Mastering Your Inner Game

By Dan Kennedy

WE’RE going to talk about the inner game of building your business. I believe that the inner game is simply all-important. 

“The inner game” is a new term for a classic idea explained many different times, many different ways by virtually every success educator, and even philosophers.

In the book Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill reveals the secret using the words, “thoughts are things”. Denis Waitley has worked with U.S. astronauts and Olympic athletes on their inner games. 

Author Tim Gallwey explores the ideas of his books, The Inner Game of Golf, The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Selling.

Interestingly, there is a never-ending connection between the inner game in sport and the inner game in business, allowing experts like Waitley, Gallwey, ex-quarterback Fran Tarkenton and golfer Arnold Palmer, among others, to step back and forth between expounding on success techniques in the athletic and business worlds.

In all cases, these people speak much more about attitudes than aptitudes for a good reason. Surveys, studies and research consistently reaffirm that 85% of your success will depend on attitudinal factors, 15% on aptitude. Yet in your formal education and in most continuing education, the emphasis is on the opposite—15% on attitude, 85% on aptitude.

Certainly technical knowledge and skills are important. In your profession, you must deliver excellence based on your staying up to date in techniques, products, materials and ideas.

However, such excellence alone will never build a successful, growing, profitable business. The excellence that will is an excellence created and sustained in your own mind. This is the most difficult, least tangible aspect of building your business that we’ll ever talk about, but it is also probably the most important.

Yeah, but what is it? So what is the inner game? The way I see it, the inner game can be broken down into four major components:

Getting Your Imagination to Work for You

By Denis Waitley

ONE of the wonderful aspects about human imagination is that it can see things not as they are now, but as they can be.

It can foretell the future, based upon our beliefs and expectations, in an almost uncanny way; it can draw the colorful mental images that we hope someday to turn into reality. 

Imagination is the beginning of creation. 

Dr. David McClelland, former professor of psychology at Harvard University, demonstrated this through a series of “projective tests”. In these tests, McClelland used photographs or drawings depicting basic scenes. 

For instance, in one photograph, a man was lying in bed with his eyes closed. His hand was raised and extended over an alarm clock on the table next to the bed. 

A window in the background was bright with the rays of early morning sunlight.

  Motivation

McClelland asked his subjects to either describe the scene or tell a story about the person in the picture. To be sure that the responses were solely a function of motivational levels, the subjects for each test were people of the same sex, age, social background, and level of education. 

Become a Student of Change by Denis Waitley

AS THE world becomes more interconnected, events outside your industry and career have an impact on your business, your family and your pocketbook.

Whatever your daily routine, it takes place in a larger context of social, technological, political, economic and cultural change. To be successful today, you must understand that world. Without that you won’t be prepared to innovate; you’ll only be able to react and to avoid.

Many people will tell you it doesn’t matter how well-informed you are. “You can’t do anything about it anyway”, goes the refrain, “so why bother to find out about things?”

Here’s a newspaper editorial that sums up this attitude: 

“The world is too big for us. Too much going on, too much crime, violence and change. Try as you will, you get behind in the race. It’s an incessant strain to keep pace and still you lose ground. Science empties its discoveries on you so fast that you stagger beneath them in hopeless bewilderment. Everything in business and life is high pressure. Human nature can’t endure much more!”

This newspaper editorial reads as if it were written last week. But it actually appeared more than 175 years ago on June 16, 1833 in The Atlantic Journal back in the “good old days!”