May 19, 2020 • 49 mins
Just about anyone today can call themselves a coach. Michael traces this trend back to its source and finds out that the secret to effective coaching lies not in retraining the body, but the mind.
- We meet the original guru of “the inner game”: Timothy Gallwey, author of the 1974 classic, “The Inner Game of Tennis.”
- We find out how mental skills coaches only need one coaching toolkit to work with everyone from New York City firefighters, youth softball players, professional musicians, and even writers with a podcast.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Let's play a game. Line up Americans in a row,
all of them by how likely they are to start
a revolution. At the front of the line, you might
put let's say, a student activist, or an energetic member
of some aggrieved interest group, or some evil genius with
(00:37):
a knack for computer programming. At the back of the line,
you'd put who who among us is least likely to
go to the trouble of trying to change the world.
I don't know a lot of us are complacent, but
somewhere near the end of the line, I think we
can all agree we'd find the golf and tennis coaches
of America's country clubs. When I hired on to be
(01:01):
a tennis pro as a middle class country club in Seaside, California.
Tim Galway is the name of the board tennis pro
in this story. He's in his eighties now, but was
in his thirties when the story begins. It was four
o'clock in the afternoon. I've been teaching all day, not coaching,
(01:24):
and it keeps a little boring telling people where the
weight on their foot should be and where they should
hit the ball on the racket on the afternoon In question.
Tim was teaching a guy with a slice backhand who
wanted to learn how to hit topspin. The guy was
taking his racket back too high. Ordinarily, Tim Galway would
(01:47):
just have told the man, hey, don't take the racket
back too high, but he lost interest in the sound
of his own voice and pretty much everything else, so
he just kept quietly tossing balls at the guy's backhand.
Three or four minutes a strange thing had he was
hitting topspin back end and said nothing. But then I
(02:11):
said something in my head, you lazy bum, you missed
your chance. If you had only taught him before, then
you would have gotten the credit for his toss spin
back in. I said, wow, And this was maybe the
(02:33):
key point. I'm more interested in teaching than I am
in this student learning. That was the moment that Tim
Galway had an idea, because I just said, Okay, I'm
going to see how much improvement I can see in
front of me with how little teaching for reversing your
(02:57):
usual approach. How little can you tell them rather than
how much can you tell them exactly? So you have
this inside about yourself and your teaching methods, and you
just you're gonna do it a different way. You're going
to see how littlely you can say. How long do
you do that before you start to think I'm onto
something my next lesson. His next lesson is with a
(03:22):
complete beginner. She doesn't even know how to hold a
tennis racket. Goalie thinks maybe he shouldn't try out this
new idea coaching by not saying anything. Then he thinks, nah,
screw it, let's try this again. How can I start
a beginner without telling the fundamentals? And so I said,
(03:42):
I'll just drop a few and hit them so they'll
see me. They'll see me. I did that five or
six times, and she said, I noticed the first thing
you did was turned your right foot sideways. He said, yeah, yeah,
I don't worry about and just take these balls and
(04:04):
the do it. No, I did say shut your eyes
and see yourself hitting the ball. I didn't say like
I did. And this is the absolute She hit like this. This,
I mean everything I would have told. She didn't know
any different. Her foot didn't move. So the one thing
(04:26):
she consciously thought about, she didn't do exactly everything that
she was just kind of unconscious. She did said, oh
my god, not the one when did she do everything
without instruction, but she didn't do the one thing she
decided herself she should do. In the history of coaching,
(04:53):
this is a revolutionary moment. Who put chocolate in my
peanut butter moment. Galli discovers that performance is all about focus.
Focus on the wrong thing, and you'll do the wrong thing.
What shocks me what was to see Tennes's improving without
(05:16):
the student trying to improve. All I would do is
ask them awareness questions or give them awareness instruction. Awareness
instructions meaning saying stuff that caused them to focus on
what was useful, like where the ball was when it
hit the racket. People love Galway's weird tennis lessons. He
(05:39):
offered no criticism, no praise, hardly any talk at all,
just to nudge here and there, to silence the voices
inside their heads, the voices that caused them to tense up.
One day, one of the country club students blurted out,
you should write a book. Kim Galway had zero literary ambition,
(05:59):
but he did it. He wrote a book about how
to coach tennis. His text was one part Eastern mysticism
and one part practical advice on how to crush your
opponent on a tennis court. He thought about calling it
Yoga tennis. He wound up calling it The Inner Game
of Tennis. In the fall of nineteen seventy four, right
(06:22):
before his book came out, Galway asked his publisher how
many copies they hope to sell. Twenty thousand, they said two.
Three quarters later, I had got my third royalty statement
and I had gone from forty thousand to eighty thousand
to hundred thousand. And I went back to Random House
(06:44):
and I said, how come it was so wrong in
your estimates? And he said, well, we thought it was
a tennis book. The Inner Game of Tennis is not
a tennis book. It's something else, which is why it's
now sold something like two million copies. And Galway is
inundated with requests from people who want his help, because
(07:05):
inner voices torture all of us, not just country club
tennis players. I get asked to give a lecture about
the Inner Game to the Houston Philharmonic. I played no
classical instruments. At the end, they applaud politely, except for
(07:25):
the conductor who comes up and says, I'm not going
to believe this till I see it. And next thing
he says is who's going to volunteer for some coaching
from tim as Faye would have it. One tuba player
volunteered alone. Galway did the same thing with the tuba
(07:45):
player that he did on the tennis court. Sir, what
do you find most difficult in performing at your level
with the tuba? That's the one question that doesn't ruffle
the ego. You just say what's the hardest thing? Now,
things are, but what's the most difficult thing your level?
(08:10):
And so he says articulation in the upper range. Never
heard the phrase. And I say it was so hard
about that? Galway has not the first clue about playing
a brass instrument. He doesn't even know the words you
need to talk touba. It's all he can do to listen. Well,
(08:33):
you go, and uh it sounded good to me. I said,
so how is that in terms of clean articulation? He says, uh,
not so good. He said, so there was it was
(08:54):
dirty to some extent. How did you know, as mass Well,
I can't hear it because Bella the tube is too far,
but I can feel it in my tongue. My tongue
gets dry and it's towards feeling thick. Galway tells the
(09:15):
tuba player to stop trying to hear his own sounds
and to focus on his tongue. So I said, don't
try to keep it change. Just notice the changes and moisture.
It's only a few measures. Sounds about the same to me.
(09:45):
The whole orchestra gets up on their feet and gives
us standing ovation, and you can tell the different. So
I said, oh my god, this is easy. I know
nothing about tubeas nothing about classical music. I don't know.
(10:10):
And I got everything from him as I needed, and
it seemed like magic. Because now this is new. The
coach doesn't need to know the first thing about what's
being coached. All the coach needs is a gift for
playing around with people's minds. Two things follow from this.
(10:36):
Anyone can coach anything, and anyone doing anything now needs
a coach. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules,
a show about various authority figures in American life. This
season is about the rise of coaches, and this episode
(10:58):
is about the inner game. The first big leap that
game coaching makes is into the business world. Tim Galway
starts getting requests from corporations to help them figure out
how to coach their executives. In the early eighties, the
(11:21):
Bell telephone monopoly was being broken up. The new head
of AT and T Corners Galway on a tennis court.
He says, the people of AT and T now need
to learn how to compete. Just a few years earlier,
Galway had been nothing more than the local club tennis pro.
Now the head of one of the world's largest corporations
is inviting him to try to fix one of the
(11:42):
world's largest corporate cultures. He started out just saying everything
to change. So at the end of the two minutes,
summarize in everything from the top level to the bottom
level to change. He said, So, Tim, what's the problem?
(12:07):
Galway told him, point plank you the problems you your
whole bossing people around management style. A monopoly could get
away with being autocratic, but now that AT and T
had to compete in the marketplace, well, everyone needed to
stop listening to the boss's voice in their heads. The
leader is the interference. Tiffany Gaskell is director of coaching
(12:29):
and leadership at a British company called Performance Consultants International.
Tim Gaway helped to create the company thirty five years ago,
after all these corporations started asking him for advice. When
you're on the tennis court, you're in your head. That
voice is the one that's saying, oh, no, you're not
good enough to do this. In organizations, because the leader
(12:50):
is the one that knows the way, then the other
people don't know the way. Performance consultants is still at
the center of coaching the executive mind, but the inner
game has become an industry. Gaskell guesses there are roughly
a quarter million of these coaches worldwide, helping business people
deal with the voices in their heads that make them
(13:11):
worse at their jobs. I was working with the managing
director of a waste company, waste management company, and every
month they were missing their recycling targets, and so we
sat down and he said, okay, so what's going on here?
