What a person understands management to be is often shaped by their own lived experience. For some it’s the simple instruction passed on to them by superiors to get things done.

Others benefit from books and coursework before being jettisoned into the university of life.

There are those who see management as the logical progression to satisfy an intrinsic ambition.

For some, management just isn’t their thing, and they’re happy enough to accept that their definition of management is the stuff other people do.

It’s hard to get good sales people these days, and just as hard to get good sales managers. Maybe harder.

Most sales managers come into the role prepared to mentor their team rather than coach them. And why wouldn’t they? Only weeks before getting the job, they were the top-performing sales person on the team. Why wouldn’t they want to impart their wisdom to the rest of it?

It’s the natural instinct: I worked it out, so let me show you how. The trouble is, that instinct is built on an assumption that doesn’t hold up as well as it feels like it should. It assumes the problem is that your team don’t know enough. In my experience, that’s rarely what’s actually holding them back.

When I studied coaching last year with Aspire Coach Training, I was introduced to a lot of new psychological frameworks, writers and thinkers, and was challenged frequently on my world view — both my perspective and my perception of what “helping someone perform better” actually means.

One of the thinkers who stuck with me was Tim Gallwey.

Gallwey is an American sports coach and the writer of the best-selling The Inner Game of Tennis (1974), where he developed what he called the “Inner Game” — the idea that performance is limited less by physical skill than by the mental interference a person creates for themselves. The book is now widely credited as one of the founding texts of the modern coaching profession, written well before “coaching” existed as a distinct discipline.

Gallwey summed up his whole argument in one equation: Performance = Potential – Interference.

With that, he’s arguing that low performance usually isn’t a skills problem — it’s an interference problem. The capability is almost always already there. What’s suppressing it is internal noise, not a lack of ability.

Read that back against your own sales team for a second.

Now think about what a sales manager typically does when a deal is going wrong. Numbers are down, the pipeline’s thin, and there isn’t much time to fix it. The instinct that feels responsible — heroic, even — is to take over. Jump on the calls yourself. Take control of the deal. Do what your team seem incapable of doing.

It’s understandable. It might even close the deal in front of you. But it does nothing for the ten deals that come after it, because you’ve just confirmed to your team that when it gets hard, the manager steps in and does it for them. You’ve added instruction. You haven’t removed interference.

Gallwey’s answer to that instinct — the one to jump in and fix it yourself — is a simple tool he calls STOP:

• Step back
• Think
• Organise your thoughts
• Proceed

It’s a tool for interrupting the automatic, interference-driven reaction. Pause before responding. Think clearly about what’s actually happening. Organise your thinking around it. Then act — rather than reacting on autopilot.

The clearest version of Gallwey’s whole philosophy comes in his own words:

“For the teacher or coach, the question has to be how to give instructions in such a way as to help the natural learning process of the student.”

Gallwey’s framework rests on what he calls “Self 1” and “Self 2.”

Self 1 is the conscious, judgemental mind — the internal voice giving instructions, criticising mistakes, analysing performance.

Self 2 is the body’s natural intelligence — the intuitive, non-verbal capacity that actually learns and executes, and which Gallwey argues we’re already “born competent at.” The natural learning process happens when Self 2 is left alone to do its job.

His example is a child learning to walk.

As he puts it, “most children learn to walk before they can be told how to by their parents.”

Nobody sits a toddler down with a briefing on balance and weight transfer.

The child watches, tries, falls, adjusts, and the body works it out through direct experience.

The parent’s job is mostly to observe “without much interference” and let the child build “confidence in the natural learning process which operates within them.”

We don’t lose that ability as adults.

We just bury it under Self 1 — the inner critic and over-instructor — until it can barely get a word in.

Gallwey talks about peak performance as a state where the mind goes as still as a glass lake: the learning happens fastest when the internal critic goes quiet and direct experience is allowed to do the work.

Which brings me back to where I started.

What you understand management to be is shaped by your own experience of it — and if the only model of “good management” you’ve ever seen is someone more senior telling you what they’d do, that’s the model you’ll default to the moment your own team looks like it needs rescuing.

Coaching your sales team isn’t about knowing less than them, or caring less about the number.

It’s about resisting the urge to hand them your answer — which, I’ll grant you, is easy advice from someone who gets paid to say it, and considerably harder at 4pm on a Thursday with the pipeline looking thin.

But the capability you’re looking for is usually already sat in the room with you.

Your job isn’t to add more instruction.

It’s to get out of the way of what’s already there.

Thanks for reading