If you are a breadwinner and/or have dependants whom you are financially responsible for, check out this checklist before you get the latest vaccine. A very thorough document. Be a Boy or Girl Scout and be prepared.
The Inner Game series of books, launched in the 1970s, are still selling, and still growing. Selling to the Point is I think the most recent. 50 years, and still going strong.
Tim Gallwey recently started training people to be Inner Game workshop facilitators, and has created a number of instructional videos for it that training. He is passing on his wisdom and experience while he still has his marbles, while he still can. And it is an impressive body of knowledge, especially about how to coach people in the art of increasing their self-awareness.
Awareness heals. It also teaches, as Tim discovered one day when he saw a player improving his game by simply watching himself in a mirror. “Damn!” thought Tim. “Now I can’t take the credit for his improvement!”
Self-knowledge, knowledge of the self, is the greatest knowledge, as so many great teachers and sages and saints have said.
“Know thyself” was Socrates’ famous dictum which has withstood the test of time.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Very old Sanskrit texts refer to “Vijay”, victory over the self.
The Inner Game is in line with those traditions, although not aligned with any one of them, because it aims at coaching or teaching by helping the performer or player to increase his or her own self-awareness – awareness of their physical body (position of feet and arms, straightness of posture, balance or imbalance, angle and height of arm, shoulder, knee, etc) – and awareness of their own inner processes.
Of crucial importance in this process is non-judgemental observation. Observe what your body and your mind are doing, but don’t judge. Just notice. The judgemental inner critic we all have can derail the learning that naturally takes place when the mind is quiet and focused.
I recently came across a video by Anthony Metivier, who is a “memory expert” and in this clip he talks about exactly this negative self-talk. He also talks about activities to focus the mind in order to expand awareness and to keep that negative self-talk at bay – exactly what Inner Game prescribes, too. What an odd coincidence!
This isn’t “just” positive thinking. It’s not just the negative thoughts we need to be aware of, but also the fake positive thoughts, especially those that are born of the ego: “I did that, I did this! How great I am!” As British poet Rudyard Kipling wrote in his famous poem “If”:
"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same"
The result of this increased awareness cannot be defined as it differs according to the person and the situation, but in Tim’s experience he observed many people’s performance improved as a result. In addition, their enjoyment increased, as well as the efficiency of their learning.
Below is an invitation from Inner Game co-facilitator, Renato Ricci, to the next Inner Game facilitator training, which will take place March 20-21. Check it out:
The Inner Game Train The Trainer program is confirmed, starting next March 20th online.
Tim Gallwey will present to the group our new The Inner Game Methodology Program.
The main goal of this program is to prepare facilitators to deliver it in different countries and areas.
It will be a great opportunity to connect with The Inner Game method created by Tim, who is recognized as the father of modern coaching.
I would like to invite you to visit our webpage and see how the program works :https://theinnergameinstitute.comRenato Ricci
https://theinnergameinstitute.com
Co-founder The Inner Game Institute by Tim Gallwey
10 years ago, a tremendous earthquake struck the eastern coastline of northern Japan, triggering a tsunami that knocked out the Fukushima nuclear power station and tossing ships, busses, cars and entire houses around like matchwood. Over 15,000 people died, including over 2,500 whose bodies were never recovered, a fact which causes their relatives much unassuaged pain.
March 9th, 2021, an aftershock from that 2011 earthquake rocked Fukushima and surrounding areas. It caused some damage, including knocking over an altar and shrine a parent had put up in his house to honour his daughter who died in the disaster.
It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900. The earthquake triggered powerful tsunami waves that may have reached heights of up to 40.5 meters (133 ft) in Miyako in Tōhoku’s Iwate Prefecture, and which, in the Sendai area, traveled at 700 km/h (435 mph) and up to 10 km (6 mi) inland. Residents of Sendai had only eight to ten minutes of warning, and more than a hundred evacuation sites were washed away. The tsunami swept the Japanese mainland and killed over 15,000 people… The latest report from the Japanese National Police Agency report confirms 15,899 deaths.
2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami | Wikipedia
Yahoo.jp has a slideshow of photos that capture the tragedy.
Inner Game mini-workshop (4)
Feb 28
Inner Game has been applied to many other areas of performance:
- The Inner Game of Tennis
- The Inner Game of Golf
- Inner Skiing
- The Inner Game of Music
- The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace
- The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life’s Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential.