We're missing our recycling targets. And he explored his own
(13:34):
beliefs around recycling and realized that he just didn't believe
in it because he said, you know, we're just sending
it on a boat to China. It's not really solving
the problem. Here. We have a common source of interference,
not really wanting to do the thing you were meant
to be doing because you don't believe in it. The
performance coach helped the waste management boss created a recycling
(13:57):
program that he could be proud of, and from then
on they hit their recycling targets. That's interesting. I mean
one response to this would be just to quit the
waste management business. But he didn't do that. He found
a better way to recycle. Yeah, and finding a better
way to recycle eliminated this interference he had that he
(14:19):
hadn't fully acknowledged that the whole thing was pointless. Yes, exactly.
So It's like, as we become aware of stuff, then
we can we have a choice and responsibility to do
something about it or not about now. I can hear
Bobby Knight throwing a chair across the room. I mean,
(14:39):
what is this bullshit? It all started on some country
club tennis court. And these mind coaches or performance coaches,
or wherever you want to call them, they've only got
a few simple ideas that they repeat over and over.
The voice inside your head needs to be managed. Screw that.
I don't have time for headcases. Criticism and praise are
equally counterproductive, as they both amplify the inner critic. Suck
(15:02):
it up, you whimp. Focus your attention on things you
can control rather than the things you cannot. Work your
ass off, and you'll control everything. On the other hand,
Bobby Knight might be shocked by who's finding this stuff useful?
(15:27):
Before the Break, I talked about how coaches are now
being brought in to help people who've never had coaches before.
We are what we repeatedly do excellence that has done
an act, but a habit. So we don't rise to
the occasion. We sing to our training. Right. You gotta
put together effective routines to operate well under pressure. There's
a mental game of firefighting huge. That's Jason Bresler, former
(15:52):
baseball player at the US Naval Academy, lieutenant in the
Marine Corps. Fought in the Battle of Fallujah, fought other
battles in Afghanistan. In between battles, he joined the New
York City Fire Department, where he now fights fires, among
other things. To challenge that our generation has is one
is the complexity of these events that we go to.
(16:13):
They're just ever increasing into complexity because there's the active
shooter threat, there's terrorism, there's transportation accidents, there's biological exposure.
All these like, it's we do far more than just
go to fires. No, two emergencies are the same, but
they all have one thing in common, an inner game.
All right, more stressful at time? Hopefully what do we
(16:35):
think stressful? Why? By my heart rate was elevated, I
was I esk guys like, do you ever have a
negative conversation with your with yourself? You know, like in
a moment where you're just like, don't suck, right, or
now you make a mistake and you're like, I freaking suck.
And universally, every single guy, particularly the most experienced guys
(16:58):
that have been to so many fires, and they say
yeah all the time. Jason fights fires himself, but he
also helps to run the training programs for firefighters, and
he noticed that firefighters didn't usually dwell on their inner states.
They fought fires, and they didn't talk about the conversations
they had with themselves when they did it. And at
first they looked at me like I was kind of crazy, right,
(17:18):
I'd say, well, hold on a second, hold on a second,
do you recognize that conversation isn't at least bit helpful?
And everyone would say yeah, I'm like, well, is it
easy to change that conversation? And they're like hell No.
All of them were game to be coached about a
thing they hadn't ever really put into words. So Jason
brought in a twenty nine year old mind coach named
(17:39):
Ben Oliva. One of the things we're trying to do
here is speed up the path to being an expert.
So this coach wears jeans and a hoodie with a
kangaroo pouch. He'd never fought a fire. He'd never been
in a fire. He might have started a fire to
roast marshmallows or something. He knows fires the way Tim
(18:02):
Galway knew tubas. But he's talking to a group of
firefighters who seemed to believe he could make them better
at their jobs. I think is the difference between routines
and superstitions. Okay, so I'm going to suggest that there
is a difference. Ben has a laptop and a power point.
(18:25):
The firefighters sit in a semicircle around him. Firefighters always
seem like they're waiting for something to happen. Okay, So
if you're you're a superstition. If you don't do it,
you can't perform well. Yea like a lapse of your
routine is going to throw you off right, kind of
like they're tied together. What if this happens, some this
won't happen. You're pointing to an important point here, which
is that superstitions often give us the impression that we
(18:49):
cannot be successful if we don't do them, whereas routines
are more flexible. Ben studied astrophysics and psychology at Williams College,
where he also played baseball and football. That Williams, he
noticed that some of his teammates were just way better
in practice than they were in games. Why was that
he left Williams and got a masters in sports psychology.
(19:11):
Now he coaches the minds of players for the Boston
Red Sox and the New York Giants. Also a bunch
of lawyers and doctors and some actors and singers you've
heard of. Bene Leavitt does the same work with firefighters
that he does with everyone else, starting with trying to
eliminate interference distractors. One are the things that pop in
your head. They end up posing on that you don't
(19:33):
have full control. Decisions that a fire that already have
been made in executy, past decisions, other people's readiness, other
people's readiness. Okay, so like other people's performance. Yeah yeah,
other people time of year. So external factors in the environment,
whether excellently. That throws so many apps up. Oh it's gold.
(19:57):
I can't play well. One of the guys had girls.
That one gets me a lot. There's one, a really
big one that I'd like to point out that we
haven't hit yet. Past mistakes, past mistakes. I can sort
of understand baseball players getting hung up that way, they're
(20:19):
all head cases. But firefighters tactical technique. He's not going
to make us a better firefighter. Jason Bressler Again, he
says he can see the effect mind coaching has on
the way that fires get fought. In the course of
adopting these techniques and applying them, we're likely to become
a better version of ourself, which then inevitably is going
to make us a better firefighter. Who doesn't want to
accomplish that. Plus, it's like you're nobody unless you have
(20:44):
a mine coach. That's gonna be part of this, right,
I mean, if everyone else has a mind coach and
you don't, how can you compete? How do I compete? Hey,
Michael hold up? Just need to adjust your mic rolling
in Berkeley. So I've just made you performance coach against
(21:04):
the rules. You are our podcast performance coach, and I
bring you in for the first conversation and you come
sit in our studio. What are the things you ask
me to try to figure out? Try to diagnose? And Okay, so, um,
should we should we do this? Should we do? Like? Um, yes,
(21:27):
let's do this. Tiffany Gaskell of Performance Consultants International. I
just finished interviewing her and was about to let her go.
But you can't talk to one of these mine coaches
for long before you start thinking about new uses to
which they might be put. Yeah, because none of the
people who've worked on the podcast have improved in any way.
So they're just trapped in their own little worlds. And
(21:49):
I just think, I think what I think of them,
and but nobody's made any progress at all. So it
would be nice if we could go somewhere I don't
know where, so help us. So I'm just putting my
hand on my head because um, there was um. So
they come from, right, That's the first thing that's really port.
(22:09):
The first thing is that it is not a remedial thing.
So Michael Um, in terms of me coaching you, then
it's like I'm going on a journey with you and
walk walking down a path. So what I would ask
is that essentially we work on you, not all the
(22:31):
people around you. See what I mean? All right? The leaders,
the interference I almost forgot. Okay, so let's start this. So, Michael,
if you had something you wanted to be coached on,
what would that be? You mean, how would I like
to improve? Is that the question? Um? Yes, that's a
(22:52):
good one. Here's here's one. It's it's not huge, but
it's noticeable. I don't like the way I am can
be distracted by small irritations. A microcosm of this is
just driving. My ideal state as a driver is detached
(23:12):
amusement at the poor habits of other drivers. I have
trouble staying in that ideal state and not not descending
into bitterness and fury on the road. So that's just
an example. But I assume if I'm that way in
the car, I'm that way with other things, and I
don't see any benefit to the bitterness and anger I
(23:36):
feel towards others when they are inept. Okay, that's a
great thing for us to work on. Okay, you're ready
to go. Yes, So um, Let's imagine that you are
sitting in the car. We're doing your dream scenario. Now, Okay,
I've got my eyes closed, great, me too. You're sitting
(23:59):
in the car and everything is just as you'd love
it to be. Tell me about what that feels like.
It feels like being in a sensory deprivation chamber where
I'm alone with my thoughts and the car is almost
just driving itself. So you are enjoying being with yourself,
(24:24):
moving along, getting to where you're going to m And
in terms of like our goal for the end of this,
let's say that something happens outside of your little bubble.
How is it you stay in your bubble? How would
I stay in my bubble if I was trying to
(24:44):
stay in my bubble? Well, if I'm in a good
state of mind, I laugh. I see someone run a
four way stop, or someone tailgating me, or an ancient
person going three miles an hour, and I think different
strokes for different folks. Isn't it got detachment? The detachment?
