It’s fun.

Tim Gallwey: [00:06:14] Self One will come back, trying to figure out what Self Two is doing, and then he’ll you to do it that way. But guess what?

Tim Gallwey: [00:06:26] All the magic disolves. Goes away. You’d rather make clear choice, sincere choice at every moment, really, at every point, at every hour, every day. So. I hope that’s enough for you.

Michel Wozniak: [00:06:52] Yeah.

Tim Gallwey: [00:06:52] And, well, not you. You’ve had more. Or, you’ve heard enough.

Tim Gallwey: [00:07:04] If it hasn’t been enough for those in the audience, keep listening. The subject will keep coming up.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:07:14] Fantastic. We also have a question from Stephen from Australia. He’s asking: Regarding the possibility of reaching High-Performance, did you see more differences or more similarities between various sports like golf, tennis, etc?

Tim Gallwey: [00:07:40] All of the above. But I saw more similarities with the differences.

Tim Gallwey: [00:07:56] Many differences.

Tim Gallwey: [00:08:00] They all amounted to the same interferences and the same potentialities of Self Two. So with all the variety of sports, team sports, individual sports, complicated sports, not complicated, e-sports and field sports or courts sports, it all gets down to the same. How much of our potential do we allow, and to what extent do we interfere with that potential? At whatever level of the performance, not just sports, we’re playing. Shall I give you a simple anecdote?

Michel Wozniak: [00:09:15] Yes, sure.

Tim Gallwey: [00:09:16] It will let you know why I’m a little bit excited about this. It comes from the tennis court.

Tim Gallwey: [00:09:25] Well, it happened, Oh, I’d say in my third year of coaching, with the inner game approach, as I understand it then. A player came, there was an audience of students, coaches. And he declared in front of all, a very brave assertion:

Tim Gallwey: [00:10:01] I am the worst backhand volleyer of anyone in the world.

Tim Gallwey: [00:10:13] I said, wow.

Tim Gallwey: [00:10:15] I’ve never seen the worst backhand volleyer in the world. I’d be delighted for you to show me.

Tim Gallwey: [00:10:27] And he hesitated. I hit him a few balls and he went like this. Like this. And I thought to myself, well, I don’t know for sure, that’s got to come pretty close, close enough, and there was so many things wrong that I didn’t know where to start, focusing his attention. So I said to him, you know, the one thing I don’t know from seeing your stroke, is how you would like to hit it someday if we work together for a couple of years, three to five years. At the end of it, how would you like to be hitting the ball?

Tim Gallwey: [00:11:36] I’ve got to get up to show this.

Tim Gallwey: [00:11:42] Like that.

Tim Gallwey: [00:11:45] Is that it? He said: no no, it’s not. Like this! Is that it? No, more like this.

Tim Gallwey: [00:11:57] And the fourth shot was this aggressive, flowing strong backhand into the corner.

Tim Gallwey: [00:12:08] I said: Uh.

Tim Gallwey: [00:12:13] I forgot one little part of that conversation. After I said: I don’t know how you’d like to hit it, he started telling me. “No, no, no, don’t bother me with words, just show me how someday you’d like to hit it.” And then the rest followed, no more than five minutes. The audience started laughing, because it was so abrupt. And for some reason, I heard myself telling them: Be quiet. Don’t burst the bubble. Let me do it.

Tim Gallwey: [00:13:11] So after a few more I said: You know, it’s too bad you can’t do that right now.

Tim Gallwey: [00:13:29] And he went like this.

Tim Gallwey: [00:13:36] I said: Yeah, that’s the way you do do it now. But show me again how you’d like to do it some day. As soon as he found himself doing what he knew he “couldn’t do”, he went back to the defensive backhand. And when I would say: Yeah, and how would you like to? Pah! Pah! Pah! So it just took one little phrase to trigger Self Two. And he went back and forth. And I let him experience both.

Tim Gallwey: [00:14:36] After 15 minutes or so, I said: So OK, I think that’s enough.

Tim Gallwey: [00:14:48] Time to pick up the balls. So we’re picking up the balls and he comes to me shaking, eyes focused on mine, saying: So who am I? You can understand the confusion. You said you’re not either one. You’re not your volley. You’ve shown yourself you can do either one, they look very different. One, you were allowing something to happen that you didn’t even know was there. You’ve just imagined or intuited how you would like it to be. And it’s certainly your choice, and I won’t blame you if you go back and forth, for a week or two, a year or two. I certainly did, and not so dramatically, I might say, but enough that I could tell there were still some foreign interference happening.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:16:22] Could we say that Self One is like the conscious mind and Self Two is the unconscious mind? Could we understand it like that?

