What makes the difference is that those consistently successful players combine those skills and knowledge with a controlled and measured level of concentration; while sticking to their routines.

What do I mean by Concentration?

Although a high level of concentration seems to be key to consistent success at the highest levels, there’s more than one way to concentrate. Some players, like Nick Faldo, felt the need to hold their concentration for complete rounds or even tournaments. That’s very hard on the nerves and probably one of the reasons that Nick now prefers to commentate rather than play top-level golf.

By way of contrast, Luke Donald is just as focussed when he’s planning and executing his shots, but between shots he looks much more relaxed and nonchalant between shots. Maybe that’s why he had the capacity to head the money lists on the PGA and European Tours in 2011.

Then there’s the story of European Tour player Phil Archer I wrote about in my book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf. Phil had a reputation for winning the pro-am events on the Wednesdays before the main tournaments and then missing the cut on the Fridays. In the tournament he tried to concentrate like a Nick Faldo, while in the pro-am he’d focus, between concentrating briefly on his own shots, on helping his amateur partners enjoy their day. I bet they thought he was acting cool when they were playing with him! When he started to be nonchalant between shots in the main tournament, he started to win.

How do I become Nonchalant?

The best advice is to focus most of your efforts on consistently following your routines and only really concentrate on the shot in hand. Between shots, you can enjoy yourself and be as nonchalant as you possibly can. There’s really nothing you can do constructively between shots, other than simply relax and enjoy the experience. You can use the “Concentration on the Zone” and “The Playing Zone” hypnosis sessions from my Golf in the Playing Zone programme to help with that.

You can also use “Finger Breathing” to help you relax between shots. You can read about the technique and download a recording of it at http://ezine.golf-hypnotist.com/finger-breathing/.

Remember to keep an eye out for nonchalance on the golf course, especially from the top players. If you were watching Robert Rock winning the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Robert may have been nervous, but he still looked nonchalant as he enjoyed the experience of playing in the final group on Sunday with Tiger Woods.

Well, I always seemed to putt better when I had a playing partner, so I’ll set aside 2-ball match play and stroke play for the moment. Now that I come to think about it, I generally seemed to putt better when I had a partner than when I was just playing for myself.

So why did I putt better with certain partners than I did with others? Well I fairly certain that I putted better when I played with a confident partner who I trusted to read my putts for me. The odd thing is that the partner I remember putting best with was not in my league in terms of handicap. He just seemed to read greens instinctively and he was certainly a good putter. He knew my putting style and trusted my judgement of distance, so he simply told me where to aim and I holed the putts – far more than my fair share.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone like that caddying for you now, I hear you say? Well, you already do, if you are prepared to trust the unconscious green reading instincts you already have. The good news is that I’ve addressed the unconscious aspects of green reading in the final golf hypnosis session in my “Own the Putting Green” programme.

Is that all we can do for putting? What about the power of the conscious mind? If I’m playing a full shot, I have lots conscious tools to help me. I can use yardage charts, GPS systems, laser rangefinders and even the 150 yard posts to help me judge distance. I can even calibrate my hitting distances with each club using devices like Trackman. In addition, there’s often contour information for the greens on the course planner to help me plan where best to land my approach shots.

All of those things, combined with the information we pick up through our senses and experience, help us to plan our full shots consciously in our pre-shot routines. The problem is that we are largely left alone with senses and judgement when it comes to putting. The only alternative to trusting your instinctive green reading skills seems to employ the services of a really good caddy or play with a partner you can trust!

Well that’s what I thought up until I went on an AimPoint green reading clinic recently!

The AimPoint Green Reading Clinic

The clinic was organised by my old friend and putting coach, Jason Gilroy of Gilroy’s Golf, and run by Europe’s senior AimPoint instructor, Jamie Donaldson. I’ll leave it to them to tell you all about AimPoint, other than to say that I started out very sceptical and came away as a convert.

What surprised me about the course was that it was much more intuitive and a lot simpler than I expected. What delighted me was that I learned something very important about my own field.

I talk a lot in my work about the importance of using and extending all of our sensory inputs – sight, hearing, feelings, smells and tastes. When I talk about visualisation, I really mean imagination and we can imagine more than just pictures. In fact many of us are more comfortable recalling and imagining internal and external feelings and sounds than pictures.

