Envisioning What You Want

Try this little exercise.

Get into a relaxed position. Clear your mind. Now….DON’T THINK ABOUT PINK ELEPHANTS!

How did that go? If you are like most of humanity, you couldn’t help but envision pink elephants.

Now, imagine you are standing on the tee box of a particularly challenging golf hole. Let’s say there is water all along the left side of the fairway. You notice that your palms are beginning to perspire as you say to yourself, “Don’t hit it in the water”. You take a cut at the ball and, sure enough, there it goes out into the middle of the lake.

The funny thing is that if you were just hitting balls on the driving range, you would rarely make such an attempt at the ball. What is going on here?

Well, the mind is a powerful thing…and it doesn’t quite grasp the concept of “Not”.

When you hold the image of the lake in your mind, your brilliant mind/body connection goes to work to figure out just how to accomplish the movement it would take to send a ball careening into that shinny blue collection of water out there.

So, if you ever experience such a phenomenon when you play the game, you might just take a moment and smile instead of experiencing frustration. Your brilliant system just figured out a way to hit the exact shot that you just envisioned in your mind. If you think about the possibilities of what this might mean for envisioning what you DO want, you might start to feel a little excitement.

When you fully grasp the power that your consciousness has in the game of golf, you can begin to relax more when you play. You can breathe deeper and have more faith in yourself. You can walk down the fairway, your steps a little lighter without all the burden of your doubts and negative thoughts.

If you see what you want to have happen, the chances of it actually happening increase dramatically.

Not only that. When you turn your attention on what you want and the positive possibilities, your whole consciousness will follow. You begin to smile more. Your breath begins to deepen. You begin to enjoy the beautiful walk in the park that golf can be.

Some days are easier to do this than others. It’s not something you need to beat yourself up about if you are not getting it on any particular day, particular hole or particular shot. However, whenever you realize this negative mind state, you have the freedom and the opportunity to begin to experiment in another direction. Envision what you want, relax, trust, breathe, smile…swing.

And be humble enough to laugh when it doesn’t all go perfectly. This is a challenging game.