Tim Gallwey: [00:16:35] You could if you understood “conscious”. But most people identify conscious mind with what I’m trying to do. Well, this guy was trying to hit it hard and powerfully, but because he knew he couldn’t, his muscles tightened and prevented him to. That was unconscious. So conscious mind had set the goal.

Tim Gallwey: [00:17:14] And unconscious mind followed the unconscious belief.

Tim Gallwey: [00:17:29] But the unconscious mind didn’t have any programming, that he couldn’t show someone how he’d like to do it someday. He has probably never been asked. So there was no competition at the beginning until I introduced: This is how you do do it, this is how you’d like to do it. Too bad you can’t do it like you’d like to do it, like you’re doing it now. In this moment, so not so definable. But, ask Renato, it happens every time, sometimes to different extents. Saying something doesn’t always make that something that worked once do it, in many factors. It’s a good chance to keep learning. And the student needs to keep learning. And the coach needs to unlearn if he doesn’t have anything to learn himself. It’s only the coachee who needs to learn. So even if you actually know so much about coaching, what to say next will come from the student. He will say that, and it’ll bring up from your Self Two what needs to be said. And then you repeat it next time, and it won’t work. If you don’t believe that, try golf.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:19:48] Absolutely, I do believe it.

Tim Gallwey: [00:19:55] Golfers are always finding the secret. What’s the secret? Something you can learn to tell yourself that will make you hit the ball as well of you as you hit your best ball. But you’re always disappointed because you had an expectation. This guy didn’t have any expectations of doing this. He didn’t know how he wanted to do it and he started here. “No, that’s not it”.

Tim Gallwey: [00:20:36] How do you know that it was what you wanted to do? How do you know?

Tim Gallwey: [00:20:44] He didn’t expect it. He was surprised. And he kept on doing it for a while.

Tim Gallwey: [00:20:54] Until I broke the bubble.

Tim Gallwey: [00:20:58] But long enough for him to know. Self Two, is there, ready to help, always. OK.

Michel Wozniak: [00:21:06] Good, thank you. The next question is from Julien from France. He’s asking: Do you think that high performance is better achieved by using all of our five senses or just the ones we are more comfortable with?

Tim Gallwey: [00:21:24] I haven’t yet found a use for taste in high performance, but that excludes master chefs, so definitely that sense. Frankly, it almost doesn’t matter what sense you use, to focus your attention. As long as it is appropriate to the player, his understanding, and the critical variable of the thing that he’s learning.

Tim Gallwey: [00:22:11] Critical variable, it sounds like a scientific name. It’s on purpose, so people take it seriously. Critical means important. Variable means something that changes.

Tim Gallwey: [00:22:40] One more anecdote from tennis. Because I know, there will be a question, I’m sure. Does this just work with beginners, or does this work with advanced players?

Tim Gallwey: [00:23:05] Well.

Tim Gallwey: [00:23:07] Sometimes I need to be approached differently. I was asked by the captain of the British Davis Cup team, to work with a member of the team, a high level player. He had great groundstrokes, forehand and backhand, but never, almost never came to net to put the ball away. He was so confident of his groundstrokes, he stayed there.

Tim Gallwey: [00:23:45] So, I got to England.

Tim Gallwey: [00:23:55] I made a visit, an appointment with the captain. And he introduced me to this player.

Tim Gallwey: [00:24:07] And asked the player, he said:

Tim Gallwey: [00:24:13] Would you like to work for 15 or 20 minutes with Tim Gallwey who’s come from California

Tim Gallwey: [00:24:28] to downtown London, actually, to help you with your volley?

Tim Gallwey: [00:24:37] He hesitated, thought and said: No. Thank you very much so.

Tim Gallwey: [00:24:51] And, thinking I knew why, having seen this before. I said: Before you make your final decision, I’d like to make a promise to you. If we work together, I promise you I will never try to improve any of your strokes.

Tim Gallwey: [00:25:32] “What? But what are you going to do?” I’m just going to try to make you a little more aware of how you’re hitting them now. “That’s all.”

Tim Gallwey: [00:25:54] He shrugged his shoulders, and said: “I don’t see any harm in that”. There’s a lot in his answer. It revealed what he was expecting, to be told how to improve his volley. That’s why the coach had invited me there: “Something was wrong with me”. Right? That’s the context for ninety nine point five percent of all tennis lessons at every level. So I know what promise to make. We started hitting balls. And I noticed that he hit the balls very late, as if he didn’t want to hit them, he waited for the last moment. So I just asked him to imagine a little clock, hitting them, right, even with his waist, his body turned sideways would be three o’clock. And this would be two o’clock. This would be one o’clock. This would be 12, right there , in front. 1:00, 2:00, 3:00.

