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Use sports to practice visualization & trust
Sports are a great way to explore and validate our power as a whole person. Think about the mechanics of physical action for a minute. We want to walk or run or feed ourselves or talk, we don’t focus on the exact
mechanics of what muscle to contract, what nerves to fire. We just think, “run” or “say Hello” and off we start or out comes the word “Hello”. This happens to different degrees too. We know we don’t contract
individual muscles to make a golf swing. What do we do? What’s going on in our heads? What’s our self talk? Many of us were brought up to, “figure things out”. Of course logic, reasoning, and study have a purpose.
We all go to school. For twelve, sixteen, twenty years, we develop our intellect and our abilities to study and reason. One day we’ll spend a great deal of time exploring other innate abilities we have. Until then,
until part of our education is developing and using our intuition and subconscious, we are responsible for this part of our education. Back to sports. We want to execute the perfect maneuver, golf swing, tennis
shot, volleyball serve. Simply put our choice is to engage our self talker, “OK this is an important point. I want to hit it like this, keep this like that, and use follow through.” Or we can use our DNA self. We
have thousands of years of experience in the very fiber of our being that has been throwing spears and leaping rocks and swinging sticks for all that time. We with our five, ten, fifty years of experience can try
and control the mechanics or we can let our DNA do it. W. Timothy Gallwey in his “Inner Games” books calls these two parts of us, “self one” and “self two”. Think of self two and DNA you. Get self one out of the way
by making it the observer. Self one is not allowed to instruct or criticize. Self one is only allowed to observe and feed observations back to our DNA self. It’s a matter of trust and experience. When we talk or
feed ourselves, we don’t form every word with our tongues and lips or precisely aim our forks into our mouths. It’s because we have thousands of experiences that give us confidence in our ability to talk and eat
without “controlling”. Cultivate this belief and confidence in all areas of your life. Trust in your DNA. Trust in your connection, as a living human being, with the infinite intelligence of the universe. Just ask
yourself for “the ball to go there” and let your experiences increase your confidence as you see the ball go where you want effortlessly.
Try This:
Read the “Inner Game” books to get more detail on applying sports to change your life. Get a crumpled piece of paper. Try your hardest to toss it on top of a table from ten or so feet away. Try five times. With each
shot really figure out why you’re missing and try to correct your mistake. How many times did the paper stay on the table? Before reading on go try it.
Now try again. This time five throws and no self talk. Visualize the result you want. Visualize the paper sitting on the table. “See” the paper sitting on the table. Watch what happens. Self one just observes. Don’t
try to “fix” anything. Just visualize the paper on the table. Did it work? It’s life - it takes practice. Use your DNA self, your thousands of years of experience to get what you want.
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