The Inner Game of Stress: Outsmart Life’s Challenges and Fulfill Your Potential
By Timothy Gallwey
Published August 18, 2009 (Hardcover) Random House
More Info: Timothy Gallwey
I’m amused. The “old” me would have been freaked out beyond belief by now. I’m speaking to the Willamette Writers tomorrow and using audio clips from past interviews, and on Wednesday, I’m hosting a workshop I developed called Rev Up Your Life. Different talk. Different audio. And moments ago, I received an invitation to moderate a panel Sunday at Wordstock on spiritual writing. Happy I was to say yes. I did not know – in contacting the woman coordinating the panel a few hours ago to ask her about a book — that her moderator had dropped out. I didn’t even know the panel existed.
There’s a joy that is bubbling up, keeping me focused on what is before me. Tim Gallwey agreed with me on the air today that that sense of focusing on what is, is Flow. In his book, The Inner Game of Stress, Gallwey says that the point is not to manage stress, but to build stability in your life so that when it inevitably comes, you are resilient. To live in that creative, childlike spirit, and prepare whatever you can ahead of time.
Tim said on Open Book with Diana Page Jordan that 75-percent of the visits to primary care physicians are due to stress-related illnesses. Did you catch that figure — 75-percent! We don’t have to wear a badge for how busy we are. If life is full of challenges, we’re in a good place, but if those challenges become stressful, not so much.
Tim says there are two selves. Self One — the one that judges, and reminds us of every nuance we must be wary of — keeps getting in the way of Self Two. Self Two is the playful, intuitive side. It’s the natural. Tim says that know-it-all Self One is like a ten-cent computer trying to tell the million-dollar computer, Self Two, how to hit the ball, or whatever the challenge is. It’ll never happen. We tighten up. Fight, Flight, or Freeze. We’re back in the primitive brain.
I told him how my stepfather taught me to drive on several different vehicles at once — four-on-the-floor, three-on-a-column, automatic, and a five-speed — and, once, when I was sixteen, and we drove into a 5-way intersection, he yanked on the emergency brake and began swearing at me for something to-this-day I don’t know what I did wrong. Somehow we got out of there. But that was just one of many incidents while I was learning to drive, and I developed a fear that showed up as getting lost, inability to read a map or find my way around, and having no sense of where I was at any given time. I finally snapped out of that this year after EMDR — the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing removed the trauma, and the fog, and now I can actually see, in my mind’s eye, where I am and where I’m going.
Tim says when you find yourself freaking out like that just STOP. Step back, Think, Organize your thinking, and then Proceed. And something else, build yourself a shield, on which you can put many things. There is one quality that is absolutely necessary. It is Hope.