- Selling to the Point
As Tim said in the video “Bounce Hit”, introducing Inner Game,
“Every outer game is different: tennis is different than football, it’s different than making a million dollars in a bank. But what’s the same is our patterns of interference. We take them with us wherever we go. So if you can find techniques and methods for finding the interference, and heightening the focus of attention, then you’ve got something you can use in any outer game you want.”
Tim Gallwey in “The Inner Game of Tennis ‘Bounce hit’” https://youtu.be/PlI8pAmuGxo
Selling, teaching, learning are all outer games, and so similar interferences might apply to all of them, making them equally arenas where Inner Game principles and tools might be usefully applied.
Here’s what one person, a former salesman and trainer of sales people, said about selling and the similarities with teaching. What do you think about it?
learning is naturally fun. Being judged by teachers, grades, and tests interferes with the fun. Teachers need to avoid students feeling like their learning is being judged. The teacher needs to learn how their students learn. Students vary in their learning styles and preferences. Some students learn from visual modalities, other student may be more auditorial or kinesthetic learner. School should adapt to the student’s learning style. Unfortunately, instead students are expected to adapt to the instructor’s teaching style. This is how teaching can interfere with learning just like selling can interfere with buying. Salespeople are taught how to sell at a training that the customer never attends. The salesperson will try to reorient their customer interaction to conform to how things went in the salesperson’s training. This is how selling can interfere with buying.
(Personal communication 7 Feb 2021)
Here are a couple more videos of Tim Gallwey coaching a beginner in tennis, and a couple of more experienced golf players.
Inner Game mini-workshop (3)
Feb 25
- Inner Game mini-workshop
- Inner Game mini-workshop (2)
- Inner Game mini-workshop (3)
- Inner Game mini-workshop (4)
What is “Inner Game”?
Inner Game is a game that takes place in your head and your heart. It’s all the internal obstacles that take place within the person, and your trust in your own potential.
So, it’s overcoming fear, doubt, lapses in concentration, and accessing your potential to perform in any given arena.
Tim Gallwey in “What is the Inner Game?” |YouTube https://youtu.be/HXwPLh7TDtg
In Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game, a key concept is interference. This refers particularly to inner interference or self-interference: the “fear, doubt, lapses in concentration”, etc.
“Every outer game is different: tennis is different than football, it’s different than making a million dollars in a bank. But what’s the same is our patterns of interference. We take them with us wherever we go. So if you can find techniques and methods for finding the interference, and heightening the focus of attention, then you’ve got something you can use in any outer game you want.”
Tim Gallwey in “The Inner Game of Tennis ‘Bounce hit'” https://youtu.be/PlI8pAmuGxo
An important element in the Inner Game approach, therefore, is to identify simple, interesting and relevant activities that can distract, even if just a little bit, that inner critic and allow our natural ability to learn to come out and play.
In the previous video, Tim introduces the activity of “bounce-hit” to do that: it focuses the attention of the player/learner while at the same time allowing her eyes and ears to notice a good player in action. It’s a non-stressful activity because there is no trying to get it right involved: it’s just an exercise in awareness.
In this video, he introduces another one he calls “trajectory”. As you’re watching, perhaps you could ask yourself what equivalent activity or activities could you usefully use to help you improve your teaching, or to help your students improve their learning, or whatever your outer game happens to be?
Inner Game mini-workshop (2)
Feb 25
- Inner Game mini-workshop
- Inner Game mini-workshop (2)
- Inner Game mini-workshop (3)
- Inner Game mini-workshop (4)
Just a quick follow-up to give you a little more information about this Friday’s mini-workshop.
Date: Friday Feb. 26th 14:00-15:00 JST
I hope you had a chance to watch the video I sent in the previous email. In that video (link below), Tim Gallwey tells of how, when he was coaching people in tennis, coaching them the “traditional” way, that is telling them what to do and what not to do, but when he imagined what might be going on inside their head as the ball came at them over the net, he realized they would have all these instructions running through their minds and they would be trying to remember and obey them as well as trying to play tennis. He also knew that tennis players when playing at their best often report that at that time, nothing is going through their minds. Some even report that it felt like it wasn’t really them playing or doing, like it was someone else doing it.
Tim surmised that the instructions might actually be getting in the way rather than helping, especially if the ultimate objective is peak performance, that state which others have called “flow”.
