Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics and Golf

By Peter O'Dell, MA

Do these things really go together? Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics is a great form of therapy, but golf is . . . well, it is something between an ordinary sport and a religion. Although some golfers experience unending frustration with the game, the truly good ones talk about being in The Zone.

And what is this zone? Different adjectives come up, but the most common ones are "peaceful," "focused," and "effortless." And sometimes it is described as "playing out of my mind." In short, these duffers are describing a state of meditation or trance. Ah, the domain of hypnosis, just one of the fundamental components of Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics. Just allow yourself to go into a light trance the next time you play. And there is the learning aspect of the game. How do you learn to swing a golf club? A fellow came into my office a month ago and asked me if I could teach him to swing the club unconsciously. I asked if he knew how many muscles you have in your arm from the tip of your fingers to the shoulder. Few people realize that there are over 150 muscles in each arm! So, I asked him if he could do 150 things simultaneously -- in fact since both arms, and the back, and the legs are involved in the swing, it is a lot more than 150 muscles to control at once!

For your conscious mind, this is an impossible task. The limit of conscious awareness ranges between 5 and 9 "chunks" for most people. But look at what your unconscious mind is doing all the time: breathing, blood pressuring, digesting food, controlling enzyme levels of all sorts, controlling blood sugar levels, preparing for reproduction, and the list goes on and on. In short, your unconscious mind controls everything. Truly, swinging a golf club properly is a trivial task for the giant within.

So, where is the problem in learning to swing a golf club? It boils down to getting the conscious mind to provide useful information to the unconscious. Curse words and critical pronouncements are not useful. Objective data on a shot is.

So how does the unconscious mind learn? That question is easy to answer. Just think back to when you did not have a conscious mind--and I don't mean at the party last Saturday night! No, the people who study child development pretty much agree that we do not have a "conscious" mind until around age seven. How did you learn before then? RAPIDLY!!!

Think of all the things that you learned in those years -- walking and talking are far more complex than swinging a golf club. How did you do it? You watched the "experts" around you and imitated them. Technically, this is called modeling. And modeling is at the heart of NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP), another major component of Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics..

NLP grew out of the notion of "modeling" from the computer sciences of the 1960s. Then, computers were huge monsters occupying whole floors of major office buildings. "Modeling" was a vision of teaching a computer to do a job or task that a man would normally do. But which man? Would you model the poorest performer or the BEST? Obviously, the choice was to find the best person at some task, break what he did down into discreet steps, and write a program that duplicated his behavior. Then the computer would be able to do the task as well as a man-the very best man.

The founders of NLP asked a simple question, "Why not use the same process to teach you to do something new or solve a problem in a different way than you have tried before." At that time, this was revolutionary. Psychology had taken a dark turn under the influence of the Freudians with their obsession with the medical model, which looks for "what's wrong with this person" and focuses on the finer details of the "problem." And there was the whole issue of rate of change. In spite of all the brainwashing of the psychological community, true change is rapid, almost instantaneous, largely because it usually hinges on a change in perspective. The only thing that really takes years and years is sending your therapist's kids to Harvard.

Very quickly, the NLP founders realized that people do not react directly to the world around them. First, you create a "map" of your world. Then, you react to that map. But the map is not the territory! Change the map, and you change "your world" and your reaction to it. You are not defective, but you may have a defective map.

What are the maps composed of? For human beings there are basically only three things: pictures, sounds and feelings. Every human being uses one or more of these modes of thinking to create your world. Change your map (the pictures, sounds and feelings), and you change your world. You literally can make your world be whatever you want it to be. If any human being can do something (anything), you can learn to do it, too--easily and quickly. All you have to do is find out what the expert's map and programs are like and duplicate them. That is one of the secrets of Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics success. We find techniques that work and teach you to use them.

NLP is an integration of several disciplines including neurology, psychology, linguistics, cybernetics and systems theory. You can think of it as a blend of cognitive and behavioral psychology. But NLP is much more than ordinary psychological theory and jargon-MUCH, MUCH MORE! The founders of NLP simply extracted the small percentage of psychological theory and technique that actually works. In fact, the number one criteria for inclusion of theory or technique in NLP is "Does it work in real life?" Ideas and techniques that cannot meet this criteria are left for the academicians to debate. This aspect of NLP carries forward as one of the cornerstones of Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics.

So, how can you use Advanced Mind-Body Dynamics on the golf course? (Or in any other sport for that matter.) Before you play, spend some quiet time alone. Pick out a Pro that you really admire -- Palmer, Woods, Zoeller -- whoever. Close your eyes and imagine them playing. Make up a little movie of it. Run that movie in your mind several times zooming in on more detail each time. Next substitute yourself for the Pro and run the movie a few more times. Then go out on the course and play it the way the Pro would.

After all, that's how you learned to walk, isn't it.

(A slightly different version of this article first appeared in Natural Awakenings magazine, June 1998 edition.)

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