Mastering The Inner Game

By and large, your success in life is determined by your skills at mastering the “inner game” – both for you and your team.

The inner game is the stuff that goes on inside your head. That ultimately determines your chances of success or failure.

It’s a phenomenon all top sportspeople are familiar with, and it applies in business too.

Timothy Gallwey, who wrote books like The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Golf, talks about the equation P = p – i

What this formula means

This formula stands for Performance (P) equals potential (p) less interference (i)

Performance (P) just means the outcomes you get, whether that’s shaving a half-second off your time in a 100 metre race or building the business of your dreams.

Clarity about the results you want is key, as you need to have a clear focus for your efforts.

Interference in this context includes talking yourself out of doing things that would result in a more profitable, more successful business through self-doubt or worries about what others might say.

The “i” is the inner game – that’s what gets in the way when you find it hard to motivate yourself, when you doubt your abilities, or when you don’t think you’re good enough, for example.

Yet it’s probably the most important part of the game. A self-doubting champion would probably never have been a champion in the first place.

But where sport differs from business is that top sportspeople recognise a positive mindset only matters when they get results.

If they are kidding themselves about the reality of their results, they’re not winning an Olympic Gold medal, no matter how positive a mindset they have.

In many organisations, people who are perceived as strong and single-minded often get promoted. But it’s possible to be incredibly single-minded and, at the same time, completely wrong.

Single-mindedness isn’t the objective here – tangible results are the objective.

That’s where the “p” (for potential) comes in – the fundamental skills, talents, and attributes required to do well.

One component of potential is the ability to link potentially positive character traits like determination and people holding themselves to high standards, with achieving results.

You need both the mindset and the results, not just the mindset, to succeed.

What to do instead

For longevity, you need more than willpower to bludgeon your way to success.

Top sportspeople have willpower in spades, but willpower alone doesn’t win medals. To be a champion, you need more than willpower.

But you also need a different approach to coaching to get the best results – whether that’s in business or sport.

As Gallwey puts it in his book The Inner Game of Work, “…this feels like you are losing control, but you are actually gaining control by letting go of an inferior means of control”. (Let that play with your mind, corporate performance management system operators.)

Tim Gallwey developed three key strategies when he coached tennis players, all of which are applicable in a business setting:

1. The first strategy was removing judgement from the process – he found that coming across like a critical teacher or overbearing boss made results worse, not better. It messed up his students’ inner game too much. But when students reviewed their own results, non-judgementally, they were much more likely to do something about them.
2. The second strategy was for him to not try to control the outcome, but to trust the natural learning process inside the student. When he was patient enough to let the inner learning take place, students would come up with more elegant and effective ways of getting a result than a traditional command-and-control approach would have done.
3. Gallwey’s final strategy was to leave the choice about whether to improve, and by how much, in the hands of his students. Because it was now “their idea”, students felt more in control and it connected them with their own underlying motivation for wanting to improve their game. As a result, students took more responsibility, showed greater willingness to succeed, and discovered more creative ways of getting to their end-result.

What about your business?

With those three strategies in mind, have a think about how you manage people in your organisation.

How many of the judgements made about your team members are the line-manager’s judgements versus the staff-members themselves?

How often is a traditional command-and-control model deployed as your line-mangers go-to strategy, vs supporting your people to reach a better outcome than the managers would have found themselves?

And how many of your team’s goals are “theirs” versus “their line manager’s”.

When the goals are not their own, a fair number – perhaps the majority of – your people will do the minimum necessary to keep their jobs in an environment they think doesn’t value them.

When the goals come from your people, their results will surprise you on the upside time and time again.

It’s not the way performance management systems work in most businesses, but if you’re serious about improving performance, I’ve found that’s usually the fastest, most cost-effective way to get where you want to go.

More importantly, the end-results tend to be better too, once you give people the permission and support to be as good as they can be at what they do, not just 5% better than last year.

And prepared to be surprised.

Some of the biggest improvements will come from some of the unlikeliest people, once you get them engaged in “their” process of improvement rather than just being expected to implement somebody else’s.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.