Because the instructions create (or make worse) a critical stance, an assumption that you (the performer, of whatever it is, tennis or dancing or playing an instrument or teaching or selling) are not doing it right, that you don’t know how to do it right and you need to listen to an expert to learn, or to correct how you are doing it. It does not encourage you to trust yourself, and yet trust is one of the key elements in flow or peak performance. How to solve this paradox?
He then got the idea that when you are playing a game, a sport, like tennis, there are actually two games going on: one is the outer game, trying to win, trying to score the goal or get the point, and the other is the inner game, the game going on inside the player, the “self-talk”. Who is talking to whom? What are they saying?
His next step was to look for ways to quieten the critical voice, to distract it. Obviously, these were designed for people playing tennis (in this video, for instance, you’ll hear some of Tim’s suggestions):
In the mini-workshop, I’ll give a brief introduction to this idea of an inner dialogue and how it might interfere with optimal performance, as well as to a couple of tools that might help minimize its limiting or negative effects. We’ll do a couple of simple exercises to see how the inner dialogue works in practice, in the “performance” of teaching and learning, and consider some ways that might quieten the inner dialogue (our own and that of our students). The rest of the time will be devoted to feedback and sharing from participants, including discussion about whether these ideas and exercises are applicable to our own language teaching and learning, and if so, how might they be applied?
Here’s a 6-minute clip from a TV show in the 1970s where Tim is teaching beginners using his Inner Game approach. He explains the “bounce-hit” exercise and some others in a little more detail than in the first video I linked to above. The picture quality is not of the best but the sound is ok:
Inner Game mini-workshop
Feb 24
(Part 1 of 4)
Last year, I took part in an Inner Game workshop run by Inner Game founder Tim Gallwey, and enjoyed it so much that I immediately signed up for the next one. Only later, once I read the small print, did I realize this was a workshop to train future Inner Game facilitators!
So after the workshop, the next step is for us budding facilitators to facilitate a workshop of our own with a few people who know nothing about Inner Game.
The Inner Game of Teaching and Learning (foreign languages) is my niche, so I reached out to some teachers I know and have set up a mini-workshop for this Friday Feb. 26th, Friday, March 5th 2-3 pm, on Zoom.
If you’re interested, leave a comment (use a current email address you check regularly), and I’ll send you the link.
It’s free.
Here’s a little bit of background:
Have you ever heard of the “Inner Game”? Some of you may have heard of (or read) a classic coaching book titled “The Inner Game of Tennis”, written by Tim Gallwey in the 1970s. Well, after the phenomenal success of that book, Tim was invited to apply his insights in coaching tennis to first other sports and then to corporate and managerial challenges.
In fact, Tim’s book was in the news again recently when Tom Brady won the Super Bowl (see article here: This Is the Book Tom Brady Hails for His Unshakable Mental Toughness | Inc.com )
I recently took a couple of workshops online with Tim Gallwey, and would like to a) share some of the ideas in it with you and b) invite you share your experiences and observations of teaching English in Japan. My aim is to a) explore the possibility that Inner Game ideas can be of practical value to classroom language teachers, and b) to collect teachers’ experiences of things that get in the way of optimal teaching and learning English in Japan.
If you are unfamiliar with Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game, this 5-minute video is a good intro:
Covid-19 smorgasbord
Feb 24
A sample of quotes, comments, food-for-thought articles, vids, etc. I’ve picked up in the past week or 2.
“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”– Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
At least 181 people have died in the US according to the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), after taking experimental vaccines meant to combat a 99.4% to 99.8% survival rate virus, the death toll for which a team of researchers in one state found may be inflated by as much as 40%.
181 People Die After COVID Vaccine in US “Adverse Events”, Nurses Refuse to Give Vaccines for Ethical Reasons | Hubpages 24 Jan 2021
There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects. This much I know after 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet there are such moves afoot.
What SAGE got wrong | Lockdown sceptics (quote from Dr. Michael Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer)
This inspires confidence in the NHS, doesn’t it?
A few days before Christmas, I received an email from the NHS stating: ‘We are writing to let you know about government advice for people considered to be at highest risk of becoming very unwell if they catch Covid-19. This is because your medical records tell us you are someone with Down’s syndrome.’ My first reaction was to laugh. This was ridiculous. I don’t have Down’s syndrome.