(25:07):
You're detached. I'm detached, That's the way I Otherwise I
start to get upset. And when you get upset, what's
there instead m a desire to reek reek vengeance and
a kind of fury that is just inexplicable given what's happened. Okay,
I desire to let them know just how awful they
(25:29):
are as human beings. Okay, so we got judgment right there.
Right there, you go a lot of judgment. Okay, So
there's the detached happy place. There's the judgment hell place.
Is that right? Yeah? True? Okay, yea. So um, let's
just get back into your detached happy place. I mean,
(25:52):
I'm there. Great. Just tell me about this bubble. What's
going on inside the bubble? Yeah? What's the bubble? Like
the bubbles playful? You could also be seriously playful in
the bubble. I'm thinking about uh famla, or I'm thinking about,
more commonly, something i'm working on, like this long scene
(26:14):
in the middle of this episode. I could be thinking
about whether to let this tape just play or insert
some narration to break it up. But I'm not because
of the noise in my head. Okay. So have you
got your feet on the ground toes? Yes? Great, So
just putting your feet on the ground, do you feel
(26:35):
that connection with the ground and staying in the bubble
and just really feeling this positivity and the bubble around you.
What color is a bubble? Blue? Light blue, kind of
a sky blue, and so you've got that all around you.
(26:58):
It could be pink too. What's the feeling in this bubble?
It's warm and cozy. Great, no negativity? Yeah, no negativity.
And on a scale of one to ten, how strong
are you feeling this right now at this very moment, yes,
(27:20):
call it an eight. So what we want to do
now is find a point on your body which you
can associate this feeling with. So you've got your feet
flat on the ground and you can feel this is
resonating around you, isn't it the bubble? Mhmm? Sometimes blue,
sometimes pink, but yes, it's resonating. And so where's the
(27:43):
place on your body that you can, like, for example,
your chest, to access this feeling. If you keep mentioning
my chest, it's hard for me to think of anything
but my sorry about I'm feeling. Yes, I feel like
I am being led to my chest where it might
be who knows where it might be, my tip of
my nose or my little toe could be anywhere for it. Um,
(28:04):
I would actually say, my toes great, and to tell
me about that, tell me about your toes, And well,
normally your toasts take your toes for granted, right unless
they're injured or they're unsightly and you don't have shoes on.
But otherwise you don't really think about your toes. They're
in your shoes. But when you're really aware of your
(28:26):
body and you wiggle your toes inside your shoe, it's
a it's a very distinct sensation, and it's a it
makes you feel very self aware. So I'm wiggling my
toes inside my shoes and it's giving me pleasure. Can
that give you access to the bubble? It might? It might.
It might also cause me to hit the accelerator a
(28:48):
little fast in the car. But but it's it's um
But yes, absolutely, I could work on connecting the feeling
of the wiggly toes to the bubble. So my request
to you is that next time you aren't driving, that
this is what you do, all right, when your face
with a situation that could get you into that judgment place,
(29:13):
I promise I will do it. It seemed like such
a simple request, but the inner game is not as
easy as it looks I came to this episode with
(29:34):
one question, why why are these inner game coaches now everywhere?
I mean, they used not to exist, and it's not
as if they required some new technology to make them possible.
Leonardo da Vinci could have had this kind of coaching. Now.
There was a guy with interference issues, hardly finished anything
he started. Maybe if he'd had a mind coach, Saudi
(29:56):
Princes would not have to shell out four hundred and
fifty million dollars for fake Leonardo's because there'd be so
many real ones to choose from. Anyway, here's a thought.
This explosion in mind coaching first required that a scide
give itself over entirely to markets. It needed life to
be seen as one giant winner take all competition. It
(30:18):
needed a new kind of anxiety. So you feel like
you've put a ton of time into the physical side,
but the mental side you haven't had that much direction.
In training, Ben Oliva trainer of pro baseball players and
Wall Street traders and New York City firefighters. He spends
(30:40):
a shocking amount of his time coaching young people, teenagers
who have somehow become swept up in our general performance
anxiety and so you're interested in figuring out, Yeah, what
you can do to get better from that? I know
about you from what your dad told me. But here's
the thing. I work with lots of high school athletes
(31:01):
and parents are kind of unreliable source. Yeah, so I'm
not going to fully rely on what he was telling me. Okay,
the girl is a seventeen year old high school softball player.
She's hoping to be recruited to play at elite colleges.
She thinks her father can't help her. But that's not new.
(31:22):
Teenagers have always found their parents to be mostly useless.
What's new is their urgent need to optimize their performance.
We're going to refocus like we're training a puppy. If
we're going to train your mind like we train a
puppy all time us for two minutes, my suggestion is
you close your eyes. You do not have to on
your marks. Good, said guy. I'll do it. These sessions
(31:47):
are usually confidential, but he's made an exception here because
the girl is my daughter, Dixie. A lot of the
time when I go to bed, I have a bunch
of things on my mind. So I was like, well,
this is kind of a form of meditation. Let's see
if I can. Because when we did it, like, all
I really had to focus on was that I wasn't
(32:08):
thinking about the test I just studied for, or like
the practice SUCH just had. So I definitely had to
restart a lot. We live in Berkeley, California, so a
lot of Dixie's teachers already make her meditate. If they
gave Olympic medals and meditation, we might just sweep. We'd
(32:29):
also win recycling. Okay, So when you got distracted and
then brought your attention back. Yeah. One of the other
pieces of this is noticing if you judge yourself right,
distracted right, because one of the bigger themes here is
trying to manage our self judgment, usually in a way
that's actually helpful for us rather than unhelpful. Yeah. I
(32:52):
know she's my child because when she's told to meditate,
her first reaction is to win at it. She may
never have heard of Bill Parcels, the legendary football coach,
but she'd agree with his most famous line, you are
what your record says you are. Okay, So what's the
problem with judging our success based on outcomes? Well, we
(33:16):
get into a mindset where we think we're supposed to
get on base every time one and that's like, are
you kind of a perfectionist in that way? Well, that's
the thing. It's like, I don't like that's definitely how
I am a lot more in high school. So that's
the problem of judging ourselves based on outcomes is that
(33:37):
we lose track of the things that get us the
best outcomes. So by focusing all our energy on the outcomes,
we end up getting worse outcomes. Yeah, it's really kind
of twisted. It's even more twisted than that. My child
has been engaged in this insane competition for the attention
of college coaches since she was thirteen years old. The
(33:59):
pressure on her grows every year. She has the sense
that any given at bat might cause a coach to
love her or to hate, and thus determine the course
of life. Every weekend, Dixie travels with your club softball team.
It's one of the best teams in the country, and
it plays against the other best teams. Wherever they play,
college coaches gather to watch, but only because they are
(34:21):
one of the best teams. If they started losing all
the time, they wouldn't be invited to play against the
best teams, and no one would want to see them
play except maybe their parents. Lose, and the coach from
your dream school might never see how good you really are.
To get a sense of what it feels like to
be inside my child's dugout, probably also inside her head.
(34:44):
We stuck a wire on her coach, who was reacting
to some screw up by one of Dixie's teammates. That
one wasn't even any of dirt, and you missed it.
Get around the fucking blood. Don't be positivity. Shut up,
so I'll give you positivity. I know you want to
call child Protective Services. And if Dixie's coach said this
sort of stuff inside of an institution a high school, say,
(35:06):
or college, some parent would complain and should be FI.
But you know who'd be the most upset if that
happened her players. Well, when you know her, you don't
take any of that really seriously, like if that makes sense,
like that's just her, Like it's not you don't you
just can't take it personally, is it was it harder
(35:30):
to sort of keep your mind in the right place
when you had a coach that you were intimidated by.
That's me obviously talking with Dixie in the car after
a softball practice. I mean I was intimidated by her
in the beginning, like the very beginning, but it was
more I just really didn't want to disappoint her. If
(35:51):
she's not yelling at you, then you're doing something wrong.
If she's not noticing you, then that's a bad sign.
Why is that? Because she's not paying attention to you.
She's like, she doesn't care what you're doing. She If
she's paying attention to you and yelling at you, it
means she cares. And that's the most important part. Oh
(36:13):
my god, we're living this fucking team here. We have
a paradox. Why don't you try to seeing them all?
That will be a good strategy is to actually look
at it. Play at the highest levels of any competitive sport,
you'll hear a lot of this sort of critical voice.
You might even sense that you need to hear this
voice to push you to places that you never push yourself.
(36:37):
The paradox is that you also need to silence that voice,
at least inside your own head. This comes up over
and over again in Dixie sessions with Ben, how much
she cares about her coaches, but how hard it is
to stay calm in their presence and how hard it
is to play well when you're not calm. I'm really
hard on myself for some reason, like on that team
(37:00):
with the coaches that I had, Like it's almost like
I had like so much respect for them that I
didn't want to let them down because like and my coaches.