Tim Gallwey: [00:27:24] …

Tim Gallwey: [00:27:42] So this Davis Cup player just started telling me the time, according to how he noticed where his body, where his racquet, made contact with the ball. Start off with 3:00. Went to 3:30. Went back to 3:00. 2:30. 2:00. 2:30. 2:00. 1:30. 1:00. 1:30. 1:30. 1:00. 1:00. 1:00. And, you know, a big smile occured on his face. And I said: So how did that feel? It felt really easy.

Tim Gallwey: [00:28:39] How did it work? “It worked great. I was so surprised.” And I said: OK, it won’t take so long with the backhand. Just keep telling me the time. Don’t try… Oh, in fact, I skipped a little bit because I’m in a rush.

Tim Gallwey: [00:29:12] I said: Did you try to change your volley because I told them not to try to change it. And he said: No, honestly I didn’t. My racket did it.

Tim Gallwey: [00:29:32] It is very often the answer you get from tennis players. It was so easy, so natural. The tight tennis player doesn’t even recognize it’s then hitting it. Sometimes I say: Oh, smart tennis racket. Is that a head by any chance? If it is, well, that’s why it hitted so well. Maybe you should buy a head and then I’ll go ahead and promote it, no. It gets through the racket’s don’t have coordination, internal coordination, it doesn’t, Apes have it. Monkeys have it. Squirrels have it. Panda bears have it, OK? They’ve learned it in the course of millions of years of evolution.

Tim Gallwey: [00:30:49] And they don’t doubt it, usually.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:30:57] Absolutely.

Tim Gallwey: [00:31:01] Well, sometimes, They’re head of a bigger animal, and they get stressed. They do what human beings do: Either fly, run, even though the bigger animal can run faster. Or not too many of them fight, but if they do, you know, they don’t fight again. And the larger animal has lunch. So the idea is to shorten that evolutionary time. For the human being that has evolved over many millions of years, he does have an enlarged nervous system, and that works pretty well. When you let it. If you think, a little cerebral cortex can give it orders. Try and see what works and how it feels and what the tone of the voice is of the one speaking in your head. Just learn from experience, so that’s long enough for France.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:32:34] We have a very interesting question from Nina from Russia. She’s asking, how did you discover how Self One and Self Two work, how was that you discovered all of this?

Tim Gallwey: [00:32:56] I didn’t read it in a book. I made up those terms. In my learning, it happened as I followed a commitment that I had made. My commitment was I want to see how much learning I can see in front of me? With how little teaching?

Tim Gallwey: [00:33:31] And over a few months, that led to very little teaching. Out of long times of, around three months, I learned it’s not teaching to ask someone to be aware. And with beginning players, you don’t tell them what to be aware of because they’ll automatically assume that’s what’s wrong.

Tim Gallwey: [00:34:18] So just say be aware of your body. Then I would say: What part of your body were you most aware? Someone would say: My wrists. What’s going on with your wrist? Oh, it’s really wobbly. Ah that’s OK, just notice the degree of wobbly as you continue to hit. See if it stays the same, gets more wobbly, or more firm. It can only be one of the three. So watch, just notice and you know, Wobbles, wobbles, wobbles, less, wobbles, less, Pah, Pah, Pah, and straight, straight, straight.

Tim Gallwey: [00:35:18] This can end hard sometimes, but for wobbles, if you time perfectly the snapped of your wrist, where the ball is… If you don’t, it’ll go who knows where. So, I’ve also had answers like: I wasn’t aware of anything. Which means they thought I meant: Are you aware of what you’re doing wrong? Whatever you say, the programming of the student is: He’s trying to fix you. He’s trying to fix you. Ego rebels.

Tim Gallwey: [00:36:24] And want you least to tell them how it should be so he can then tighten his cheeks, and try to do it, and also most of his muscles that aren’t needed to do that.

Tim Gallwey: [00:36:51] So,

Tim Gallwey: [00:36:55] when this guy said: “I didn’t experience anything.” “Did you notice, any chance, that your feet were standing on the court?

Tim Gallwey: [00:37:11] Or bellow you on the court?”

Tim Gallwey: [00:37:17] “Well, yeah, I knew that.” “I know but were you aware of it?” “Oh, that’s what you mean by aware.” “Yeah, that’s what I mean by aware. Let’s do it again. It just means being aware.” Don’t use the word conscious at the beginning. Carefully not. Just be aware.