As a golfer, I was used to thinking about the feeling of every part of the body in my swing – apart from my feet. That all changed when Jamie started talking about walking around the green and sensing changes in slope with my feet. He was getting us to “look” for inflection points so we could detect break directions. You’ll have to go on the AimPoint Fundamentals clinic to understand the relevance of that information and a lot more besides.

All I know is that it reminded me of all the valuable input we have from all our senses and how we can easily “read” the subtlest change of slope on a green just by walking around on it.

The older they get, the more golfers tend to forget how easy putting really is. They also forget how good they used to putt when they were younger and more carefree. You often hear the golf pundits on television talking about how some or other up and coming young professional hasn’t yet learned how difficult putting really is. They sometimes go on to talk about how the accumulation of years of missed putts slowly frazzles the nerves and undermines the confidence of the older and more experienced golfers. Maybe that’s how they justify their own inability to maintain their competitiveness on the tour. It’s small wonder that they’re now commentating rather than playing.

I work regularly with an American Senior Professional Golfer and the first time we met was in a practice round for the British Senior Open Championship. He explained that he couldn’t read greens very well. It was a major problem for him and put unnecessary added pressure on the rest of his game.

After walking a few holes with him in his final practice round, I noticed that there was a little white cross painted on each of the greens. I guessed that these were to show the greens staff where to cut the holes on the first round of the tournament, the next day. So I suggested to my client that it would be worth rolling a few balls to these marks to get the feel of these pin positions. As he’d been practicing with several balls and to save time, I suggested that he walked in a 20 foot circle around these “holes” and rolled a few balls by hand to them. It was a lot quicker than putting them, as he didn’t bother to line them up.

I kept quiet for the first few greens where he tried this and just let him do this without much conscious thought. Then I pointed out to him that around 40 percent of the balls he’d rolled this way would have gone in the hole and the rest had finished within 12 inches of the white mark. He burst out laughing when I asked him if he was still sure that he couldn’t read greens. He could when he didn’t try too hard consciously!

Why don’t you try it out for yourself? It’ll confirm how good you really are at reading greens unconsciously and instinctively. All you have to do is to roll a few balls on a few greens. It’s a great way to reinforce the “Reading your Putts Instinctively” golf hypnosis track in my Own the Putting Green” programme.

Own the Putting Green

Own the Putting Green” is one of my most popular programmes and is used by many of my professional clients to very good effect. The programme addresses putting confidence and belief in your putting, as well as learning `to trust your instinctive green reading abilities.

The programme won’t teach you how to putt or how to read greens. What it will do is help you to make the most of the unconscious, instinctive putting abilities you already have.

Unusually for me, there are no instructions here about using any formal self hypnosis technique before following these six steps. You’ll usually be using this technique as you transition from the conscious process of planning your putt in your pre-shot routine to the, hopefully, unconscious process of stroking the putt in your shot routine. Having said that, if you’re an experienced user of the “Finger Breathing technique, you’ll only need a couple of deep breaths at this point to get into just the right state.

Step 1: When you approach a putt, start following your normal pre-shot routine and doing whatever you would normally do to read and visualise the putt.

Step 2: If you haven’t already marked the ball, then mark it now, clean it and replace it ready to putt. I suggest that you avoid making any particular conscious effort to line up the markings on the ball with the target. If you normally draw a sighting line on your ball, either ignore it or don’t do it for now.

Step 3: Now stand 2-4 yards behind the ball on the line to your target. Face straight at the target, so that both your eyes are seeing the ball and the hole using your binocular vision.

Step 4: Recall your visualisation of the putt and do your best to imagine the feeling and/or picture of the ball rolling along your expected line before hearing it fall in the hole.

Step 5: Now, keeping that feeling and/or picture in your mind and, while maintaining your gaze at the ball and the hole, take your stance for a practice swing. Take a couple of practice swings while still looking simultaneously at the ball and hole.

Step 6: As soon as you feel the practice swing is a good rehearsal for the putt you want to play, move as quickly and smoothly as you can and take up your stance to the ball. Only roughly align yourself to the hole – your unconscious will automatically allow for any misalignment. Then take one slow look at the hole and as soon as your eyes return to the ball, notice how you automatically and unconsciously start your putter stroke and then stroke the putt. It really is that easy!