And then another thing I do definitely when I'm nervous
is like I don't know, like my eyes almost like
freeze and it's really stressful because I have like naturally
(37:24):
really good hand eye coordination, and so I'll still hit
the ball, but I know if my eyes were on it,
I would have hit it a lot better. Right, So
think about that. That means your attention is somewhere in
the future on what if this happens, what if that happens,
rather than on the present moment actually on trying to
(37:45):
pick that ball up right out of her view. So
let's do an exercise just to show you that you
have control of your attention when you are aware of it. Right,
So what's your attention talking to you? Right? I would
hope that it's on me at least for the most part.
But if we want to write, I can tell you
(38:05):
to shift your attention to the way that the seat
feels underneath you, the way that your weight feels on
that seat. That's really a weird thing to pay attention to, right, Yeah,
And it would be weird if you were sitting here
talking to me paying attention to that sensation. Yeah, that
would be like a really weird thing to be doing. Yet.
(38:29):
But you can do it if you want to, right,
Or you can just wiggle your toes. The point is
that Dixie can learn to pay attention to the things
that are useful, to pay attention to her breath, for example,
or the ball as it leaves the pitcher's hand. Just
as the tuba player can stop trying to listen to
his own music and focus on his tongue, Dixie needs
(38:52):
to find the thing that helps to focus on. I
don't know what the right focused cues are. This is personal,
it's individualized. There's there's not focused cues that are best
for everybody. But you just told me you hit your
best when you're aggressive and loose. That sounds like a
killer focused kid. Ben and Dixie spoke over Skype every
(39:13):
week for months, just the two of them. We taped
only a few of these sessions, and even then we
didn't listen in. But one day, when I was driving
her home after softball practice, I asked her how it
was going, and she told me that when she stepped
into the batter's box, she now had a phrase in
her head, loose and aggressive. And is it like, how
(39:34):
do you say it the way you would say it
to yourself? Like you hear it in your head? Loose
and aggressive, loose and aggressive. Loose and aggressive. So it's light,
it's not loud. Yeah, what would have been in your
head before you did those drills with him? Don't swing
(39:55):
and miss, you have to move the runner, don't fuck up,
don't look at your coach. Typically things that started with
don't get rid of the don't That's what Ben had
(40:17):
been teaching her. The new strategy gets this trial run
into tournament being inspected by roughly fifty college softball coaches.
The opposing team's pitcher has already signed with the University
of Texas. She lights out, her dropball drops, her rise
ball rises, and her fastball comes in at sixty five
miles an hour, which is the equivalent of a ninety
four mile an hour fastball and baseball Dixie's teammates all
(40:40):
have trouble dealing with it. Everyone's striking out, her swinging late.
Everything feels like it's happening too fast. Dixie now comes
to the plate. There we go next day, Get on time.
The first pitch is a fastball, high and inside, just
extremely hard to react to quickly enough to hit hard.
A month earlier, she'd have been frozen by it. Oh,
(41:02):
you did it. That's the sound of it. Hit. It's
a rocket down the left field line. She didn't just
not freeze, she was ahead of it. She never reacted
so quickly to a pitch in her entire life. After
the game, I didn't say anything about it. I'd read
the inner game of Tennis, and the last thing my
daughter needed was another voice in her head. She'd been
(41:23):
coached to stop thinking and trust her reactions, which can
be hard for a smart person to do. But eventually
I debriefed her, asked her what she thought had happened.
I developed a routine that acted kind of like a
safety net for me, Like knowing that I had a
plan made me know if I executed it or not,
(41:45):
and so having that as my goal instead of focusing
on the outcome it made it a lot easier to
not be hard on myself because I was like, well,
I executed my plan, I did everything I was supposed
to do, and it just didn't work out. And that's
how this game works. So I just have to let
it go and do the same thing next time. And right,
(42:06):
you know, like because it made me realize that I
cannot control everything. Right, my daughter is saying I cannot
control everything of her own free will. And I'm sitting
in the driver's seat about to drive home from softball practice,
wiggling my toes at every intersection instead of screaming at
the other drivers. And yet there's still a part of
(42:28):
me that thinks there is just no way this shit
can work. Explain to me why people didn't figure this
out five hundred years ago. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it.
Tiffany Gaskell again, creator of my pink road rage bubble.
People have cared about performance for a long time. Why
wasn't Sir Lancelot when he was jousting, Why wasn't he
(42:51):
wiggling his toes or clenching his abs or I don't understand.
I'm thinking about the evolution of humankind, and I'm thinking
that we are in a place now where we are
you know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. There you go
so basically like once you've got various stuff to can
care of, so that's like survival, than we're going relationships,
(43:12):
than we're going up to relationships with other and then
we can go into the place where we can self actualize.
And I think that a lot of the developed world
is in that place right now. Are you just smuggling
therapy into people's lives by calling it coaching and making
them feel better about it? Well, actually, therapy is more
about things that have happened to you in the past
(43:35):
that you're trying to deal with, and coaching is really
about okay, going forward. You know, there's a saying which
is therapy is a path of tears and coaching is
the path of laughter. There was one other surprise in
all this. It occurred to me as I watched Dixie play.
It had taken me longer to notice, and I was
(43:56):
more hesitant to credit her inner game coach for it,
even though the change was entirely in her mind. It
seemed like she was aggressive there. Then had come to
Southern California on other business and I dragged him out
to see Dixie play. He said he didn't usually do
this because he got so wrapped up in outcomes and
started doing stuff that was counterproductive to his coaching, like cheering.
(44:19):
Praise was bad because it was still judge. Anyway, we
were standing along the left field fence, surrounded on all
sides by college scouts and anxious parents and screaming coaches.
Me trying not to care too much about what was
going on on the field. Ben actually not caring too much.
Since she started talking to you, she's been the two
things I've noticed. One is she's been much more aggressive
(44:43):
in the zone without losing her discipline. So her at
bats have been very good. The outcome has not always
been what she'd hope, but it's been fine. I mean,
she's hit well pretty well. But the other thing is
I think she's starting to learn not to be hard
on herself. It's our focus, and where I notice it
(45:05):
is it when she's hard on herself, it's an express
have a more general trait, which is she's very judgmental.
She's hard on a lot of people. She's critical, and
so she will sit there and be meant. She won't
say it, but she'll have thoughts about her, critical thoughts
about her teammates, and of course critical thoughts about her
parents and m and learning to take that off herself.
(45:30):
She's been noticeably nicer to me, like like all of
a sudden, Tabitha turn to me a couple of weeks
ago and said, who is this child? And so it's
I don't want to give you that much credit yet,
and who knows how long last. And I've not said
a word to her about any of this, but it's
been it's been really surprising to see just a little
(45:53):
bit of hesitation before she goes into the critical negative mode.
Winnings great, so's kindness. That kindness might help you to win. Well,
you gotta love that. It looks like we're playing fucking
a B tenant under team and it's two to nothing.
(46:15):
They are like seven hundred softball coaches in Northern California
that Dixie could have played for. There's a reason she
insists on playing for this particular coach. It's not always
easy or pleasant, but there's a point to it. Tim
Galway might say the coach was creating interference. Dixie would too,
but she thinks the interference is important to have you
(46:36):
know that's bullshit. That's a bullshit approach to life. We
can benefit from interference. We need coaches who teach us
how to be comfortable being uncomfortable in a way our
parents don't and probably shouldn't do. You need to stop
being a lazy piece of shit and get around the
ball and get your ass up and block and work
for your picture or I'm going to kick your ass.
(46:59):
Got its? The trick is to let their voice into
your head and then let it out again, use it,
learn from it, then learn to mute it. Yeah, Miya's
going to get ahead in account and throw so fast, Stayley,
so fast, luc agressive, blue senecrest. Oh, I'm Michael Lewis.
(47:36):
Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced
by Audrey Dilling and Katherine Gerardo, with research assistance from Lydia,
Jane Cott, and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Mia Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed
(47:58):
by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagon Symphonette. We
got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded
by Tofa Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley.
We got recording helped this episode in Milwaukee from Jaw
Media and Neo Soul Productions. Special thanks to Deputy Chief
Dan Lipski and Eric Nurnberg of the Milwaukee Fire Department
(48:22):
and Jason Brasler, Christopher g iSER, and Ralph Longo of
the New York City Fire Department. As always, thanks to
Pushkin's founders, without whom I would not exist, Jacob Weisberg
and Malcolm Gladwell. My dad is totally oblivious to it too,
Like he's just working out in the other room where
I was originally setting up recording. He's like, no, no, no,
(48:44):
you have to get out here. I'm working out, And
I was like, Dad, I'm doing this for you. Also
like I have this Mica, but yeah, I just switch
around everything. What are you doing? That's hilarious. No,
Pushkin. Let's play a game. Line up Americans in a row,
all of them by how likely they are to start
a revolution. At the front of the line, you might
put let's say, a student activist, or an energetic member
of some aggrieved interest group, or some evil genius with
(00:37):
a knack for computer programming. At the back of the line,
you'd put who who among us is least likely to
go to the trouble of trying to change the world.