Tim Gallwey: [00:37:45] Next thing, oh, I remember, short anecdote. That was just one guy who was much too tight, and his answer after we’d gone through the awareness part, like: “Oh, you just mean feel. Whatever part you feel.” “Yeah!” So he got that, hit him a few more balls, and his body seems to relax. But I couldn’t say: “Good”. Otherwise, I was trying to change who he was, what he was. I stayed with my question: “What part of your body did you experience or did you feel?” He said the one part of his body I couldn’t see. Well, not the only one, but one for sure. He said: “My toes”. Yes, I just saw the shoes. “Oh, tell me, what’s going on with your toes?” “Oh, they’re feeling tight.” I said: “OK, keep noticing the degree of tightness, how tight are they now? 10 is as tight as they can be.” “So, about a five”. I said: “OK, just keep hitting a few”. And he did, and they gradually didn’t feel good, relaxed, and his balls got more fluid because his whole body picked up on that. Relaxed. Not really relaxed. I have to cover that. But relaxed enough.

Tim Gallwey: [00:39:59] Trading wonderful shots, much better shots. Seft Two shots. Why not tell them to relax? Then, they could lie on the tennis court, speak up to me saying: “What shall I do now?” So a tennis shot is not relaxed. That’s relaxed fingers, but my arms, forearms, biceps aren’t relaxed, not tensed, but they’re not relaxed, just enough to hold my arms up. So if you want to play perfect tennis from your thought, it’s really easy, just memorize the names of all the muscles. Several hundred or more. They all have complicated names. And then, muscle groups, not just strands, but groups and follow the same instructions for the nervous system. Then, when you want to take your racket back, tell the muscles that you need it to tighten to bring the racket back, tell the rest to relax. Don’t let your feet have a little bit of muscle in them, and then you want to actually shift the weight on your feet, so you’ve got to give them instructions, the same time your racket is coming forward, hitting the ball and following through. OK? Want to try? No way!

Tim Gallwey: [00:42:12] Ok. Remember that.

Tim Gallwey: [00:42:17] Pros don’t know how they hit the ball.

Tim Gallwey: [00:42:24] They can do it. They can do it quite regularly. Till they get nervous, but they can do it more consistently, because it felt good and it worked all the way along during their practice, gradually, gradually, after Gonzalez was asked to write a book about tennis, he put “Grip” at the top of the page and he said, I don’t know what to write.

Tim Gallwey: [00:42:56] He went to the closet, grabbed his racquet, put his hand on it and started typing with one hand.

Tim Gallwey: [00:43:06] Oh, so you can say I’m reverting back to the simplicity, the existence of an inner intelligence that may know or not know how to hit a tennis ball, but it’s had millions of years of evolution, of learning how to learn from experience. That’s all it’s had, not that much language, maybe a few here and there, I don’t know. They learned it all, by what it felt, as far as I could figure out. It felt good and it worked. To me, it’s kind of obvious. It’s what I’m seeing over and over again stand behind. Whenever they try to correct what they think they’re doing wrong, they yighten up. Here’s a law of Self One: When in doubt, tighten. When in doubt, tighten.

Tim Gallwey: [00:44:25] You could all reflect on the way you shake hands. If it’s as strong as you can, then there’s this great guy, six inches taller than you, with a tried muscle mass, and you say: “OK, OK…” You know you’re trying to show him how strong you are, not trying to show who you are, a human being, meeting another human being, nothing to prove, nothing to show off. Just I’m here. So, very simple, let’s go on.

Michel Wozniak: [00:45:13] It’s interesting because we’re talking about sport and now there is a question from Eugene from Canada who’s asking how to apply inner game principles to work?

Tim Gallwey: [00:45:27] Work’s a very big field. Even bigger and bigger and bigger than sport. Work is something you can be doing when you don’t even have a job. I’m self-employed, I work a lot. Sometimes I have a boss in there and it’s not the kind of boss you’d want to have. He never has enough time and he always want to go… When he’s talking, it always seems to go too long, You’ll notice it from time to time. So he likes to be in control. As everybody else’s Self One does. And Self Two waits till I’m ready, to whatever extent I’m ready, to let go of control and let what knows better, he’s showing me he knows better how to take control. Gradually, gradually. I get it when I’m talking about it, I even get it more.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:47:00] We have a question.

Tim Gallwey: [00:47:03] One anecdote.

Tim Gallwey: [00:47:16] The last question was about high performance. The managers at work and your little manager inside want high performance. Of course, that’s one thing they know is important, they may not know what it is, and “high” means more than I’m doing it now, or my best. How universal is that definition? Work should be done with your highest performance. Or at least at the level we say.

