Yesterday I had a wonderful experience “writing” my first oral short story. I’ve written many stories before, but never one strictly intended for being told orally.  It was so exciting for it to suddenly start coming out because I had no idea when my first story would, and I was beginning to wonder if it ever would.

You see I’d taken to watching storytellers do their magic on YouTube, reading the collected stories of Eamon Kelly (the amazing Irish storyteller), studying the components of good storytelling and seeing storytellers live whenever I could.  I kept on gathering the these experiences, these ingredients, and then throwing them into the oven that is me.  I’ve been doing this for about two years–ever since I took a trip to Ireland to dive deeper into the culture, including storytelling.

Despite doing all this, and taking up the harp and doing this blog about bards, my unique voice, my own unique stories I wished to tell did not come out yet.  Until yesterday.

It’s funny, I think our minds run better when we don’t think; they run better when we experience. My five pounds of grey matter have functioned much better after reading Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.  This basically details a creative process (for playing tennis) where you observe what you wish to do, imagine it in your head and let your body do it without the brain interfering with judgement.   Then you repeat whatever it is a few times until your body figures out how to do it perfectly.  I must say this formula works brilliantly for Irish dance–and storytelling.

So, I so deeply encourage you, if you have any secret longings for things you’d like to do, to follow this process.  Observe what you like and what you wish to do, imagine yourself doing it and then do it.

For me, with storytelling I felt it was best to wait until the day came when stories would just pop out of me. I didn’t want to force it because my own unique story style would not come out and a stiff unnatural story would.  Well.  I shall shut my trap and get back to work.  I’ll post the story on here today or tomorrow so you can get a read and perhaps I’ll be able to get some harp music up as well to go with the story.

Put your dreams in the oven and let them pop out!

I played two years of execrable doubles in high school, and then put my sticks in storage for the next 15 years.

When I picked up the game again in my early 30s, I started with lessons. The weekly sessions weren’t enough to satisfy my hunger for instruction. I repaired to the library. I read through the instructional features in back issues of Tennis magazine, stunned that this kind of information was so readily available. I checked out a series of Nick Bollettieri videos–Sonic Serve, Ballistic Backhand, Killer Forehand. Would I ever be able to hit the ball like that?

I ventured back into the stacks, and checked out just about every tennis book in the Chester County Library System. For sheer entertainment, my favorite was Brad Gilbert’s Winning Ugly, though its emphasis on strategy was probably a couple of years ahead of my abilities when I first picked it up. The two books I return to time and again are Timothy Gallwey’s classic, The Inner Game of Tennis, and, more recently, Greg Moran’s Tennis beyond Big Shots.

Gallwey explores the conflict between the unconscious self–the instinctive physical genius that teaches us to walk, run, reach, and balance without a word of instruction–and the conscious self that tries to control its unconscious doppelganger.

If you’ve played even a little tennis, this duality is familiar. Every once in a while, you hit a stroke perfectly. The sweetness of the feeling shocks your conscious self to attention. “How did I do that?” And then you’re done. Your consciousness starts issuing instructions in a vain effort to recapture that moment of unconscious perfection.

Gallwey offers some suggestions for trying to disengage the mind and let the body take over. I’ve tried them with mixed results. But when my game falls into a deep funk, I return to The Inner Game more than any other resource.

Moran’s Tennis Beyond Big Shots is more tactical. Like Winning Ugly, it preaches consistent, low-risk play. Oddly enough, it doesn’t evoke in me the same anxiety about errors that Gilbert’s book does. Maybe I just discovered it at the right time.

I’d come off a USTA season when I was trying to hit through my opponents. I didn’t think I had the stamina for a consistent game. I also believed that I had enough weapons to win without it.

I didn’t win a match all season.

When the USTA computer recalculated the ratings, I was bumped back to the minor leagues. Then, I happened across a tennis column by Moran somewhere on the Web. He wrote that when they win the toss, most rec players should opt to receive, not serve (again, much like Gilbert!). Moran’s piece included statistics showing that most players below the 4.5 level lose serve, more than hold. Absolutely true in my case. The article led me to Moran’s book at a time when I was ready to heed its lessons:

“If you can hit the ball in the court five times each point, you’ll probably beat 90 percent of the players who are beating you now.”