I don't know a lot of us are complacent, but
somewhere near the end of the line, I think we
can all agree we'd find the golf and tennis coaches
of America's country clubs. When I hired on to be
(01:01):
a tennis pro as a middle class country club in Seaside, California.
Tim Galway is the name of the board tennis pro
in this story. He's in his eighties now, but was
in his thirties when the story begins. It was four
o'clock in the afternoon. I've been teaching all day, not coaching,
(01:24):
and it keeps a little boring telling people where the
weight on their foot should be and where they should
hit the ball on the racket on the afternoon In question.
Tim was teaching a guy with a slice backhand who
wanted to learn how to hit topspin. The guy was
taking his racket back too high. Ordinarily, Tim Galway would
(01:47):
just have told the man, hey, don't take the racket
back too high, but he lost interest in the sound
of his own voice and pretty much everything else, so
he just kept quietly tossing balls at the guy's backhand.
Three or four minutes a strange thing had he was
hitting topspin back end and said nothing. But then I
(02:11):
said something in my head, you lazy bum, you missed
your chance. If you had only taught him before, then
you would have gotten the credit for his toss spin
back in. I said, wow, And this was maybe the
(02:33):
key point. I'm more interested in teaching than I am
in this student learning. That was the moment that Tim
Galway had an idea, because I just said, Okay, I'm
going to see how much improvement I can see in
front of me with how little teaching for reversing your
(02:57):
usual approach. How little can you tell them rather than
how much can you tell them exactly? So you have
this inside about yourself and your teaching methods, and you
just you're gonna do it a different way. You're going
to see how littlely you can say. How long do
you do that before you start to think I'm onto
something my next lesson. His next lesson is with a
(03:22):
complete beginner. She doesn't even know how to hold a
tennis racket. Goalie thinks maybe he shouldn't try out this
new idea coaching by not saying anything. Then he thinks, nah,
screw it, let's try this again. How can I start
a beginner without telling the fundamentals? And so I said,
(03:42):
I'll just drop a few and hit them so they'll
see me. They'll see me. I did that five or
six times, and she said, I noticed the first thing
you did was turned your right foot sideways. He said, yeah, yeah,
I don't worry about and just take these balls and
(04:04):
the do it. No, I did say shut your eyes
and see yourself hitting the ball. I didn't say like
I did. And this is the absolute She hit like this. This,
I mean everything I would have told. She didn't know
any different. Her foot didn't move. So the one thing
(04:26):
she consciously thought about, she didn't do exactly everything that
she was just kind of unconscious. She did said, oh
my god, not the one when did she do everything
without instruction, but she didn't do the one thing she
decided herself she should do. In the history of coaching,
(04:53):
this is a revolutionary moment. Who put chocolate in my
peanut butter moment. Galli discovers that performance is all about focus.
Focus on the wrong thing, and you'll do the wrong thing.
What shocks me what was to see Tennes's improving without
(05:16):
the student trying to improve. All I would do is
ask them awareness questions or give them awareness instruction. Awareness
instructions meaning saying stuff that caused them to focus on
what was useful, like where the ball was when it
hit the racket. People love Galway's weird tennis lessons. He
(05:39):
offered no criticism, no praise, hardly any talk at all,
just to nudge here and there, to silence the voices
inside their heads, the voices that caused them to tense up.
One day, one of the country club students blurted out,
you should write a book. Kim Galway had zero literary ambition,
(05:59):
but he did it. He wrote a book about how
to coach tennis. His text was one part Eastern mysticism
and one part practical advice on how to crush your
opponent on a tennis court. He thought about calling it
Yoga tennis. He wound up calling it The Inner Game
of Tennis. In the fall of nineteen seventy four, right
(06:22):
before his book came out, Galway asked his publisher how
many copies they hope to sell. Twenty thousand, they said two.
Three quarters later, I had got my third royalty statement
and I had gone from forty thousand to eighty thousand
to hundred thousand. And I went back to Random House
(06:44):
and I said, how come it was so wrong in
your estimates? And he said, well, we thought it was
a tennis book. The Inner Game of Tennis is not
a tennis book. It's something else, which is why it's
now sold something like two million copies. And Galway is
inundated with requests from people who want his help, because
(07:05):
inner voices torture all of us, not just country club
tennis players. I get asked to give a lecture about
the Inner Game to the Houston Philharmonic. I played no
classical instruments. At the end, they applaud politely, except for
(07:25):
the conductor who comes up and says, I'm not going
to believe this till I see it. And next thing
he says is who's going to volunteer for some coaching
from tim as Faye would have it. One tuba player
volunteered alone. Galway did the same thing with the tuba
(07:45):
player that he did on the tennis court. Sir, what
do you find most difficult in performing at your level
with the tuba? That's the one question that doesn't ruffle
the ego. You just say what's the hardest thing? Now,
things are, but what's the most difficult thing your level?
(08:10):
And so he says articulation in the upper range. Never
heard the phrase. And I say it was so hard
about that? Galway has not the first clue about playing
a brass instrument. He doesn't even know the words you
need to talk touba. It's all he can do to listen. Well,
(08:33):
you go, and uh it sounded good to me. I said,
so how is that in terms of clean articulation? He says, uh,
not so good. He said, so there was it was
(08:54):
dirty to some extent. How did you know, as mass Well,
I can't hear it because Bella the tube is too far,
but I can feel it in my tongue. My tongue
gets dry and it's towards feeling thick. Galway tells the
(09:15):
tuba player to stop trying to hear his own sounds
and to focus on his tongue. So I said, don't
try to keep it change. Just notice the changes and moisture.
It's only a few measures. Sounds about the same to me.
(09:45):
The whole orchestra gets up on their feet and gives
us standing ovation, and you can tell the different. So
I said, oh my god, this is easy. I know
nothing about tubeas nothing about classical music. I don't know.
(10:10):
And I got everything from him as I needed, and
it seemed like magic. Because now this is new. The
coach doesn't need to know the first thing about what's
being coached. All the coach needs is a gift for
playing around with people's minds. Two things follow from this.
(10:36):
Anyone can coach anything, and anyone doing anything now needs
a coach. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules,
a show about various authority figures in American life. This
season is about the rise of coaches, and this episode
(10:58):
is about the inner game. The first big leap that
game coaching makes is into the business world. Tim Galway
starts getting requests from corporations to help them figure out
how to coach their executives. In the early eighties, the
(11:21):
Bell telephone monopoly was being broken up. The new head
of AT and T Corners Galway on a tennis court.
He says, the people of AT and T now need
to learn how to compete. Just a few years earlier,
Galway had been nothing more than the local club tennis pro.
Now the head of one of the world's largest corporations
is inviting him to try to fix one of the
(11:42):
world's largest corporate cultures. He started out just saying everything
to change. So at the end of the two minutes,
summarize in everything from the top level to the bottom
level to change. He said, So, Tim, what's the problem?
(12:07):
Galway told him, point plank you the problems you your
whole bossing people around management style. A monopoly could get
away with being autocratic, but now that AT and T
had to compete in the marketplace, well, everyone needed to
stop listening to the boss's voice in their heads. The
leader is the interference. Tiffany Gaskell is director of coaching
(12:29):
and leadership at a British company called Performance Consultants International.
Tim Gaway helped to create the company thirty five years ago,
after all these corporations started asking him for advice. When
you're on the tennis court, you're in your head. That
voice is the one that's saying, oh, no, you're not
good enough to do this. In organizations, because the leader
(12:50):
is the one that knows the way, then the other
people don't know the way. Performance consultants is still at
the center of coaching the executive mind, but the inner
game has become an industry. Gaskell guesses there are roughly
a quarter million of these coaches worldwide, helping business people
deal with the voices in their heads that make them
(13:11):
worse at their jobs. I was working with the managing
director of a waste company, waste management company, and every
month they were missing their recycling targets, and so we
sat down and he said, okay, so what's going on here?
We're missing our recycling targets. And he explored his own
(13:34):
beliefs around recycling and realized that he just didn't believe
in it because he said, you know, we're just sending
it on a boat to China. It's not really solving
the problem. Here. We have a common source of interference,
not really wanting to do the thing you were meant
to be doing because you don't believe in it. The
performance coach helped the waste management boss created a recycling
(13:57):
program that he could be proud of, and from then
on they hit their recycling targets. That's interesting. I mean
one response to this would be just to quit the
waste management business. But he didn't do that. He found
a better way to recycle. Yeah, and finding a better
way to recycle eliminated this interference he had that he
(14:19):
hadn't fully acknowledged that the whole thing was pointless. Yes, exactly.
