Your multiple intelligences, hold surprising approaches to the green, if you’re willing to accept that one way rarely fits all golfers. Conversely, golf helps you to develop and draw from hidden or unused new intelligences that you’ll find useful this week at work.
Intelligences… even those often ignored by schools and business organizations … can be developed on the links… and they’ll add amazing solutions to 
improve your workweek at the same time.
Include any of these tips in your next game, and raise the bar for:
Verbal-linguistic intelligence, which includes your ability to play with and learn from words and phrases. Try listening to Scott Peck’s humorous tapes on how golf relates to life, and then follow three of his verbal suggestions off the tee.
Naturalistic intelligence, which includes your ability to engage with nature for smarter solutions to daily problems. Take a walk through a park. Abandon your game to lessons from clouds, trees and rocks along the way. Use a hunter’s, botanist’s, or anatomist’s ability to recognize and enjoy animals, plants, and other parts of the natural environment, to unlock naturalistic possibilities you may have overlooked on the course.
Visual-spatial intelligence, which includes your ability with art or architecture to splash new colors onto your game plan. Visual smarts show the curved arc from your ball to the hole, so you learn to connect with the ball as if your swing followed that visual arc. Imagine new visual arcs to the green, and then follow a navigator or sculpture’s capacity to perceive your visual world more accurately. See every swing propel your ball to the green.
Logical-mathematical intelligence, which includes your ability with logic, numbers and patterns, so you move you sequentially toward a target. Organize your day around your next game so that you play at a time you enjoy golfing most. Sequence each step toward a winning hit and then plan to follow the same methodical sequence for the next swing.
Interpersonal intelligence, includes your ability to receive from and contribute to other people’s ideas, to hear, understand, help and learn from others around you. Golf your next game with a person you admire, enjoy, laugh with or are challenged by. Discuss your games together and watch their strengths and weaknesses on the course. List one new strategy gained.
Intrapersonal intelligence, includes your ability to reflect alone and then add insights you gain to generate smarter solutions. Take time out … alone … to think about positives in your game. Imagine life without golf, and then appreciate the way you can still learn new winning strategies from your own intelligences, regardless of your age or circumstances. Watch victory follow in new ways, all because you reached into deep personal resources for answers.
Musical intelligence, includes your ability with sounds and cadence -- to relax and move in new creative ways through its rhythms. Sing or play notes you’d like to see in your next game. Listen to tapes during your ride to the clubhouse, and you’ll unlock many new adventures in your next game. Regardless of your training or skill, you’ll benefit with possibilities never thought possible, since music can actually convert brain waves into skillful shots.
Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, includes your ability to allow movement to teach new solutions. Try new ways to loosen up and benefit from motion, whether it’s walking, running or building mock ups you enjoy. When we unlock bodily-kinesthetic approaches to golf, we also enjoy physical abilities that dance, or ski, or leap into other areas of our swings. During a game, take advantage of this domain by allowing your body to dictate swings.
Engage your brain in multiple ways as described here, and you’ll discover new talents that often remain hidden during a round of golf. Step by step you’ll create a better game, by tapping into diverse mental treasures. Remember, these are already present in your cranium, so it’s worth a try to retrieve each.
Why not set a goal to use just one new intelligence during your next game, or at work this week.
Catch a glimpse of your hole in one, and then move closer to landing it through bringing a few new mental tools to the tee. It may just propel you away from sand traps and toward the green, which makes it worth a shot in my game anyway. See you at the clubhouse. I hope you’ll be the one exchanging a calculator for smaller scores.
Comment Preview