“In its simplest form, the strategy for high percentage singles is as follows:

1. Never hit a second serve.

2. Get every return of serve back in play.

3. Hit your groundstrokes crosscourt.

4. Approach straight ahead.

5. Take control of the net.

6. When in doubt, throw it up.”

So simple, and yet so effective. As I’ve tried to incorporate these simple strategies into my game, my results have improved, and with them, my confidence.

What are the great books in your tennis library?

–A. Clarke

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There is a very thin line between cockiness and confidence and it is so easy to step over that many men are not really aware of when they do,

The fist pump is cockiness at its finest...

including myself. The best explanation for the difference between confidence and cockiness that I have heard is that confidence takes into account the feelings of others, while cockiness does not.

A quick Google search on “Cocky Men” brought dozens of articles and debates where men ask women why they love jerks/cocky men. Listed below are only a few of the sites:

• Why Do Women Dislike Arrogant Cocky Men
• Women: Do You Find Confident and Cocky Alpha –Male Type of Men Attractive
• An Article on Cocky Funny – Why Cocky and Funny Attracts Women Young and Old

There are even sites by women dedicated to “Cocky Men”

• I Love Cocky Men

It’s not entirely our fault that men are encouraged by other men to be cocky. We learned it on the playground, the game field, and the board room. Our naturally competitive nature and desire to be the best makes it easy for us to fill our own heads with delusions of grandeur. cockiness is a defense mechanism to overcompensate for insecurities we might experience when challenged. Confidence relies on past successful experiences where we consciously determined the outcome from the start.

I have yet to find a person who can state that they are 100% Confident in any given situation.  What I have found have been great actors. I do believe that the way out of insecurity is to recognize insecurity for what it is and keep it from falling into a downward spiral of failure where one “mistake” or slip up snowballs into a disaster.

Timeless classics such as the Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey focus on staying mentally strong and overcoming fear and nervousness.  Don’t write off this book as only being for Tennis.  This masterpiece comes highly recommended in many different fields and came to me as I aspired to become a better musician and dealing with performance anxiety.

The women can't get enough of this guy...Whenever I ask whats an example of a confident guy, before I can finish the sentence "George Clooney" pops out... Unbreakable Confidence...

It seems that every woman has their own personal upper limit threshold of toleration when it comes to confidence and cockiness.  Once you cross that line, she will disqualify you and most likely write you off as arrogant. While all women seem to want a confident man, a mixture of both confident and cocky self-dinegrating humor seem to form the killer formula.

Unbreakable confidence doesn’t mean that nothing bothers you, it simply means that no matter what the outcome, the result will not change your state of mind.

There is someone else far better qualified than I am to respond to that question. Tom Butler-Bowen is the author of five volumes in the 50 Classics series. He selected and then discusses primary sources for five subjects: prosperity, psychology, success, self-help, and spirituality. In each of the five volumes, he provides a brief bio of each author, then examines several key ideas and explains the enduring significance of the given work. Here is a representative selection of authors and works featured in 50 Success Classics:

Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (1867)
Chin-ning Chu, Thick Face Black Heart (1992)
Russell H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (1921)
W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis (1974)
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk To Freedom (1994)
Orison Swett Marden, Pushing To The Front (1894)
Zig Ziglar, See You At The Top (1975)

Here is an excerpt from Butler-Bowen’s discussion of Horatio Alger:

“The New York City of the mid-19th century was an awful place for many of its inhabitants. Areas such as Five Points (setting for the movie Gangs of New York) were dangerous and filthy, filled with abandoned or neglected children. Many slept outside at night, and most wore assemblages of badly-fitting ‘ragged’ clothes. During the day they hawked matches, sold newspapers, shined shoes or picked pockets in order to eat. The authorities did little to alleviate the situation, and in a celebrated case, a street urchin found naked was represented by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Horatio Alger, the chronicler of this world to a public who may have preferred not to know that it existed, was not himself a New Yorker, having been brought up in middle-class comfort with a private school education followed by Harvard. Though he had had some writing published, Ragged Dick or Street Life in New York With The Boot-Blacks was Horatio Alger’s first bestseller, setting the template for scores of poor-boy-makes-good novels that had a massive influence on young Americans. Groucho Marx and Ernest Hemingway were among those said to have devoured his work.”