So It's like, as we become aware of stuff, then
we can we have a choice and responsibility to do
something about it or not about now. I can hear
Bobby Knight throwing a chair across the room. I mean,
(14:39):
what is this bullshit? It all started on some country
club tennis court. And these mind coaches or performance coaches,
or wherever you want to call them, they've only got
a few simple ideas that they repeat over and over.
The voice inside your head needs to be managed. Screw that.
I don't have time for headcases. Criticism and praise are
equally counterproductive, as they both amplify the inner critic. Suck
(15:02):
it up, you whimp. Focus your attention on things you
can control rather than the things you cannot. Work your
ass off, and you'll control everything. On the other hand,
Bobby Knight might be shocked by who's finding this stuff useful?
(15:27):
Before the Break, I talked about how coaches are now
being brought in to help people who've never had coaches before.
We are what we repeatedly do excellence that has done
an act, but a habit. So we don't rise to
the occasion. We sing to our training. Right. You gotta
put together effective routines to operate well under pressure. There's
a mental game of firefighting huge. That's Jason Bresler, former
(15:52):
baseball player at the US Naval Academy, lieutenant in the
Marine Corps. Fought in the Battle of Fallujah, fought other
battles in Afghanistan. In between battles, he joined the New
York City Fire Department, where he now fights fires, among
other things. To challenge that our generation has is one
is the complexity of these events that we go to.
(16:13):
They're just ever increasing into complexity because there's the active
shooter threat, there's terrorism, there's transportation accidents, there's biological exposure.
All these like, it's we do far more than just
go to fires. No, two emergencies are the same, but
they all have one thing in common, an inner game.
All right, more stressful at time? Hopefully what do we
(16:35):
think stressful? Why? By my heart rate was elevated, I
was I esk guys like, do you ever have a
negative conversation with your with yourself? You know, like in
a moment where you're just like, don't suck, right, or
now you make a mistake and you're like, I freaking suck.
And universally, every single guy, particularly the most experienced guys
(16:58):
that have been to so many fires, and they say
yeah all the time. Jason fights fires himself, but he
also helps to run the training programs for firefighters, and
he noticed that firefighters didn't usually dwell on their inner states.
They fought fires, and they didn't talk about the conversations
they had with themselves when they did it. And at
first they looked at me like I was kind of crazy, right,
(17:18):
I'd say, well, hold on a second, hold on a second,
do you recognize that conversation isn't at least bit helpful?
And everyone would say yeah, I'm like, well, is it
easy to change that conversation? And they're like hell No.
All of them were game to be coached about a
thing they hadn't ever really put into words. So Jason
brought in a twenty nine year old mind coach named
(17:39):
Ben Oliva. One of the things we're trying to do
here is speed up the path to being an expert.
So this coach wears jeans and a hoodie with a
kangaroo pouch. He'd never fought a fire. He'd never been
in a fire. He might have started a fire to
roast marshmallows or something. He knows fires the way Tim
(18:02):
Galway knew tubas. But he's talking to a group of
firefighters who seemed to believe he could make them better
at their jobs. I think is the difference between routines
and superstitions. Okay, so I'm going to suggest that there
is a difference. Ben has a laptop and a power point.
(18:25):
The firefighters sit in a semicircle around him. Firefighters always
seem like they're waiting for something to happen. Okay, So
if you're you're a superstition. If you don't do it,
you can't perform well. Yea like a lapse of your
routine is going to throw you off right, kind of
like they're tied together. What if this happens, some this
won't happen. You're pointing to an important point here, which
is that superstitions often give us the impression that we
(18:49):
cannot be successful if we don't do them, whereas routines
are more flexible. Ben studied astrophysics and psychology at Williams College,
where he also played baseball and football. That Williams, he
noticed that some of his teammates were just way better
in practice than they were in games. Why was that
he left Williams and got a masters in sports psychology.
(19:11):
Now he coaches the minds of players for the Boston
Red Sox and the New York Giants. Also a bunch
of lawyers and doctors and some actors and singers you've
heard of. Bene Leavitt does the same work with firefighters
that he does with everyone else, starting with trying to
eliminate interference distractors. One are the things that pop in
your head. They end up posing on that you don't
(19:33):
have full control. Decisions that a fire that already have
been made in executy, past decisions, other people's readiness, other
people's readiness. Okay, so like other people's performance. Yeah yeah,
other people time of year. So external factors in the environment,
whether excellently. That throws so many apps up. Oh it's gold.
(19:57):
I can't play well. One of the guys had girls.
That one gets me a lot. There's one, a really
big one that I'd like to point out that we
haven't hit yet. Past mistakes, past mistakes. I can sort
of understand baseball players getting hung up that way, they're
(20:19):
all head cases. But firefighters tactical technique. He's not going
to make us a better firefighter. Jason Bressler Again, he
says he can see the effect mind coaching has on
the way that fires get fought. In the course of
adopting these techniques and applying them, we're likely to become
a better version of ourself, which then inevitably is going
to make us a better firefighter. Who doesn't want to
accomplish that. Plus, it's like you're nobody unless you have
(20:44):
a mine coach. That's gonna be part of this, right,
I mean, if everyone else has a mind coach and
you don't, how can you compete? How do I compete? Hey,
Michael hold up? Just need to adjust your mic rolling
in Berkeley. So I've just made you performance coach against
(21:04):
the rules. You are our podcast performance coach, and I
bring you in for the first conversation and you come
sit in our studio. What are the things you ask
me to try to figure out? Try to diagnose? And Okay, so, um,
should we should we do this? Should we do? Like? Um, yes,
(21:27):
let's do this. Tiffany Gaskell of Performance Consultants International. I
just finished interviewing her and was about to let her go.
But you can't talk to one of these mine coaches
for long before you start thinking about new uses to
which they might be put. Yeah, because none of the
people who've worked on the podcast have improved in any way.
So they're just trapped in their own little worlds. And
(21:49):
I just think, I think what I think of them,
and but nobody's made any progress at all. So it
would be nice if we could go somewhere I don't
know where, so help us. So I'm just putting my
hand on my head because um, there was um. So
they come from, right, That's the first thing that's really port.
(22:09):
The first thing is that it is not a remedial thing.
So Michael Um, in terms of me coaching you, then
it's like I'm going on a journey with you and
walk walking down a path. So what I would ask
is that essentially we work on you, not all the
(22:31):
people around you. See what I mean? All right? The leaders,
the interference I almost forgot. Okay, so let's start this. So, Michael,
if you had something you wanted to be coached on,
what would that be? You mean, how would I like
to improve? Is that the question? Um? Yes, that's a
(22:52):
good one. Here's here's one. It's it's not huge, but
it's noticeable. I don't like the way I am can
be distracted by small irritations. A microcosm of this is
just driving. My ideal state as a driver is detached
(23:12):
amusement at the poor habits of other drivers. I have
trouble staying in that ideal state and not not descending
into bitterness and fury on the road. So that's just
an example. But I assume if I'm that way in
the car, I'm that way with other things, and I
don't see any benefit to the bitterness and anger I
(23:36):
feel towards others when they are inept. Okay, that's a
great thing for us to work on. Okay, you're ready
to go. Yes, So um, Let's imagine that you are
sitting in the car. We're doing your dream scenario. Now, Okay,
I've got my eyes closed, great, me too. You're sitting
(23:59):
in the car and everything is just as you'd love
it to be. Tell me about what that feels like.
It feels like being in a sensory deprivation chamber where
I'm alone with my thoughts and the car is almost
just driving itself. So you are enjoying being with yourself,
(24:24):
moving along, getting to where you're going to m And
in terms of like our goal for the end of this,
let's say that something happens outside of your little bubble.
How is it you stay in your bubble? How would
I stay in my bubble if I was trying to
(24:44):
stay in my bubble? Well, if I'm in a good
state of mind, I laugh. I see someone run a
four way stop, or someone tailgating me, or an ancient
person going three miles an hour, and I think different
strokes for different folks. Isn't it got detachment? The detachment?
(25:07):
You're detached. I'm detached, That's the way I Otherwise I
start to get upset. And when you get upset, what's
there instead m a desire to reek reek vengeance and
a kind of fury that is just inexplicable given what's happened. Okay,
I desire to let them know just how awful they
(25:29):
are as human beings. Okay, so we got judgment right there.
Right there, you go a lot of judgment. Okay, So
there's the detached happy place. There's the judgment hell place.