So why does this work? Well, the object is to get all the conscious thought and analysis out of the way before handing over to your unconscious mind to finally assess the shot and hit the putt. Looking at the hole with both eyes while you get the feel of the putter stroke allows your unconscious mind to take in all the information it needs to deliver the putt that you saw and/or felt in step 1. Finally, the faster you can smoothly take your stance, look at the hole and start your swing, the more of that unconscious information you’ll retain and the less time there is for the conscious mind to step in and start analysing things again – and potentially sowing the seeds of doubt.

Remember that you can use a similar technique for chips and, with practice, for longer shots as well. It’s also a good technique for helping overcome the Yips for both putting and chipping.

I remember avoiding the suggestion, at the time, that Darren started doing that after he or one of his support team read about it in my ezine. However, it was obviously helping him in overcoming some of the “demons” that seemed to be afflicting his putting confidence back then. The six steps and his action back then of gripping left hand low and then re-gripping right hand low were clearly keeping his conscious mind occupied while just trusting his unconscious mind to hit the putts.

The technique was so effective I included it, along with three golf hypnosis sessions, in my “Own the Putting Green” golf hypnosis programme.

Imagine my delight a year later when he was still using those six steps in his magnificent win in the 2011 Open Championship at Royal St Georges.

Remember you are a great putter

I first used the Six Steps to better Putting in Your Unconscious Mind technique when I was working with a young tournament professional having serious problems with his putting. He’d been struggling to put a good score together despite often hitting 15 greens in regulation in a round. It wasn’t his putting stroke, because he’s already spent a lot of time working with his coach on his putting and everything was looking good there. The problem was that he seemed to have forgotten that he was a good putter. And that was putting more and more psychological pressure on his game.

We spent some time on a very undulating putting green and experimented with various techniques until we came up with the Six Steps to Unconscious Putting that I’ll post tomorrow. My client was uncomfortable at first, but after about 45 minutes, I suddenly noticed him relax and smile as he said something quietly to himself. I’m not sure what the exact words were, but it was the cheeky nickname he’d been given by his friends at college when he kept holing putts as they played for candy bars and sodas.

He remembered how good a putter he was and the following week, he went out and won his first pay cheque as a professional. He putted rather well that day!

Tomorrow, I’ll take you through those Six Steps to Unconscious Putting, a key part of the pre-shot routine that Darren Clarke used so effectively at Royal St Georges in wining the Open Championship

Here’s what GOLFMagic had to say in the Instruction Articles section of their website under a dramatic headline and a rather worrying sub-heading! There’s a similar article on the Golfshake.com website.

Hypnotist offers solution to dreaded yips
Go “under the knife” to solve your wedge game

It goes by many names, although the most literal term itself sends shivers down our spines.

Twitches, staggers, jitters and jerks are enough to make the palms sweaty, but the one that gives us sleepless nights is the yips.

How often does it happen? One week you’ll be pulling off shots like that Tom Watson effort at the 1982 US Open, the next you’re using your wedge as a gardening tool. And that is generally the form that sticks. Suddenly you’ve forgotten what it’s like to hit the dancefloor and the 56 stays in the bag gathering rust.

So why not try something a bit different? Andrew Fogg (pictured below) is the UK’s leading golf hypnosis expert, and is offering golfers a real, permanent solution to this dreaded golfing conundrum.

Every year, thousands of golfers sift through hordes of instruction articles searching, praying and pleading for a cure. Inevitably, the problem persists as no amount of tuition; comfort of grip or shaft length can ever heal the mental scarring caused by the yips.

Instead, there’s a real solution that a growing number of golfers in the UK can vouch for. And that’s a visit to The Golf Hypnotist, who has worked with everyone from high-handicap amateurs to Tour professionals.

Several individuals within the industry have visited Mr Fogg, usually following a torrid few months with the chipping yips, and since their session have confirmed their short game has improved no end.

“I honestly can’t believe how much my short game has improved in such a short period of time,” admitted one golf industry figure and student of Mr Fogg. “Like most people, I guess I was a little sceptical at first but I’d recommend it to absolutely anyone now.”

An hour-and-a-half long session with Mr Fogg costs £100, including a follow-up. For more information, visit www.golf-hypnotist.com.

You can find out about all my Golf Hypnosis Programmes, including “Overcome the Yips“, for putting, chipping and wedge play, at the Golf Hypnotist Store.

The problem I’ve found back then was that, however well conceived and constructed these training aids are, I only used most of them a couple of times before they start gathering dust!

