Ch.40 Win-win Sports at New Colleges

In Chapter 40 New Colleges, Experiential Insight Colleges SPORTS programs! In two chapters

Serializing Awakening the Inner Teacher: Insight Experiential Colleges. How Women In Congress re-invented liberal arts colleges.

Taking a step back, the big picture is New Colleges Project, 2030–2040, synthesized a new curriculum and new method of classroom instruction as a crash course to rectify and clarify healthy, truly human values for college-age learners. The goal was to graduate men and women ready willing, able and wanting to take on the challenges we face on SpaceShip Earth, as Team Human, for the next seven generations.

Thanks for reading How Experiential Insight Colleges replace older lib arts! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Women compete differently than men

In the Piscean Age, male competition led to endless tales of great men, portraits and statues of men. The Aquarian Age, starting more or less in 2020, was much more characterized by feminine genius and talents.

New Colleges were instigated by Women In Congress after the great success of Women’s Summer Conference 2033. Public agitation over a very public collapse of liberal arts colleges in 2029 was the second factor. “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” The 2029 crisis gave activist women courage to dare to conceive and propose re-making of liberal arts colleges. The results was five pilot campuses across a few states.

Much attention and enthusiasm already existed for upgrading liberal arts History curriculum. Surprisingly, Sports curriculum was the first and easiest curriculum area to be re-conceived and upgraded. Interactive social games replaced the majority of male-competitive win~lose competing. These games were so much fun, during the writing and developing of New Colleges, three days a week, the War Room and Writers Room staff, convened outside at 3 PM to play the New Games.

What was wrong with male sports?

To go back a bit development of New Colleges was supported by Monday Lunch With Experts, a weekly series on-going since 2023 live and online. The focus of these talks, interviews, Q&A was tricky, cultural topics. The benefit was often expanding women’s language and rhetoric for tricky topics so they could be discussed more openly, clearly and transparently. A consensus women could live with was then more possible.

To answer your question, professors, authors and education innovators in the field of Athletics presenting at Monday Lunch agreed with this idea: Between 1850–2025, competitive win~lose sports dominated the male imagination almost exclusively. This one-sided domination affected not only pop culture but also financial culture. Between 1978 (Reagan) and 2022 (revival of anti-monopoly regulations) elite investors conceived of “winning” exclusively (one-sidedly) in terms of profit. This one-sidedness led to an epidemic of greed.

In live and televised competitive sports; while, they relied on teamwork, games contributed little to promoting teamwork, cooperation and collaboration in any other area of life or popular culture. The paradox was without teamwork there would be no sports teams. When high profile, professional-corporate sports athletes provided a healthy role model for children and young adults, these were more the exception than the rule.

Teamwork wan’t esteemed, valued and invested in by corporations until the early 2000s; when it became obvious, it was healthy teams of Cultural Creatives who were making the most innovative and profitable internet websites and phone apps.

The corporatized, quadrennial international Olympics were better at promoting healthy teamwork and personal values — yet not by much. Still too much money, power and competition involved.

Where was sports — or any one sport — providing healthy role models of self-connection, cooperation and collaboration regularly, routinely and reliably? Virtually nowhere?

American Ninja Warrior

On the national-international level, American Ninja Warrior (2009–2027) on NBC.com, was the exception which proved the above rule. ANW was virtually the only sport where the positive qualities of self-connection, competing with your self, win-win competition between athletes, healthy and appropriate consequences for failure was explicitly and enthusiastically celebrated.

Consider what the average ANW participant learned attempting an ANW course for the first time. Through personal experience, participants learned the practical value of internal self-connection: know your physical and mental limitations; know your physical and mental strengths; capitalize on them. Athletes who held onto self-connection, self-discipline, do not rush, do not push themselves too far. In their short video bios, these ANW athletes often testified to how ANW supported their performance everywhere in their life.

When American Ninja Warrior style gyms were installed at college campuses, this attracted students whose desire was to compete with themselves for their their personal best: best time, best performance, etc. This had the wonderful side-effect of generalizing to student performance in liberal arts classrooms.