Is that right? Yeah? True? Okay, yea. So um, let's
just get back into your detached happy place. I mean,
(25:52):
I'm there. Great. Just tell me about this bubble. What's
going on inside the bubble? Yeah? What's the bubble? Like
the bubbles playful? You could also be seriously playful in
the bubble. I'm thinking about uh famla, or I'm thinking about,
more commonly, something i'm working on, like this long scene
(26:14):
in the middle of this episode. I could be thinking
about whether to let this tape just play or insert
some narration to break it up. But I'm not because
of the noise in my head. Okay. So have you
got your feet on the ground toes? Yes? Great, So
just putting your feet on the ground, do you feel
(26:35):
that connection with the ground and staying in the bubble
and just really feeling this positivity and the bubble around you.
What color is a bubble? Blue? Light blue, kind of
a sky blue, and so you've got that all around you.
(26:58):
It could be pink too. What's the feeling in this bubble?
It's warm and cozy. Great, no negativity? Yeah, no negativity.
And on a scale of one to ten, how strong
are you feeling this right now at this very moment, yes,
(27:20):
call it an eight. So what we want to do
now is find a point on your body which you
can associate this feeling with. So you've got your feet
flat on the ground and you can feel this is
resonating around you, isn't it the bubble? Mhmm? Sometimes blue,
sometimes pink, but yes, it's resonating. And so where's the
(27:43):
place on your body that you can, like, for example,
your chest, to access this feeling. If you keep mentioning
my chest, it's hard for me to think of anything
but my sorry about I'm feeling. Yes, I feel like
I am being led to my chest where it might
be who knows where it might be, my tip of
my nose or my little toe could be anywhere for it. Um,
(28:04):
I would actually say, my toes great, and to tell
me about that, tell me about your toes, And well,
normally your toasts take your toes for granted, right unless
they're injured or they're unsightly and you don't have shoes on.
But otherwise you don't really think about your toes. They're
in your shoes. But when you're really aware of your
(28:26):
body and you wiggle your toes inside your shoe, it's
a it's a very distinct sensation, and it's a it
makes you feel very self aware. So I'm wiggling my
toes inside my shoes and it's giving me pleasure. Can
that give you access to the bubble? It might? It might.
It might also cause me to hit the accelerator a
(28:48):
little fast in the car. But but it's it's um
But yes, absolutely, I could work on connecting the feeling
of the wiggly toes to the bubble. So my request
to you is that next time you aren't driving, that
this is what you do, all right, when your face
with a situation that could get you into that judgment place,
(29:13):
I promise I will do it. It seemed like such
a simple request, but the inner game is not as
easy as it looks I came to this episode with
(29:34):
one question, why why are these inner game coaches now everywhere?
I mean, they used not to exist, and it's not
as if they required some new technology to make them possible.
Leonardo da Vinci could have had this kind of coaching. Now.
There was a guy with interference issues, hardly finished anything
he started. Maybe if he'd had a mind coach, Saudi
(29:56):
Princes would not have to shell out four hundred and
fifty million dollars for fake Leonardo's because there'd be so
many real ones to choose from. Anyway, here's a thought.
This explosion in mind coaching first required that a scide
give itself over entirely to markets. It needed life to
be seen as one giant winner take all competition. It
(30:18):
needed a new kind of anxiety. So you feel like
you've put a ton of time into the physical side,
but the mental side you haven't had that much direction.
In training, Ben Oliva trainer of pro baseball players and
Wall Street traders and New York City firefighters. He spends
(30:40):
a shocking amount of his time coaching young people, teenagers
who have somehow become swept up in our general performance
anxiety and so you're interested in figuring out, Yeah, what
you can do to get better from that? I know
about you from what your dad told me. But here's
the thing. I work with lots of high school athletes
(31:01):
and parents are kind of unreliable source. Yeah, so I'm
not going to fully rely on what he was telling me. Okay,
the girl is a seventeen year old high school softball player.
She's hoping to be recruited to play at elite colleges.
She thinks her father can't help her. But that's not new.
(31:22):
Teenagers have always found their parents to be mostly useless.
What's new is their urgent need to optimize their performance.
We're going to refocus like we're training a puppy. If
we're going to train your mind like we train a
puppy all time us for two minutes, my suggestion is
you close your eyes. You do not have to on
your marks. Good, said guy. I'll do it. These sessions
(31:47):
are usually confidential, but he's made an exception here because
the girl is my daughter, Dixie. A lot of the
time when I go to bed, I have a bunch
of things on my mind. So I was like, well,
this is kind of a form of meditation. Let's see
if I can. Because when we did it, like, all
I really had to focus on was that I wasn't
(32:08):
thinking about the test I just studied for, or like
the practice SUCH just had. So I definitely had to
restart a lot. We live in Berkeley, California, so a
lot of Dixie's teachers already make her meditate. If they
gave Olympic medals and meditation, we might just sweep. We'd
(32:29):
also win recycling. Okay, So when you got distracted and
then brought your attention back. Yeah. One of the other
pieces of this is noticing if you judge yourself right,
distracted right, because one of the bigger themes here is
trying to manage our self judgment, usually in a way
that's actually helpful for us rather than unhelpful. Yeah. I
(32:52):
know she's my child because when she's told to meditate,
her first reaction is to win at it. She may
never have heard of Bill Parcels, the legendary football coach,
but she'd agree with his most famous line, you are
what your record says you are. Okay, So what's the
problem with judging our success based on outcomes? Well, we
(33:16):
get into a mindset where we think we're supposed to
get on base every time one and that's like, are
you kind of a perfectionist in that way? Well, that's
the thing. It's like, I don't like that's definitely how
I am a lot more in high school. So that's
the problem of judging ourselves based on outcomes is that
(33:37):
we lose track of the things that get us the
best outcomes. So by focusing all our energy on the outcomes,
we end up getting worse outcomes. Yeah, it's really kind
of twisted. It's even more twisted than that. My child
has been engaged in this insane competition for the attention
of college coaches since she was thirteen years old. The
(33:59):
pressure on her grows every year. She has the sense
that any given at bat might cause a coach to
love her or to hate, and thus determine the course
of life. Every weekend, Dixie travels with your club softball team.
It's one of the best teams in the country, and
it plays against the other best teams. Wherever they play,
college coaches gather to watch, but only because they are
(34:21):
one of the best teams. If they started losing all
the time, they wouldn't be invited to play against the
best teams, and no one would want to see them
play except maybe their parents. Lose, and the coach from
your dream school might never see how good you really are.
To get a sense of what it feels like to
be inside my child's dugout, probably also inside her head.
(34:44):
We stuck a wire on her coach, who was reacting
to some screw up by one of Dixie's teammates. That
one wasn't even any of dirt, and you missed it.
Get around the fucking blood. Don't be positivity. Shut up,
so I'll give you positivity. I know you want to
call child Protective Services. And if Dixie's coach said this
sort of stuff inside of an institution a high school, say,
(35:06):
or college, some parent would complain and should be FI.
But you know who'd be the most upset if that
happened her players. Well, when you know her, you don't
take any of that really seriously, like if that makes sense,
like that's just her, Like it's not you don't you
just can't take it personally, is it was it harder
(35:30):
to sort of keep your mind in the right place
when you had a coach that you were intimidated by.
That's me obviously talking with Dixie in the car after
a softball practice. I mean I was intimidated by her
in the beginning, like the very beginning, but it was
more I just really didn't want to disappoint her. If
(35:51):
she's not yelling at you, then you're doing something wrong.
If she's not noticing you, then that's a bad sign.
Why is that? Because she's not paying attention to you.
She's like, she doesn't care what you're doing. She If
she's paying attention to you and yelling at you, it
means she cares. And that's the most important part. Oh
(36:13):
my god, we're living this fucking team here. We have
a paradox. Why don't you try to seeing them all?
That will be a good strategy is to actually look
at it. Play at the highest levels of any competitive sport,
you'll hear a lot of this sort of critical voice.
You might even sense that you need to hear this
voice to push you to places that you never push yourself.
(36:37):
The paradox is that you also need to silence that voice,
at least inside your own head. This comes up over
and over again in Dixie sessions with Ben, how much
she cares about her coaches, but how hard it is
to stay calm in their presence and how hard it
is to play well when you're not calm. I'm really
hard on myself for some reason, like on that team
(37:00):
with the coaches that I had, Like it's almost like
I had like so much respect for them that I
didn't want to let them down because like and my coaches.