Tim Gallwey: [00:48:14] It could be higher, but this is our standard. Do they ever say: Enjoy yourself. Not very often. Do they ever come up to you and say: What are you learning? Maybe never.

Tim Gallwey: [00:48:46] Hmmm.

Tim Gallwey: [00:48:50] Is everybody who works, at all moments, at whatever level they’re performing at, somewhere between evolving rapidly, to medium level, evolving and learning something, but very gradually, and devolve it? Is it possible for human beings to devolve? What does that mean? Grow less human while they’re working. Then the boss comes up and says: How are you doing?

Tim Gallwey: [00:49:51] Fine.

Tim Gallwey: [00:49:53] And where did you find that anger?

Tim Gallwey: [00:50:00] Oh. I didn’t want them to ask me any more, when they get away from me. I suspect that he’d be trying to peak my performance. Big mistake trying to peak unless you can be tricky about it.

Tim Gallwey: [00:50:33] Learning is for HR. Learning is for the classroom. Learning doesn’t happen from experience until it’s you who have to take a higher position with higher challenges. Then you want to learn from your experience, not by been told, and you say: Wow, because I did this job and this job in this job, I learned.

Tim Gallwey: [00:51:19] So I put my credentials here. Well, how did you learn? Well, I kinda learned it my way. And exactly how does that work? How do you do it? How would you tell somebody else to do that? Any way to do it a little more smooth, a little more without an up and down, an up and down all the time?

Tim Gallwey: [00:51:46] Oh, well. No.

Tim Gallwey: [00:51:52] I’m not a psychologist. Me neither. I took one college course in psychology.

Tim Gallwey: [00:52:05] And then a B.F. Skinner course. Behavior modification, starting with pigeons and going to human beings.

Tim Gallwey: [00:52:19] Not negative reinforcement because it’s punishment.

Tim Gallwey: [00:52:24] It was just positive reinforcement: That a boy, that a boy. That’s what I wanted. Always with reinforcement.

Tim Gallwey: [00:52:37] As it was with Skinner, he flashed lights when the pigeon did the correct behavior, and made a sound.

Tim Gallwey: [00:53:00] And, the pigeon tended to do more of those behaviors than the others, after they’ve been doing them more of it. Food traugh would come up. The pigeon would take a long time because it made them hungry to eat the seeds, whatever he fed them. I was there in the class and I was scared. I was scared he was right, that it’s the way you learn. A positive reinforcement.

Tim Gallwey: [00:53:43] And then, his first words in class. He looked out at the audience around. He said: I don’t like what I see. Too many Harvard men, and not enough Radclyffe girls, and they give you guys an unfair advantage. That was his motivational speech.

Tim Gallwey: [00:54:17] It’s not like he went out and got more Radclyffe Girls, he just said: Oh, we’re going to learn something that’s important to us.

Tim Gallwey: [00:54:31] Anyway, it went on like that and halfway through, he wasn’t very far. He asked the class: What do you want me to have the pigeon do? They said: Moving counter clockwise circles. Jumping counterclockwise circles on his left foot. And halfway through the class was going on like this, much more than this.

Tim Gallwey: [00:55:23] The only reason I extend this anecdote, you’ve already got the gist of it, but the crowning blow is very relevant to modern times. After halfway through the class, good, he’s not gonna be able to do it. And he just hit one of the button. It was a button that turned the light on and made the sound go off.

Tim Gallwey: [00:56:04] But it didn’t put out the food traugh. And he saved all that time.

Tim Gallwey: [00:56:13] And not having to wait for this silly pigeon to get his own needs met. Let you take that in as much as it wants to go. At the end, moving in clockwise circles, counterclockwise on his left foot and everyone was impressed. I was still scared. Until my roommate started dating his daughter, I hope he’s not alive. Whoever that person was, I don’t think I got his name right, but whoever he was, he had a daughter. My roommate started dating, he didn’t know I was even taking the course, and came back and told me after a few days: That guy can’t get his daughter to wear shoes in downtown Boston.

Tim Gallwey: [00:57:29] I said: Really? Then I relaxed. I said: I thought so.

Tim Gallwey: [00:57:36] But I like to confirm evidence. And so, little later, I’ll give another work example, but I know that our time is limited. I didn’t hear Self One’s voice. But I knew I would pretty soon, or yours: OK, that was good Tim, let’s go on.

Nathalie de Marcé: [00:58:14] Speaking of the current times, we have Catherine from Israel who is asking in what direction should we orient changes in the time we are leaving in?

Tim Gallwey: [00:58:33] In the time we are living in. I was just answering that question. OK.

Tim Gallwey: [00:58:44] You’ve got the anecdote. I’ll give another one. But let the learner, be the learner.

