A simple formula to improve results

Transcript of the video

Modified slightly for readability (the way I speak is somewhat less formal than the way I write!)

Hi, my name is Jeremy Lazarus. 

I'd like to talk to you about a simple formula that will help you to get better results faster, whether it's results in your business, in your career, in your life, in your health and fitness, your financial situation, whichever area of life that you're interested in, this will help you to actually achieve the kind of results you want. The information comes from a book called the Inner Game of Tennis, which I read many years ago. It's not a big book but it's a very powerful book, a very insightful book. It's written by a guy called Timothy Galway. Now Timothy Gallwey was a tennis player and a tennis coach, and he noticed that during a game of tennis there were actually two games going on; there were two games going on at the same time. 

The first one was what he called the 'outer game' and the second was what he called the 'inner game'. Now the outer game was what people could see. Players doing forehands, backhands, serves, volleys - a typical game of tennis. The inner game was what was going on inside the head of both the players, or in doubles, all four players. So the sort of things that could be going on is, 'I'm gonna win this game', ' I'm gonna play really well'. 'I'm gonna just focus on this particular shot', or it could have been that nothing was going on, they were just 'in the moment'. Of course some of the other things that could be going on in the inner game are, 'I'm not very good at doing forehands', or 'I'm having a bad day today', or 'my opponent seems to be getting on top of me I don't know what to do about it'. 

Whichever of these types of inner dialogue was happening, it's interesting how there's the outer game and the inner game, and from his observations in the work he did Galway reduced all of this to one simple formula, which is 

R = P - I. 
Results equals Potential minus Interference.

Let's take each of those in turn. 'Results', well I think that's fairly obvious, it's the outcomes that you get in your life, in different areas of your life. The two important ones obviously are 'Potential' and 'Interference'. 'Potential' is what we know and our prospective capabilities and 'Interference' is what gets in the way of us actualizing our potential. So really, life's pretty simple; increase potential, decrease interference and if you do one or both of those then almost by definition your results are going to improve. 

So let's just look a little bit more at that. How might you improve or increase your potential? Well some simple examples could be to learn more. Find out, and educate yourself, about what it is you want to improve; so if you want to improve let's say in the area of health and fitness, read, watch videos, go to talks, learn about what you should eat, drink, not eat, not drink, and the sort of exercises that are right for you. If it's in the area of your career, what are some of the skills that you would need to learn in order to get to where you want to get to? For example, if you want to be a manager, if you want to get promoted, what are some of the management skills that might be useful and then read up on those, go on courses, watch videos. So these are some simple ways of increasing potential. 

Reducing interference, again there are various ways of doing that. What I tend to find with my clients and have done since 1999 is that some people have limiting beliefs which stop them from being, doing and having what they want to be, do and have. Some of these beliefs can be relatively innocuous, others could be almost like a virus; they could be really harmful, sobeliefs such as, 'I'm not good enough', 'I'm stupid', 'I don't deserve success', 'people from my kind of background don't do well, we don't get promoted', so to be able to address those kind of interferences can in some ways be transformational, and certainly getting rid of some of the simple interferences like bad habits - if you get rid of your bad habits then, all things being equal, you're going to improve your potential and/or your results. 

So my question to you is, 'What could you do to increase your potential, and what are some of the interferences that you have that stop you from getting the kind of results you want to have in your career, your work, your relationships, your health and fitness, your finances?' My tip would be make a list of those and do something about it. Take some action, and sometimes taking action can actually mean asking people for help, so whether that's asking friends, asking your colleagues, asking a coach, for example, so do whatever it takes to increase your potential, reduce your interference and therefore get better results. 

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