Decline of quadrennial intl. Olympics

Before the covid era, the audience for the International Olympics had already been declining for a long time. After covid, the Olympics never recovered their pre-pandemic prominence. Why? Monday Lunch experts proposed these reasons:

- A stressful, one-sided, male-mindset was too prevalent,

- Too much pressure and money at stake, taking the fun out of competing, and

- Lack of balance with healthy feminine values, self-connection, connect with others, cooperation and collaboration. The values the world lacks and needs more of.

Waldorf-method advocates had for decades voiced how the most disheartening Olympic sport for many women was female gymnastics. Female athletes were judged 100% on external appearance. Scored by men and male-thinking women, Women’s Olympic Gymnastics was little different from a Miss America Pageant. Who wins? The girl-woman who embodies appearance and traits, male gazers value most. Girls gymnastics was too much like a horse show, female athletes showing off, performing like horses at a horse show. Celebrating individual achievement and personal creativity were NOT the highest priority. These were second or third behind pleasing men, winning trophies of national pride and commercial sports endorsement deals.

From a female perspective, conventional Olympics was corrupted by male tropes and win~lose thinking.

New Colleges Sports was a response to all of these problems.

Competition-mad male-led Olympics was more backwards looking than forwards looking. New College creators were determined to bring the age of exploiting high school and college athletes to a close. They were determined to bring the age of high school and college athletes exploited as surrogate warrior-war action-violence for public entertainment to a close. Thanks to ANW and New Colleges Sports, a new age of sport spectatorship celebrating each individual competing against their own limitations, continued to expand nationally and internationally. Gradually local, state and national sports began to morph into more female-friendly expressions.

The Inner Game of Sports

Dear reader, have you ever been on the verge of a personal performance, where you knew you were a success even before you began to compete? You felt confident, in control. Your mind focused with ease, impervious to self-doubt and distraction. Obstacles melt away, and internal resources you never knew you possessed, materialize?

This phenomenon — winning or losing in your mind before you win or lose it in reality — is what tennis player and coach W. Timothy Gallwey first called “the Inner Game” in his book The Inner Game of Tennis. Gallwey published his book in 1971 when people (males) viewed sport as a exclusively physical in nature. Athletes focused on their muscles, not their mindsets. Today, we know how psychology is the other half of the challenge.

In any sport, in any endeavor, your Inner Game is not fought against any external opponent. Your Inner Game is fought against your own self-defeating tendencies and bad habits. Gallwey writes in his introduction:

INDENT

Every game is composed of two parts, an outer game, and an inner game. . . . It is the thesis of this book neither mastery nor satisfaction can be found in the playing any game, without giving some attention to the relatively neglected skills of the inner game. The inner game takes place in the mind of the player. It is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all bad habits of mind inhibiting excellence in performance. . . . Victories in the inner game may provide no additions to the trophy case; yet, they bring valuable rewards more permanent; and which, can contribute significantly to one’s success off the court as well.

end Q

One of the most important insights Gallwey shares is one major thing leading us to lose at the Inner Game is trying too hard, interfering with our own natural learning curve. Let’s take a look at how we can win the Inner Game in our own lives by seeing the importance of not forcing things.

Myth of “no pain, no gain”

When we’re learning a new sport; really, any new behavior, we often internally talk to ourselves. We give ourselves instructions. When Gallwey noticed his students talking to themselves, he wondered who was talking to whom. From his observations, he drew his key insight: the idea of Self 1 and self 2.

Self 1 is the conscious self. self 2 is the subconscious and unconscious. In healthy individuals, these two selves keep up a healthy dialogue. When the two selves establish on-going two-way communication, performance is enhanced.

More often, this isn’t what happens.

Self 1 gets judgmental and critical, trying to instruct self 2 in what to do. The trick is to quiet Self 1. Allow self 2 to travel up its natural learning curve, improving with each repetition. This is the natural process which enables small children to learn new things. This capacity is within us — we just need to avoid impeding it. As Gallwey explains, “Self 1 tries to instruct self 2 using words. But self 2 responds best to images; and, thru repetition, internalizing the physical muscle memory experience, to carry out Best Practices.”