Tim Gallwey: [00:59:02] The learner is in charge.

Tim Gallwey: [00:59:08] How do I know?

Tim Gallwey: [00:59:11] He’s got two ears. When he hears you, there’s a choice, letting it go through that tube and takes it out the other one, or having it go up into the head: I’ll think about it or that reminds me or I don’t agree, or down to where you are.

Tim Gallwey: [00:59:37] And it’s his or her choice.

Tim Gallwey: [00:59:45] The coach had something to do with it, makes it easier or harder to take in. We’ve learned enough to say the students in charge will just test them and give them a mark at the end. That will motivate them. But we don’t really believe it. I’m the teacher, and when I went to graduate school to get my M.A. or degree in teaching, I was taught how to teach. So my recommendation for these days: Teach the very minimum. Provide experience for the rest, and no, your class isn’t long enough to do experiences for everybody. But guess what, their life is long enough to get experience, and believe it or not, almost whatever they do, they can learn what they want to do.

Tim Gallwey: [01:01:23] And they can always put themselves in an environment that’s conducive to learning that.

Tim Gallwey: [01:01:35] Now, we could have an argument about that, but, who’s the teacher here? OK, so teach what needs to be taught, which is much less than you think. And let them learn just sure enough. We’re on digital communication here. I can’t even see you, in your eyes, and if your head is moving, if you’re asleep, I can’t get even a clue. The only clues I have are my two colleagues interested. And they seem to be. Please don’t look interested when you’re not. I’m looking. And one tool you can use in modern days is, given the modern day, the modern era, the modern culture: Be smarter than everybody else. Never raise your hand if you don’t know. But listen closely to when the teacher speaks, when other people are raising their hand, like that but don’t give way. And when you’re in a conversation with another colleague, a student, you know what to do. Just win the discussion. So if you know the culture, you can say things that kinda relax it a little bit like: What would you do if you had no idea at all what to do?

Tim Gallwey: [01:04:10] I might do this.

Tim Gallwey: [01:04:14] That might be really stupid. It might be really great. Usually one of the two. And often really creative because they don’t want to look stupid. So it just means what they hear is taking off the boundaries of good, or agreeing with him, or smart. He didn’t have a clue: what would you do? It’s not a bad mindset, believe it or not, to take into your doing. However much you know, it won’t hurt to say to yourself: I don’t really know how to do this best. And you’ll find subtle things that can be changed that you never thought of because you could get the damn job done, with a certain amount of tightness, a certain amount of self-consciousness, not self-awareness. It’s come to mean what? Self-consciousness. Anxious about themselves.

Tim Gallwey: [01:05:45] Now, if you go to advanced classes, somebody dares say the word consciousness. You may think, oh no, that’s what I do, I try to be conscious. Just let my hair down to be as conscious as I can be every day, even now, conscious of me, conscious of the other person to whom I’m speaking. Conscious too of the interference they might have, hearing this subject matter, which is so simple that it could be repeated to a stranger in three or four sentences over.

Tim Gallwey: [01:06:55] It doesn’t sound like anything to me. Like many of the true things, the deeper you go, the simpler they are.

Tim Gallwey: [01:07:13] Well, don’t go too deep.

Tim Gallwey: [01:07:18] Don’t go too simple because I need a little complexity, just pay attention. So give me a few examples. More complex, but interesting. Vice president of AT&T comes for a tennis lesson. He doesn’t announce himself.

Tim Gallwey: [01:07:49] He gets a lesson from the assistant to the assistant to the assistant. After the lesson he comes to me in the courtyard and says, we’re having lunch, Tim. Oh, are you Tim Gallwey? I started with the question, are you Tim Gallwey? Yes, yes, yes. We’re having lunch today. I knew I had no appointments for lunch. That was very rare, but we were at a kind of country club setting.

Tim Gallwey: [01:08:26] I said: OK.

Tim Gallwey: [01:08:31] In about two minutes, he described the situation at AT&T. AT&T was at the time the largest corporation in the world. The Supreme Court, in all their wisdom, ruled that they could have only six months to become corporate marketing enterprise. No more monopoly.

Tim Gallwey: [01:09:15] No more wanting to improve your bottom line and simply charge more. It was easy for these guys, because there was no other telephone. So he ended up coming to my home where my then wife and I were asked to talk a little bit about the Inner Game. We did. He went around his room, the room where he had packed six of his top managers, under him. He was in charge of change at AT&T in the six months. And he had come and the one thing he did say was: I think you may know something about change that I don’t understand.