And then another thing I do definitely when I'm nervous
is like I don't know, like my eyes almost like
freeze and it's really stressful because I have like naturally
(37:24):
really good hand eye coordination, and so I'll still hit
the ball, but I know if my eyes were on it,
I would have hit it a lot better. Right, So
think about that. That means your attention is somewhere in
the future on what if this happens, what if that happens,
rather than on the present moment actually on trying to
(37:45):
pick that ball up right out of her view. So
let's do an exercise just to show you that you
have control of your attention when you are aware of it. Right,
So what's your attention talking to you? Right? I would
hope that it's on me at least for the most part.
But if we want to write, I can tell you
(38:05):
to shift your attention to the way that the seat
feels underneath you, the way that your weight feels on
that seat. That's really a weird thing to pay attention to, right, Yeah,
And it would be weird if you were sitting here
talking to me paying attention to that sensation. Yeah, that
would be like a really weird thing to be doing. Yet.
(38:29):
But you can do it if you want to, right,
Or you can just wiggle your toes. The point is
that Dixie can learn to pay attention to the things
that are useful, to pay attention to her breath, for example,
or the ball as it leaves the pitcher's hand. Just
as the tuba player can stop trying to listen to
his own music and focus on his tongue, Dixie needs
(38:52):
to find the thing that helps to focus on. I
don't know what the right focused cues are. This is personal,
it's individualized. There's there's not focused cues that are best
for everybody. But you just told me you hit your
best when you're aggressive and loose. That sounds like a
killer focused kid. Ben and Dixie spoke over Skype every
(39:13):
week for months, just the two of them. We taped
only a few of these sessions, and even then we
didn't listen in. But one day, when I was driving
her home after softball practice, I asked her how it
was going, and she told me that when she stepped
into the batter's box, she now had a phrase in
her head, loose and aggressive. And is it like, how
(39:34):
do you say it the way you would say it
to yourself? Like you hear it in your head? Loose
and aggressive, loose and aggressive. Loose and aggressive. So it's light,
it's not loud. Yeah, what would have been in your
head before you did those drills with him? Don't swing
(39:55):
and miss, you have to move the runner, don't fuck up,
don't look at your coach. Typically things that started with
don't get rid of the don't That's what Ben had
(40:17):
been teaching her. The new strategy gets this trial run
into tournament being inspected by roughly fifty college softball coaches.
The opposing team's pitcher has already signed with the University
of Texas. She lights out, her dropball drops, her rise
ball rises, and her fastball comes in at sixty five
miles an hour, which is the equivalent of a ninety
four mile an hour fastball and baseball Dixie's teammates all
(40:40):
have trouble dealing with it. Everyone's striking out, her swinging late.
Everything feels like it's happening too fast. Dixie now comes
to the plate. There we go next day, Get on time.
The first pitch is a fastball, high and inside, just
extremely hard to react to quickly enough to hit hard.
A month earlier, she'd have been frozen by it. Oh,
(41:02):
you did it. That's the sound of it. Hit. It's
a rocket down the left field line. She didn't just
not freeze, she was ahead of it. She never reacted
so quickly to a pitch in her entire life. After
the game, I didn't say anything about it. I'd read
the inner game of Tennis, and the last thing my
daughter needed was another voice in her head. She'd been
(41:23):
coached to stop thinking and trust her reactions, which can
be hard for a smart person to do. But eventually
I debriefed her, asked her what she thought had happened.
I developed a routine that acted kind of like a
safety net for me, Like knowing that I had a
plan made me know if I executed it or not,
(41:45):
and so having that as my goal instead of focusing
on the outcome it made it a lot easier to
not be hard on myself because I was like, well,
I executed my plan, I did everything I was supposed
to do, and it just didn't work out. And that's
how this game works. So I just have to let
it go and do the same thing next time. And right,
(42:06):
you know, like because it made me realize that I
cannot control everything. Right, my daughter is saying I cannot
control everything of her own free will. And I'm sitting
in the driver's seat about to drive home from softball practice,
wiggling my toes at every intersection instead of screaming at
the other drivers. And yet there's still a part of
(42:28):
me that thinks there is just no way this shit
can work. Explain to me why people didn't figure this
out five hundred years ago. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it.
Tiffany Gaskell again, creator of my pink road rage bubble.
People have cared about performance for a long time. Why
wasn't Sir Lancelot when he was jousting, Why wasn't he
(42:51):
wiggling his toes or clenching his abs or I don't understand.
I'm thinking about the evolution of humankind, and I'm thinking
that we are in a place now where we are
you know Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. There you go
so basically like once you've got various stuff to can
care of, so that's like survival, than we're going relationships,
(43:12):
than we're going up to relationships with other and then
we can go into the place where we can self actualize.
And I think that a lot of the developed world
is in that place right now. Are you just smuggling
therapy into people's lives by calling it coaching and making
them feel better about it? Well, actually, therapy is more
about things that have happened to you in the past
(43:35):
that you're trying to deal with, and coaching is really
about okay, going forward. You know, there's a saying which
is therapy is a path of tears and coaching is
the path of laughter. There was one other surprise in
all this. It occurred to me as I watched Dixie play.
It had taken me longer to notice, and I was
(43:56):
more hesitant to credit her inner game coach for it,
even though the change was entirely in her mind. It
seemed like she was aggressive there. Then had come to
Southern California on other business and I dragged him out
to see Dixie play. He said he didn't usually do
this because he got so wrapped up in outcomes and
started doing stuff that was counterproductive to his coaching, like cheering.
(44:19):
Praise was bad because it was still judge. Anyway, we
were standing along the left field fence, surrounded on all
sides by college scouts and anxious parents and screaming coaches.
Me trying not to care too much about what was
going on on the field. Ben actually not caring too much.
Since she started talking to you, she's been the two
things I've noticed. One is she's been much more aggressive
(44:43):
in the zone without losing her discipline. So her at
bats have been very good. The outcome has not always
been what she'd hope, but it's been fine. I mean,
she's hit well pretty well. But the other thing is
I think she's starting to learn not to be hard
on herself. It's our focus, and where I notice it
(45:05):
is it when she's hard on herself, it's an express
have a more general trait, which is she's very judgmental.
She's hard on a lot of people. She's critical, and
so she will sit there and be meant. She won't
say it, but she'll have thoughts about her, critical thoughts
about her teammates, and of course critical thoughts about her
parents and m and learning to take that off herself.
(45:30):
She's been noticeably nicer to me, like like all of
a sudden, Tabitha turn to me a couple of weeks
ago and said, who is this child? And so it's
I don't want to give you that much credit yet,
and who knows how long last. And I've not said
a word to her about any of this, but it's
been it's been really surprising to see just a little
(45:53):
bit of hesitation before she goes into the critical negative mode.
Winnings great, so's kindness. That kindness might help you to win. Well,
you gotta love that. It looks like we're playing fucking
a B tenant under team and it's two to nothing.
(46:15):
They are like seven hundred softball coaches in Northern California
that Dixie could have played for. There's a reason she
insists on playing for this particular coach. It's not always
easy or pleasant, but there's a point to it. Tim
Galway might say the coach was creating interference. Dixie would too,
but she thinks the interference is important to have you
(46:36):
know that's bullshit. That's a bullshit approach to life. We
can benefit from interference. We need coaches who teach us
how to be comfortable being uncomfortable in a way our
parents don't and probably shouldn't do. You need to stop
being a lazy piece of shit and get around the
ball and get your ass up and block and work
for your picture or I'm going to kick your ass.
(46:59):
Got its? The trick is to let their voice into
your head and then let it out again, use it,
learn from it, then learn to mute it. Yeah, Miya's
going to get ahead in account and throw so fast, Stayley,
so fast, luc agressive, blue senecrest. Oh, I'm Michael Lewis.
(47:36):
Thanks for listening to Against the Rules. Against the Rules
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced
by Audrey Dilling and Katherine Gerardo, with research assistance from Lydia,
Jane Cott, and Zooe Wynn. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Mia Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed
(47:58):
by Nick Brittell, with additional scoring by Stellwagon Symphonette. We
got fact checked by Beth Johnson. Our show was recorded
by Tofa Ruth and Trey Schultz at Northgate Studios in Berkeley.
We got recording helped this episode in Milwaukee from Jaw
Media and Neo Soul Productions. Special thanks to Deputy Chief
Dan Lipski and Eric Nurnberg of the Milwaukee Fire Department
(48:22):
and Jason Brasler, Christopher g iSER, and Ralph Longo of
the New York City Fire Department. As always, thanks to
Pushkin's founders, without whom I would not exist, Jacob Weisberg
and Malcolm Gladwell. My dad is totally oblivious to it too,
Like he's just working out in the other room where
I was originally setting up recording. He's like, no, no, no,
(48:44):
you have to get out here. I'm working out, And
I was like, Dad, I'm doing this for you. Also
like I have this Mica, but yeah, I just switch
around everything. What are you doing? That's hilarious. No,
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