Daily Mail | How your health records could be filled with mistakes
despite decades of trying there has never been a successful, durable vaccine for a coronavirus either….Coronaviruses not only infect people they infect animals. We have tried to create vaccines for animal husbandry and pet purposes on multiple occasions, and have failed every time to obtain permanent immunity. We have also wound up creating amplification effects by accident too; the poster child for this one was a feline “vaccine” that actually wound up amplifying the effects of the virus instead of attenuating or preventing infections! This is why, by the way, that there is no reason whatsoever to believe we will ever have a permanent vaccine; despite attempts in both animals and humans we’ve never succeeded before with this particular type of virus. Now is it entirely possible — even probable — that this specific virus was an accidental release? Yep. In fact I’d say it’s more likely than not. That’s the “civil standard of proof”, and it’s present. Why? Because this virus behaves like an attenuated live virus, but not attenuated enough. For those who think that sort of idea is crazy I remind you that we’ve used that exact concept for decades with oral polio, and it works. So the theory that this was an accidental release from Wuhan’s lab and they were working on a vaccine for SARS, for example, is not crazy. The only crazy part is that their odds of success were near zero in the first instance, but scientists try to find breakthroughs in things that appear to have a near-zero probability of success all the time. But a bioweapon? Nope. There are plenty of candidate virus families to use for that sort of thing, if you’re into attempting it. Coronavirus isn’t one of them.
Debunking the bioweapon stupidity | Karl Denninger, “The Market Ticker” 15 April 2020
Even if you locked down the nation for 30 days it would do nothing. As soon as you drop the restrictions the virus comes roaring back. You think it won’t? Yes it will. Exponential math..Your premise is that you lock down and then maintain the “social distancing”. But that, if you do it, still wrecks every restaurant, every bar, and every small business. It is exactly as destructive. Every hotel still goes bust. Every bar. Every restaurant. And it doesn’t matter to the outcome because as soon as you drop the constraints the virus will come roaring back. The fact is that you can’t kill the virus. The virus only dies when immunity reaches the point that R0 is suppressed below 1.0. That is mathematics and there’s not a darned thing you or I can do about it.
The Market Ticker | Karl Denninger 20 March, 2020
Threlkeld added, Williams also had been vaccinated for COVID about a month ago and that testing found the two types of antibodies in his system – one type of antibody that results from a natural COVID infection, and a second type of antibody from the vaccine. Threlkeld also said Williams tested negative for COVID-19 while in the hospital.
Memphis doctor believed to have died of rare Covid related syndrome | Localmemphis.com 11 Feb 2021
Coronaviruses are notorious for ADE reactions, where antibody presence potentiates the infection instead of protecting against it. …The poster child for ADE in coronaviruses was an attempted vaccine for a feline coronavirus that often made cats very sick. The vaccine killed every one of them in the test when they were later exposed, wildly potentiating the infection. Read that again folks: NOT ONE VACCINATED CAT SURVIVED A CHALLENGE WITH THE ACTUAL VIRUS.
Ordinary vaccines we have lots of experience with, such as measles, the flu shot, mumps and similar do not carry a risk beyond that of natural infection and cannot be weaponized because they produce the exact same antibody response as a natural infection. If you have had either the measles or the shot you will have antibodies but an antibody test will not tell you which since they’re not distinguishable. I suspected from the start that due to the way these mRNA shots work — they are not actually a vaccine at all in that they do not “mimic” natural infection but rather cause your cells to produce the spike protein that the virus has and that elicits an immune response — that the antibodies produced by those jabs would be distinct and distinguishable from natural infection.
The West’s Obituary | The Market-Ticker 13 Feb 2021
The Wild Geese Howard says:February 20, 2021 at 6:51 pm GMT • Pfizer suddenly announces their vaccine no longer needs to be stored at ultra-low temperatures: https://nypost.com/2021/02/19/pfizer-covid-vaccine-doesnt-need-to-be-stored-at-freezing-temps-anymore/ This is ridiculous…
One of the current tropes peddled by the government and its rag, tag and bobtail of scientific advisers is ‘don’t kill Granny’. This has led to some beliefs circulating which are that: 1. If Granny is exposed to COVID-19 she will catch it 2. If Granny catches COVID-19 she will automatically die as a matter of course 3. If Granny isolates herself and keeps away from her family and everyone else, she will not only escape COVID-19 but also apparently death itself since the consolation for missing Granny at Xmas is that she is guaranteed to be available for a hug in a year’s time. I thought I’d look into this. … This recent Imperial College article (October 2020) explains that that an IFR for COVID-19 of about 0.1% for under-40s rises to over 5% for the over-80s (it doubles for about every 8 years of life over 40). In other words, of 100 people aged over 80 who catch COVID-19 up to about 6 will die. That’s another way of saying that 94 will survive Covid. That’s both sexes and we know women do slightly better.