Tim Gallwey: [01:10:37] And I said: Well, OK. Flashing into my mind, his license plates. About a month after I’d been working for AT&T, not hired for some tasks, and that was “Self one”. No, no, no. Excuse me, it was “Self Two”. He had “Self Two” license plates. Self One had told him to put it on his car. So. The anecdote I wanted to tell you about, is from the lower level workforce. There are also anecdotes for the middle level and the higher level. All of them, I was put in touch with, because every level wanted to know: Will Inner Game work here? And so I was invited to the vice president telephone operators, asking me that question: Will the Inner Game work with our telephone operators? We have three performance standards, they’re OK on productivity.

Tim Gallwey: [01:12:20] Which is defined: Is every call shorter than two point five (26.5) seconds.

Tim Gallwey: [01:12:34] Second, they’re OK on accuracy, getting in numbers into the computer given to them by the customer so the customer could be connect. The numbers, he said. Imagine, this is the call. Except they missed one part. Have a good day. The operator repeats the number, and “Have a good day”. They have 25 seconds. What could they be doing differently in twenty five seconds. Before I leave the vice president, he gives a third level of performance, which is courtesy.

Tim Gallwey: [01:13:43] And he says: That’s the part I need you to help me. Can you help? And I said: On one condition, I’ll give it a try, I’ll give it a go.

Tim Gallwey: [01:13:59] What’s the condition? That I don’t have to talk about courtesy. He stopped, saying: I don’t care what you talk about, so long as those ratings done by third parties, go up dramatically. I said: No problem. He said: OK, got a deal. You’ve got six hours. One hour a week for six weeks. That’s a few more hours than we have here. It was just one of those twenty six point five seconds of work and then, how do I make this short? I go into the telephone operators, I say: How’s work? Boring… Some of them are 20 years in this job, twenty six point five seconds, do the math, a long eight hours a day with maybe an hour and a half breaks, including lunch. For 20 years. Then some of them said: I’m stressful. Because the twenty six point five seconds, just making sure you got the numbers actually right, and then trying to be courteous. So mostly after the twenty six point five seconds, red lights went on above them, if they happenned to be long. So I wondered, what’s the ball here? The customer’s voice coming into the court of the operator, who was asked to repeat what is being said. And then, physically put it into a computer. And then say: Have a good. Unless the other guy says it first, she says: And you have a good day, too, sir. But they don’t say it like that, but: Have a good. If you’ve heard telephone operators. You may be too young. After eight hours a day of doing this for a few months: Hello, yes, I’ll get you Skyline 1 7 0 5 4. Have a good day.

Tim Gallwey: [01:17:12] It just goes monotone and mechanical.

Tim Gallwey: [01:17:20] A little exaggeration, but not much. And I’m not exaggerating. I’m getting roo warm in this room. Do you mind if I take my sweater off?

Nathalie de Marcé: [01:17:45] No, of course not.

Tim Gallwey: [01:17:46] I didn’t think you would, but I wouldn’t have done it anyway if you had some reason like the photograph had to be constant, didn’t want to be changing people. OK.

Michel Wozniak: [01:18:00] Yeah, we have one final question, which would be very interesting to…

Tim Gallwey: [01:18:07] How much time have we gone?

Michel Wozniak: [01:18:09] Uh, we’re about to be done. We were about to be done. Yeah.

Tim Gallwey: [01:18:14] How much time have we done?

Michel Wozniak: [01:18:16] For the moment, we made one hour and 20 minutes.

Tim Gallwey: [01:18:20] I’ll take one minute to do the example. I could take 10, 15. Here’s what you would have seen if you’re observing and listening to the operator. The customer says: Give me Skyline 1 7 0 5 4 right away.

Tim Gallwey: [01:18:53] She puts down a nine and circles irritate. And she answers: Was that Skyline 1 7 0 5 5 ? Yeah.

Tim Gallwey: [01:19:17] She says: Have a good day. And the guy says: Yeah, and you too.

Tim Gallwey: [01:19:31] And after several hundred of those, the ahhh gets ohhh! I’m speaking to more people than anybody in the world, one on one, and I’m having a little tiny impact on them, depending on what I let express myself through me. If I’m in reaction, I just cover up: Yes, Skyline 1 7 0 5 4. I know better than to be angry. And I know better than to stress myself out, some of them didn’t know that that’s the reason for the 8. When you have to grade it, is it an 8 or a 7 or a 10, you have to listen and that puts the sound at a distance. And that distance keeps it from coming into what would hurt inside you. So.

