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:

Imagination by Bob Proctor

HAVE you ever wondered how children can sit through replays of their favorite Lion King or Little Mermaid video?

 

It amazes me that they’ll watch the same show every day without a single complaint or request for something new.

What’s more amazing, though, is that adults do the very same thing with their days. The majority of men and women play “movies” in their heads day after day, relentlessly focusing on past events, many of which are unpleasant and disturbing experiences.

If they’re actually able to stop their contemplation of past events, then they allow impressions of their current surroundings and recent results to govern their thoughts. If they contemplate the future it’s usually by worrying about it, or wishing that something better might come along. Then they wonder why bad things keep happening to them, or why they never rise above the issues and obstacles in their lives.