This lesson provides one of the key learning points in leveraging the Law of Attraction for your golf game. Awareness of your feelings allows you to become your own best teacher in keeping yourself on track with your Intentions – and the applications far exceed golf!
Please note: if you have deep or troubling feelings, or difficulties with this topic of feelings in general, you may want to consider adding to your team, a trusted, trained, sympathetic person who can draw from you and help you grow. Typically, a psychologist, sports psychologist, life coach, or religious mentor might be worthy of your consideration. Ask the Universe to bring this person into your life, and then be ready and willing to act, and to receive from them. Use the Law of Attraction to your healthy benefit!
“Feelings are the body’s reaction to the mind, and every feeling is your friend.” — Bob Fagan
Just as physical pain signals that something is amiss with the body, emotional hurt signals spiritual misalignment. One of the most important strategies associated with the Law of Attraction is that your feelings are the best auditor of your thoughts. Simply stated, feelings are the language of the soul, the body’s reaction to the mind. When you feel good or right, no action is necessary. However, when you feel depressed, resentful, confused, angry, guilty, sad, or any emotion that does not feel good, go back to re-examine the underlying belief or thought that triggered it. Negative emotions are simply an indicator that you are out of vibrational alignment with your true self – you messed up. You always have a choice as to how you perceive the world around you. Why not change it to your favor? There always is something related to how we perceive our environment, a choice we make. Change your thought or belief and you change your world. You do all this in effect making yourself a “deliberate creator”.
In golf, we are presented many situations involving the challenge or even the social aspects that can trigger negative feelings. Maybe you don’t like a putt, a hole, a course, an opponent, the playing conditions, a playing companion, what somebody said or did, their etiquette or lack thereof, or even a rules decision. How you interpret your surroundings and react on the golf course can have a telling effect on your game. Make a birdie and do you get too excited or make a double bogey and do you become too upset? The best players will try to stay even keeled. At the least, they will not retain the elation or the anger too long after a shot. Witness Tiger Woods. For a good shot, he has his animated fist-pump, but several seconds later you will find him settled back into a completely composed state – same way with a bad shot. Poorer players stay elated or depressed too long and it affects their body chemistry and muscles. Sometimes too much of a good thing produces adrenalin that ruins club selection.
When you catch yourself with a negative feeling, check to identify the underlying belief and quickly make the decision to revise your thinking. Every feeling has a gift to give you if you only notice.
Here are some samples of common uncomfortable feelings in golf and what they mean.
Fear – reflects the possibility of danger or doubt. Choose to acknowledge the fear and to love the challenge. Focus upon the target with blinders, black out the trouble.
Anger – reflects the need to establish clear boundaries so you can maintain your sense of focus and equanimity. Check the source of the thought, and turn it into something positive like a lesson or a signal.
Overwhelm & Confusion – reflects the need to slow down or the need for space. Act accordingly. Stop, look, acknowledge, and choose to engage rather than resist.
When in doubt as to how to respond, try to orient yourself toward love, engagement, and abundance as opposed to fear and scarcity.
Here is a roadmap as to how you might audit your golfing beliefs and turn the non-operating ones into supportive.
- Reflect over areas of your game in which you are very satisfied. Write down the supporting beliefs in each of those areas.
- Now do the same with the areas in which you are less than pleased with. Again, jot down the supporting underlying beliefs. Dig deep and be honest with yourself. What are the underlying thoughts or beliefs that drive each of these thoughts?
- Now review the “feel good” beliefs. Read them over and then close your eyes and envelop yourself in the feeling that adjoins them. What thoughts, emotions, and physical feelings are surfacing? How do you see yourself moving on as a result of these beliefs?
- Now go back to the list of your limiting beliefs and review them again. Again close your eyes and sense the emotions, physical feeling, and all that is associated here. Is this the way you want your golfing life to unfold?
- Now with the limiting thoughts, make a decision as to whether or not you want to hold on to them. Remember that many of them are just your “stories” or thoughts that you have invested in. Sometimes an audit will reveal something that is better discarded or released.
- For each of those limiting belief, cross them out, and write out a replacement for them on the “positive” list. Destroy the limiting belief sheet.
- What you have done is to identify what doesn’t work, and then decided that you could and would change your belief, and then you did. Congratulations!
- Now at least once a day, read over your supportive beliefs with passion and conviction, and visualize yourself experiencing your new perspectives.
“Your emotions indicate the degree of your alignment with Source.” – Esther Hicks