Tim Gallwey: [01:20:47] Then they learned. I asked them how many voices do you hear? They say 40 different tones of voice. And how many do you express on the way back? Well probably reactions to those 40. And what qualities would you like to express if you’re allowed to express anything you want to the particular sound that you heard? So, depending on who it was, they gave an answer and the game began, oh, it wasn’t always this way. If it happened to be a warm voice, but they had strong voices, confident voices. Exactly. I mean, they had all kinds of voices they might want to express, but they could even do some of those at the same time. So that’s it. And the only hard part was the first line managers of the operators, that wanted to take the credit for the courtesy change.

Tim Gallwey: [01:22:26] Oh, yeah, we’ve told them how to be courteous, must have been us. Anyway, little hurdle to get through there and then to explain it to other companies who didn’t want to do anything like their brother or sister company in California.

Tim Gallwey: [01:22:48] Like, you know, Southern Company or Middle Eastern Company or Boston Company. We don’t want to do any of this California stuff. So. That’s it. Otherwise, word got around, and it slipped up to the vice president and he said: I wonder what he did. I never tried to see. OK, I think I went over my 20 seconds.

Michel Wozniak: [01:23:38] The final question is from Henkins, it’s our Henkins, so we know him, I guess, you and me, from the USA.

Michel Wozniak: [01:23:51] And he’s asking: how would you like to see the Inner Game evolve in the future?

Tim Gallwey: [01:24:02] Deeper in its foundation, and wider in its application. So, greater outreach, public, corporate, different levels. It might start in the corporations at major or lower levels. Let it shape upwards. Maybe. OK.

Michel Wozniak: [01:24:44] Thank you very much, Tim, thank you very much for your time.

Tim Gallwey: [01:24:48] I am so sorry. Can you put them on for a second? Can you put them on to that channel, wide channel that shows everybody.

Michel Wozniak: [01:25:02] Uh, no, no, because it’s being transferred to YouTube, so.

Tim Gallwey: [01:25:07] Oh Youtube. Can’t see people. Too many people to get permission from. Ok. Thank you very very much.

Michel Wozniak: [01:25:16] Thank you very much. Tim. I would just like to mention the you will see under the video the URL but if you want more information about Tim, about his trainings, about everything, it’s on theinnergameinstitute.com . You will have it written with a link also beneath the video. If you want to have more information about us, about Nathalie and myself, you also have the URL beneath the video. Very shortly you will have also the subtitles of that video in English and in French. So this will be the work of a few days, but it will be very soon available, and we’ll let you know by email. Thank you very much.

Nathalie de Marcé: [01:26:06] Thank you to Andrew, to Debbie, to Brad, to Miriam, to Paolo, to Alexey. Well, and of course, Tim, it was absolutely fantastic to have you, the creator, the men, the teacher.

Tim Gallwey: [01:26:30] I’m just a human being who have subdued the one that wants to be somebody. I’d rather not know who’s coming forward. And it’s working fine. I want everyone to realize that train the trainer is happening on May 30th. Renato, you’re not live. Can you make Renato live?

Michel Wozniak: [01:27:16] Yes, yes. He just has to switch the video on, and the audio.

Renato Ricci: [01:27:26] Hello, everybody. Michel, thank you. Thank you, it was a pleasure to be with all of you, many different countries. So thank you, Michel, for this help.

Tim Gallwey: [01:27:38] Is there some translation available when people come?I

Tim Gallwey: [01:27:45] I think you have it translated later in the YouTube channel, correct?

Michel Wozniak: [01:27:51] Yes.

Renato Ricci: [01:27:53] But we have our next program starting next Saturday from different areas. Also, we are receiving people from different countries. And you can go visit our website. theinnergameinstitute.com and you can find there all the explanations about the Inner Game Train The Trainer. So thank you again.

Michel Wozniak: [01:28:20] Thank you so much.

Tim Gallwey: [01:28:22] It’s The Inner Game Institute in English.

Michel Wozniak: [01:28:27] Yes, theinnergameinstitute.com

Michel Wozniak: [01:28:31] Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim.

Tim Gallwey: [01:28:34] What is the time on the weekend, Renato?

Renato Ricci: [01:28:37] It’s very early in the morning for you.

Tim Gallwey: [01:28:41] Well, what time are you using?

Renato Ricci: [01:28:46] It’s US Eastern time. All the information is on the website. OK, thank you.

Tim Gallwey: [01:28:56] Thank you very much. Thank you, Renato. Thank you, Tim. And thank you all who are listening to to this Masterclass. And we see you very soon. Bye.

Tim Gallwey: [01:29:10] Bye.

Nathalie de Marcé: [01:29:10] Bye, thank you.

Tim Gallwey: [01:29:13] Again. Thank you Michel, thank you Nathalie.