In short, if we let ourselves lose touch with our ability to feel our actions, by relying too heavily on mental and verbal instructions, we seriously compromise access to our natural learning curve process and better performance.

Reference

https://fs.blog/2020/01/inner-game-of-tennis/

Obsessed with being on top

Due to Male Gender Collapse, With so few males in New Colleges, many younger female students were naturally curious what old time macho men were like. What were they?

As we will se in the coming sections on Communications and History, New College classroom facilitators (teachers, professors) conducted many conversations on this. To summarize NC teacher texts, in Medieval times, old macho males were indoctrinated to; and, committed to King of the Hill, brutal Game of Thrones stories. Macho males believed one single individual, can and should dominate all others. Might makes right, in French, force majeur.

A corollary to this was, one ethnic minority can and should dominate all other races and ethnicities; sometimes, one religion can and should dominate all other faiths.

Above all other values, old macho males chose “win~lose” and “competition.” Therefore, self-connection cooperation and collaboration had to be be denied and repressed.

Macho male leaders could NOT see beyond competitive races and being-on-top contests. “Win-win” was a foreign language to macho males.

This was challenging for young women to imagine. They tried to imagine this. Ultimately young women agreed Feminine genius is worlds different and more practical given the needs of SpaceShip Earth.

From win~lose to win-win

Old Macho Male competition thought mostly in lowest common denominator terms. Simplistic dualism was the male fashion for a thousand years, “heads I win; tails you lose.” Since WWII and especially since 2008, apart from males, the rest of world — was moving on to three-body thought and problem solving. Binary on~off thinking was too primitive for the problems of a planet groping blindly towards a healthy world culture and political economy.

Two-body problem solving: is my profit going up or down? Is the stock market going up or down? Improving the standard of living and quality of life for the 99% can’t be accomplished by on~off, profit~loss, tax~spend, rich~poor, white~black thinking.

Two-body thinking, on~off, profit~loss, tax~spend, rich~poor, white~black — is too unsophisticated to assess and solve problems in a highly interconnected, interactive world with multiple moving parts, values and vectors. Cixin Liu brought the metaphor of three-body problem solving into the mainstream with his famous sci-fi novel, The Three Body Problem (2016).

Three-body problem solving in MMT

Three-body problem solving had its greatest use-case in national economics of sovereign nations, those who print their own currency. Modern nations are no longer on the gold standard (tax and spend in order to make you pile of gold get bigger not smaller). Modern nations who print their own currency are in the business of spending (creating) new money into their economy to keep three things in balance: a high level of employment, a low level of inflation; and, a high level of investment in productive capacity (factories, etc). Three Body Economists think about how much new money should be created-spent; and, how much to tax and who to tax — for the best outcome for employment, inflation and productive capacity. This is what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) advocates.

Two-body win~lose, tax~spend thinking isn’t worth much. Unhealthy cut-throat competition, Old Males favorite pass time, only takes us backwards to before WWII, not forwards.

More abundance only comes from self-connection, cooperation and collaboration than ever came from even healthy competition. Competition is the little engine. Self-connection cooperation and collaboration is the bigger engine. Just ask Mother Nature.

Since 1920 or earlier, with the brief exception of the WW II and the Civil Rights era, most male-led orgs routinely neglected and sabotaged most practical plans to directly improve the future for the 99%. You cannot be “win~lose” today and “win-win” tomorrow. You can only hold one core value system deeply inside your self. You choose.

In the last 80 years, with the brief exception of the Civil Rights era, most male-led orgs consistently neglected and sabotaged practical plans to directly improve the future for the 99%. Corporate-consumer monopoly capitalism dominated. The exception was 1930–1978.

The Century of Male Failure, 1920–2020, motivated women to try the alternative, win-win. Perhaps it was more fruitful for the 99%. Could it be followed thru consistently — or not? Male thinking simply wasn’t sophistical enuf to even attempt this experiment on any large scale, base policy decisions on it. Female thinking was.

Within New Colleges, led by women in the War Room and Writers Room, women were free to experiment creating win-win culture. After male Gender Collapse (2065-on going), when more younger, healthy males emerged, graduating from New Colleges, the women taught the men how to think and make decisions based on win-win. But I digress.