This article is short, but hopefully profound. If I’ve learned anything the last few months in life, it is about the power of intention.
I’ve first heard this concept from Alex Lee, then from Tommy John (who inspired Alex Lee), and have since been digging into Joe Dispenza as well as other influences in life, recently taking on books like “The Cure Within” by Anne Harrington and “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton.
Most of us have heard of the idea the belief or “buy in” in a program is the key to success, and I believe it is, but the problem is that we leave it at that and go no further when there is absolutely more to discover.
I’ve heard funny stories about many completely wild training programs that still worked very well for the particular athlete, most of those having enough training volume for five individuals.
I’ve seen college seniors achieve incredible things at the NCAA meet largely through the power of belief and will, even when their training was regularly interrupted in the course of the year through injury.
We know through research that in specific cases, visualizing training is about 70% as effective as actually training, and a combination of both visualizing and training is the superior method.
How important is it then that we understand more of the linking between emotions, visualization and actual training. “Buy in” or “belief” is important, but how do we quantify or unpack more of what that means?
Intention versus Expectation
A lot of it all has to do with your “intentions”, more so than expectations. The big difference is that intention is process driven while expectation is outcome driven. Here are some key points with all of this.
- Intention is having faith in what you desire, but there is not an expectation on the exact process to the outcome (can’t force it) which allows one to stay in the present (A good example of this was my junior year of college where I high jumped 7’0, and trained in a place where I thought the bar was 1-2” higher than it actually was the whole year, which created faith and belief. The next year I fixed my training bar and met the year with forced expectations. I jumped 6’10 that year and jumped 4” lower on average at most meets).
- Intention is the single-minded goal that you have absolute faith and confidence in what will be achieved, albeit the “how” not always unfolding in the way that you expect, so you must keep in the present.
- Intention is not only the mental, but the emotional tone you create within the hearts of your athletes. The highest emotions are gratitude and love. As I’ve heard from the philosophical Frank Yang, “What you feel on the inside when training is more close to reality than what the body appears like”, good food for thought.
- Intention is your own will (and vibration if you are into that kind of thing) and how that impacts the results your athletes are achieving.
- Intention fits hand in hand with belief. Every time an athlete does something that they didn’t think they could do before, belief grows like a muscle. Early entry points to this can be in the endurance and skill realm, and that’s fine, but the more specific to the sport skill, clearly, the better.
Conclusion
There are my quick thoughts on this for the day, and I hope you can take this into your own coaching and training process.
If you have any thoughts on comments, feel free to leave them here.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith, MS, CSCS is a NCAA Division I Strength Coach working in the PAC12 conference. He has been a track and field jumper and javelin thrower, track coach, strength coach, personal trainer, researcher, writer and lecturer in his 8 years in the professional field. His degrees in exercise science have been earned from Cedarville University in 2006 (BA) and Wisconsin LaCrosse (MS) in 2008. Prior to California, Joel was a track coach, strength coach and lecturer at Wilmington College of Ohio.
During Joel’s coaching tenure at Wilmington, he guided 8 athletes to NCAA All-American performances including a national champion in the women’s 55m dash. In 2011, Joel started Just Fly Sports with Jake Clark in an effort to bring relevant training information to the everyday coach and athlete. Aside from the NSCA, Joel is certified through USA Track and Field and his hope is to bridge the gap between understandable theory and current coaching practices.
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