To those curious to know which are the most highly regarded books on the subject of success, I highly recommend Butler-Bowen’s own book as a guide to those sources. Here is a link to Butler-Bowdon’s Web site where you can obtain more information about him and his works. You can also sign up for e-mail alerts:

http://www.butler-bowdon.com/

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Descartes was wrong. Whatever you think: your reason is not you. There’s more to know than the rational part of your mind can tell you. And if you ever want to feel in control of your life, you’d better start to explore your other senses.

(if you’re a how-to-list-kind-of-person: scroll down, it’s at the end of this post)


Have you ever seen anyone who’s ‘in the zone’, like a basketball player making all his shots or an actress delivering this great soliloquy or a jazz pianist playing the greatest solo you’ve ever heard?

Have you noticed how these people seem to be somehow disconnected from reality?

If you’d ask them about how they’ve experienced these moments, they’ll probably tell you that these moments were like a heightened sense of life. They were there, and they weren’t there at the same time.

Last weekend I read that Belgian’s olympic champion high jump Tia Hellebaut couldn’t recall the sensations and the emotions she had during the olympic final. She knew she was there, but today it feels like it was just completely the opposite.

For me that’s an intriguing paradox.

These people seemed out of control and yet at that specific moment they controlled life in a very powerful and even unimaginable way.

Some people call this the “flow”.

Why is it that people who are in a flow seem more in control while at the same time ‘letting go’ is something we tend to describe as being passive, as allowing yourself to be out of control?

All life is movement
Suppose all life is movement. Everything strives for something and everything is driven by something at the same time.

If that’s true then when are you in control?

When you understand the full picture and you can consciously manipulate reality?

How on earth would you be able to grasp reality to its fullest extend? How on earth could you possibly recognize and control all the impulses in life that trigger your thoughts and reactions. Let alone that you’d be able to measure the impact of everything you do?

We can’t. Or at least, we can’t if we only rely on our sense of reason.

Reason as we know it (do we?)
This sense of reason works like a filter. We’ve designed it to help us to rapidly pay attention to those things which are more important than others in our quest for survival. In short: we depend on reason to make clever judgements. It gives us a picture of life which makes it easier to handle, so it seems.

Yet this instrument is far from perfect. Because however smart we are, we still manage to make a tremendous amount of mistakes which seem to make sense. People actually believed they earth was flat you know. And it made perfect sense.

Also, I highly doubt that any one knows exactly when it’s appropriate to use our sense of reason and when not. Mainly because no one told you to but also because letting go of reason seems like a pretty silly thing to do.

It’s something which artists do, or yogi or other people who don’t need to take reality that seriously. In fact, we believe this can actually be a dangerous thing to do. Madness is luring around.

In fact, we’ve become so used to using our sense of reason that we’ve forgotten that it is only one of the many useful ways we use to deal with knowledge about this world.

We’ve also become so obsessed with it that it actually made us teach ourselves that it is the single most important sense we have and that it is basically the only one you can trust. So worrying about when to use it and when not is not even a valid question. It’s common sense, for all you know. (Something Theodor Adorne refers to as the instrumentalism of reason)

Imagine a world without reason (and it’s not a dream)
It has even become hard for us to imagine that the world would be meaningful without our sense of reason.

And yet it is.

Because besides our sense of reason there’s also something which I call physical intelligence (*). Physical intelligence is the way your body (to its fullest extend) reads reality and responds to it.

Physical intelligence is basically what helped you growing up and understand about life on earth long before you even had a sense of reason and long before you could understand how reason would help you to get on in life.

We don’t know this physical intelligence that well because we tend to unlearn how to trust it. The older we get the more we get the impression it becomes useless. It is not useless, but we’ve made it useless though the way we’ve organized and designed our lives: i.e. in a rational way.

Still, our physical intelligence remains far from useless and it actually keeps us more alive than reason allows you to realize.

The power of physical intelligence
Once and a while, when physical intelligence takes control – or when we allow it to take control – it turns out to be more suitable to life then we could ever imagine.

That’s when people are in a flow. That’s when they allow their physical intelligence to do its work.

And for a lot of people, that’s a frightening experience.

Because your sense of reason can’t understand what’s happening. It just has to sit there and watch how something else takes over your life which is something it’s not used to (and the chances are you’re either).

The secret of being in control is … being
People who are in a flow allow their whole body to ride the wave, to go with the flow.

