Shaping Your Swing With The Power Of Intention

Shaping Your Swing With The Power of Intention
By Brandon Richardson, PGA 5/30/12

Before every golf swing, an intention created it.   How we swing is merely a physical manifestation or expression of how the world occurs to us at any given moment. In other words the way you see the golf course is how you will act on the golf course.  If you look out and have a clear vision of how the ball will travel to the target, your body will respond brilliantly to this feedback.

Don’t believe it? Take a ball and toss it underhand towards a target, but when you throw it, throw it so the ball spins from right to left in the air….What just happened?  I provided the intention (which you could create yourself) to send a ball to a target in a specific way so the ball was spinning from right to left. How did your body know how to move in such a way so that it created this kind of spin?  Because there was a clear intention to do it. Even if you have never thrown a ball in your life, in a short while you would be able to make the distinction of spinning the ball from right to left, left to right, and relatively straight. The source of this action or any action is the intention, the vision and creativity occurring before the action. Anyone who attends a Golf with Freedom Learning Curve Workshop would experience this by throwing clubs in a similar way and the foundation of learning to shape your shots is revealed to have been within you all along, only needing a clear intention to begin the process of developing your awareness of how to curve the ball.

Of course if your vision of the ball flight is one that revolves around “don’t hit it there, there or there” your body will respond to this feedback too, and it will respond in a defensive, threatened sort of way. It only takes an instant to have your intentions shift and in turn your actions will shift as well.  This is observed in the transition of most golfers practice swings to their actual swings. Your practice swing is smooth, complete, and effortless because your intention is to make a swing that feels good and sends the ball to the target. Then like Jekyll and Hyde your intentions shift when you address the ball and your smooth complete and effortless practice swing becomes a monster.  Your intentions turn to survival mode, the ball becomes the target, and your defensive slash of a golf swing gives off the body language as one of being hopeful, cautious, or threatened. You created the context, your body is just doing what it’s told.

And every day life example is if I have letters that need mailed, my intention is to drop them off at the post office and all my actions leading me to the completion of this task will stem from that one clear intention. It’s how we connect to targets, how we create possible futures that inspire us to act, inspire us to learn, and inspire us to explore and discover what’s possible that generates real change in our swings, our businesses, and our relationships.

 So can you be intentional about your intentions?  It takes practice becoming more aware of what was previously operating underneath your radar of consciousness.  Can you begin to notice when your intentions to swing with freedom are overridden by your intentions to survive? Can you begin to notice how certain actions match your original intentions and how other actions don’t? Can you see how the creation of a possible future is the road map in which your body can begin to follow? 

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