Month: May 2019

Wendy, Kali and I also attended an ‘Inner Game Conference’ at the University of Hertfordshire on April 29th. Tim Gallwey ran the whole day and is famous for his best seller, ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’.  His ideas are at the forefront of what we do in coaching today moving from a ‘directional’ approach to letting the ‘player’ or coachee work it out for themselves.

The very basic premise is that we have a ‘Self 1’, which is our internal chatter or thoughts, and a ‘Self 2’, which is our inner wisdom or instinct.

Tim believes that we are natural learners, after all, who taught you how to walk? But, he says, our Self 1 lets interference get in the way of our performance.

He demonstrated the process in a couple of ways, firstly by getting someone to catch a tennis ball and, whilst doing so, asking her to watch the arc of the ball or notice the pattern on the ball. Whilst this occupied Self 1, Self 2 was able to learn how to catch the ball more often.

A second demonstration was with a woman who had a fear of doing presentations to large audiences. When she came up onto the platform she kept her back to the audience and only spoke with Tim. He asked her what she felt (fear) and how that manifested itself (heartbeat) and the scale of the fear from 1-10. Then he told her he was going to ask her to turn around and point out the audience members who were wearing glasses, which she did, looking at everyone because now her Self 1 was preoccupied. He then asked her to look for people with blue eyes and then to look for scary people. He then checked her fear levels which had gone down considerably. It was a fabulous activity to use for people who are nervous about presentations.

Anyway, more from us next time about the ‘Inner Game’ conference including how Wendy received a personal coaching session from Tim Gallwey.  For now, I would like to leave you with something Tim said at the conference:

When you are playing tennis, ‘Your friend will hit everything to your strong forehand.

Your enemy will hit everything to your weaker backhand – making it better. So, who is your friend?’

Well, it’s been a busy couple of months!  So much so that we are only just able to write and thank everyone who attended the 2019 NLP and Coaching Convention on April 5th.  The day was kicked off and hosted by Wendy and Kali who, as well as teaching us Norwegian, also introduced our keynote speaker Julie Starr.

 Julie gave an insight into her thinking as a coach. Her key themes were your ego and being aware of it; approaching the coachee’s neurological levels and identifying where the issue was, and then coaching at the level above that.

To follow are the neurological levels from which the coach identifies the issue. So if the problem is a belief, the coach could explore issues of identity, the coachee’s script and their belief system.

The place and the time and the people involved. You may be unsuccessful only in specific circumstances or with particular people.

It is what we do but includes thoughts and actions. Sometimes the behaviour is difficult to change because it is connected to other levels.

Capability lies within skills in both thinking strategies and physical skills. It is only visible in the resulting behaviour because it lies within you.

Beliefs are principles that guide actions, not what we say we believe but what we act on. They are what is important to us, health, happiness, love..

This is the sense of yourself, your core beliefs. It is built through life and is very resilient.

This is the realm of ethics, religion and spirituality

We then had several workshops before I did a session challenging the current thinking that negative emotions are ‘triggered’ by something outside of us when, actually, we are sending out ‘predictions’ depending on our current physiology, meaning we are totally responsible for our state.

A good day was had by 137 people and guess what? We already have the date set and the venue booked for next year on March 27th 2020.