And since they intensely feel the flow (which is actually a set of very complex movements), I believe they are also in control because they allow everything to do it’s work, gravity, the wave, the board, the surfer.

They truly are. Here. Now.

And they have faith.

Because without faith they’d probably start thinking about how they’d get control over the whole situation, how their mind should give their body directions, how it should read the wave, how you should position your feed, what size your board should be, and so on …
Now being in control is also knowing (or should I say sensing) when to get in and out of the flow.

At some points it is actually quite useful to reason about something (ask your accountant).

The hard thing to grasp is that this is actually something which is hard to understand for your sense of reason since your sense of reason makes you believe he’s all you’ve got.

How to understand that there’s more to life than you know? (love story)
Think of it as a long lasting relationship.

After all these years, your relationship isn’t what it used to be. In fact, most of the time you’re just arguing with each other. All your friend does is criticizing you for who you are, and trying to improve you or change you because according to him you’re far from handling life in a perfect way.

One day you meet this great guy who’s far more understanding. He listens to you instead of criticizing you and bossing you around. He actually loves you for who you are (how great is that?). You feel you’re falling in love with him (or what did you expect).

But that’s as far as it goes. Because all of a sudden you become afraid. And you decide not to take this relationship one step further even though deep down you feel that this is guy is way more pleasant to be with, and even though you feel that this might be the guy, he might be the one.

Aye, there’s the rub.

He might be the one. You don’t know for sure.

What you do know for sure is that you know your current partner. You’ve built a life together and it works, well,sort of. It’s not great, but at least you know what you have.

So why risk losing that if you don’t know how your relationship with the other guy will work out? After all, the world is a dangerous place and you never know what you’re going to get. And for all you know you current situation is pretty safe.

But it doesn’t make you happy, does it. And since happy people generally tend to live longer (they definitely enjoy life more), it’s not really what you’d call the best option

As far as the senses are concerned, bigamy is a great thing
Our relationship with reason is pretty similar. The good thing though is that we actually can explore different relationships without having to have a brake up first.

In fact, having different relationships with our different senses at the same time will actually make our relationship with our sense of reason healthier.

Descartes’ mistake
So whatever you think: your reason is not you. Descartes was wrong. There’s more to know than the rational part of your mind can tell you.

And if you ever want to be in control, probably the best thing to do is allow yourself to learn to use all your senses, so not only your sense of reason.

It means you’ll have to have faith in your physical intelligence. It means you’ll have to allow it to make mistakes without criticizing it and making yourself believe it is less smart than your sense of reason.

So how to start flowing?

• learn to play again
• allow yourself to lose yourself into small things
• enjoy wandering around
• if you find yourself in a situation where you cannot come up with a solution through thinking, why not follow your guts?
• love life
• love yourself
• getting lost is just life trying to tell you you’re about to discover something you haven’t seen before. Make sure you notice.
• have fun

For those of you who’d like a more reasonable approach to this matter, try Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, Timothy Gallwey and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi their writings or this brilliant lecture on consciousness as a movement.

“We should reject the idea that the mind is something inside of us that is basically matter of just a calculating machine. There are different reasons to reject this. But one is, simply put: there is nothing inside us that thinks and feels and is conscious. Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.

A much better image is that of the dancer. A dancer is locked into an environment, responsive to music, responsive to a partner. The idea that the dance is a state of us, inside of us, or something that happens in us is crazy. Our ability to dance depends on all sorts of things going on inside of us, but that we are dancing is fundamentally an attunement to the world around us.

And this idea that human consciousness is something we enact or achieve, in motion, as a way of being part of a larger process, is the focus of my work.” (Alva Noë)

(*) It’s possible that what I call physicall intelligence is actually a general term for things like emotional intelligence or social intelligence, like they are described by Daniel Goleman.

Another page from my journal – an art journal actually. Click to enlarge the image.

Reflect on What's Calling Me

I’ll blog in more detail about this later, but if you have any interest in performing, please pick up this book: The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green and Timothy Gallwey. Buy this if you’re an adult just learning to play music. Read it and tell me what you think. In fact, buy it (or pick it up at the library) even if you don’t have an interest in performing. See if it doesn’t change your mind. 

EDIT: Oh, and check out the site at http://www.innergameofmusic.com/

Enjoy!