Dr. Mort Orman here and today I want to share a few insights with you from a 2009 book called The Inner Game Of Stress, by Tim Gallwey with Drs. Ed Hanzelik, M.D. and John Horton, M.D.
As I mentioned in my first post in this series, How Tennis Can Cure Your Stress, Tim Gallwey developed a novel approach to teaching tennis in the 1970s that became part of the foundation for modern sports psychology.
Three decades later, Gallwey collaborated with practicing physicians Hanzelik and Horton to apply the same basic principles to helping people lower their stress.
Gallwey postulated as a tennis teacher that all reasonably intelligent human beings have vast innate capabilities they don’t know they have, and conventional teaching methods aren’t designed to bring out.
He coined the terms “Self 1” and “Self 2” to explain how the “inner game” plays out in sports, in the business world and also in how people end up feeling stressed.
Meet Your Stress Maker
According to Gallwey, Self 2 is the natural, capable, calm and resourceful part of each of us that has vast inner knowing, but which is often suppressed or interfered with by the activities of Self 1, which he refers to as our “Stress Maker.”
Self 1 is the critical, judgmental, overly negative part of ourselves that is constantly distorting our perceptions of reality and produces unnecessary fear, misplaced anger, self-doubt, self-blame and many other stressful experiences.
As I also mentioned in the first post of this series, Gallwey and his physician co-authors boldly state in the Introduction to their The Inner Game Of Stress book:
“Our core belief of the Inner Game is that every person has the internal wisdom to bypass the frustrations and fears that pull them into the negative cycle of stress…we [all] have the natural ability to be wise and calm in the midst of the barrage of daily external struggles.”
“Within Our Patients’ Control”
The book is based on a series of stress seminars, conducted over years, by the two physician co-authors, along with Gallwey’s help.
The physicians noticed that most of their patients who were suffering from stress believed that external circumstances were determining their levels of stress, and therefore stress was inevitable, given their life situations.
As a result of conducting their seminars, however, these physicians discovered something that truly surprised them:
“We discovered that something as devastating and destructive as stress is actually within our patients’ control.”
Gallwey’s thesis is that everyone is playing an inner game, actually multiple inner games, whether they recognize it or not.
We are also playing multiple outer games as well.
Outer games involve overcoming obstacles in the outside world to reach our goals.
Inner games involve overcoming inner obstacles—fear, self-doubt, frustration, pain, distractions—that prevent us from expressing our full range of capabilities and enjoying our lives and our work to the fullest.
Ultimate success and optimal health in life rely on balanced attention to both games.
The Choice Is Yours
The theme of this book, which I totally agree with, is that everyone has choices as to how you look at external events, how you define them, how you attribute meaning to them, and how you react mentally and emotionally.
You may not have a choice about how you react immediately, but once you notice that you’ve been triggered to react in certain ways, you absolutely do have choices about what you elect do in response to this.
The major conclusion all three authors arrived at in this book is that chronic stress is caused largely by the way people perceive the events and circumstances of their lives—and not by the realities themselves.
They also came to the very same conclusion I did, more than 30 years ago, that the standard remedies offered to help people deal with chronic stress—exercise, diet, rest, and using stress management techniques—usually failed to address these inner causes—and therefore a new and more effective approach was needed.
That’s why they developed the seminars and inner game strategies which form the basis for this book.
Quite simply, their stated goal for their seminars was to “create an organic shift in the way people view the world and respond to it” and this is exactly what they were able to achieve.
I say we need many more or these bold, creative thinkers, trainers and physicians.
To your health, happiness and success,
Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com
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