The Risk to Granny | Lockdown sceptic 16 Dec 2020
When the pandemic crisis broke, we were all instantly bombarded with figures by scientists and journalists, and almost invariably out of context. They included data that had been measured, and figures that were predicted, most notoriously in the UK the 510,000 prospective deaths put about by Imperial College that played such a large part in the first lockdown. This has carried on remorselessly ever since. It struck me almost immediately right back in March that I had no idea at all what the normal rate of death was in the United Kingdom. Therefore, any statement about deaths from Covid, real or predicted, whether made by a member of SAGE, the Government or a wittering TV journalist, was meaningless to me. Way back then I looked it up on the Office of National Statistics (ONS) website. It’s in the high 1,600s per day which translates into over 600,000 per annum in a normal year (if any year is normal).
Just how high are excess deaths in 2020? | Lockdown sceptics 3 Dec 2020
Speaking of which, a rather unprepared professor who said he did not watch the British Prime Minister’s daily covid briefings because none of the figures presented were given any context, suddenly lost his internet connection:
And for a change of air:
Feeling cooped up? Check out these 2 vids, 1 in Japan, 1 in UK, both posted last year (and learn what a “Geordie” is). The first one has Japanese subtitles only but you don’t really need them, do you? The title says he’s in his 40s and single. You’d never have guessed, eh?
Reading list 2020
Feb 15
Five stars
- Becoming the Iceman by Wim Hof and Justin Rosales
- Werner Herzog – a Guide for the Perplexed, Paul Cronin
- The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
- The Harmless People, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
- Man of Montmartre; a novel based on the life of Maurice Utrillo, Steven & Ethel Longstreet
- A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller
- The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
- A Throne of Bones, Vox Day
- A Sea of Skulls, Vox Day
- Brings the Lightning (The Ames Archives #1), Peter Grant
- The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe
- The Claw of the Conciliator, Gene Wolfe
- The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe
- The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe
- Listen to the Echoes – The Ray Bradbury Interviews, Sam Weller
- INVESTOR-Z Series (21 volumes), Norifusa Mita
- The Knight, Gene Wolfe
- The Wizard, Gene Wolfe
Four stars
- Taghri’s Prize, Peter Grant
- Rocky Mountain Retribution, Peter Grant
- Gold on the Hoof, Peter Grant
- A River of Horns, Peter Grant
- Stones of Silence (Cochrane’s Company #1), Peter Grant
- Airless Storm (Cochrane’s Company #2), Peter Grant
- Pride of the Damned (Cochrane’s Company #3), Peter GrantMoon Palace, Paul Auster
- Oracle Night, Paul Auster
- Imagine This, Julia Baird (John Lennon’s sister)
- Earthly Powers (audio book, read by Gordon Griffin), Anthony Burgess
- You’ve Had Your Time, Anthony Burgess
- Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence, Anthony Burgess
- Little Wilson and Big God, Anthony Burgess
- The Long Day Wanes, Anthony Burgess
- The Wim Hof Method, Wim Hof (tho personally, I recommend Becoming the Iceman by Wim Hof and Justin Rosales for anyone just curious about this phenomenon)
- The Unveiling of Timbuctoo, Galbraith Welch
- Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome (audio book, read by Ian Carmichael)
Three stars
- Designing Writing Assignments, Traci Gardner
- The Midnight Ground, Eric Dontigney
- Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge
- The Promethean, Owen Stanley
- Crisis in Higher Education, Jeffrey R. Docking
Two stars
- Dear, Dear Brenda, Henry Miller & Brenda Venus
- The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors, Leigh Ryan
- A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Erika Lindemann
- Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War, Thomas Hobbes
Unfinished/gave up
- How to Take Smart Notes, Soenke Ahrens
- Escalante’s Dream, David Roberts
- Writer Teaches Writing, Donald M. Murray
- A Tutor’s Guide, Bennett A. Rafoth
- The Harvard Tutor’s College Essay Handbook, Katerina Manoff
- To Paint is to Love Again, Henry Miller (actually very interesting: I listened to the audio book on YT)
- The Books in My Life, Henry Miller (inspiring but rather intense; to be taken in small doses)
- Henry Miller on Writing, Henry Miller (ditto)