If you still want to use golf training aids, then here’s a way to use Golf Hypnosis to get the most out of them.

Most of these devices are designed to help you to physically repeat some part of the golf swing the way the designer feels you should. The good news is that they help you to make flawless repetitions of that swing element. The problem is that I get bored or want to get out on the course, long before I complete the thousands of repetitions needed to ingrain the new action.

So how can golf hypnosis help? Well, one way is to use self hypnosis to take you into a receptive hypnotic state and then use the training aid while remaining in an eyes-open trance. I used that technique with a hoop style swing trainer I had some years ago called an Explanar – www.explanar.com. It’s a very effective training aid invented by Luther Blacklock, a top UK teaching professional and head pro at Woburn Golf and Country Club.

Another way golf hypnosis can help is in speeding up the learning process using a concept called “Hypnotic Time”. It is not uncommon for people to fall asleep for a few minutes and wake up from a dream that they seemed to “live” for hours or even days. In a similar way, people in hypnotic trance can often experience time distortion allowing them to speed up their unconscious experience.

All you need to do is to practice a drill for a short while using the training device of your choice, then use hypnosis to rehearse the drill over and over in Hypnotic Time. You can achieve this either using self-hypnosis or by listening to the hypnosis tracks in my “Better Golf with Less Practice” hypnosis audio programme. That way, you can to unconsciously complete hours of practice or rehearse rounds of golf in just a few minutes.

The idea of using hypnosis as part of a swing coaching technique for golf is one of my pet projects. That’s partly because I meet so many golfers whose minds are full of swing thoughts that get in the way of their golfing enjoyment and their unconscious, instinctive abilities.

My second reason is that I believe that hypnosis and NLP can and should play a big part in the learning process for the golf swing. As I talk about in my “Better Golf with Less Practice” hypnosis programme, repetitions are key to ingraining swing changes, but only if they are good repetitions and there are thousands upon thousands of them. It pains me to think of all those balls I hit on the range in my 20′s in the hope of hitting a dozen shots the way I wanted to. What’s the point of all those bad repetitions?

I have a third reason, a personal one, and that’s to use these techniques to learn a new, more biomechanically correct swing. One that will protect my 61 year old body after more than 40 years of “trying” to swing like Jack Nicklaus did in his prime. Thankfully, my hips have survived better than his! The new swing I’m just starting to work on is called the RST swing from a guy called Chuck Quinton at www.rotaryswing.com.

In his RST programme, Chuck is very heavily into a series of drills and “reps”, gradually building up the elements of the full swing. The problem is that you need to practice each of these drills serially and thousands of times. That takes many months. In addition, most of the early drills do not even involve swinging a club, let alone hitting a ball. So you have to be very dedicated and prepared to give up playing golf for a couple of months. I didn’t like that idea at all.

So my approach is to physically run through each drill consciously, until it looks and feels right. Immediately after that I sit down and listen to the “Practice Golf in Your Mind” hypnosis track from my “Better Golf with Less Practice” programme and do 1,200 perfect reps in my mind in the next 30 minutes using “Hypnotic Time”. If I repeat that daily for a couple of days, I’ve done over more than enough reps to internalise the drill. I’ll also build up many more layers of myelin on the new neural pathways than I would get from many months of less consistent practice.

There’s even a valid argument that says that, as long as I really understand and feel the drill internally, I probably don’t even need to do the physical bit at the beginning. Either way, the repetitions in your mind really will be flawless and identical – won’t they!

If you want to complete the reps even faster, then once you’ve used “Practice Golf in Your Mind” on a drill, you can use “Play Golf in Your Dreams”, the third hypnosis track in the “Better Golf with Less Practice” programme. That way, you’ll get even more perfect repetitions while you sleep.

Why do golfers talk themselves into playing the shots they don’t want to hit? I’m talking here about saying or thinking to yourself something like, “Now, don’t hit it into the water”. If it wasn’t the water, it could have been the bunker, the trees or the wrong side of the green that they were trying to avoid. If it wasn’t one of those, it could have been about not slicing, hooking, topping, shanking or yipping, for all I know.

I worked recently with a client who had a major problem playing the third hole on his home course, a long par 4. When I asked him to describe what he thinks about when he plays that hole, he started by telling me about all the trouble off the tee. He explained about the out of bounds on the left, the ditch and bushes on the right and the awkward slopes in the fairway. When I asked him about how he’d play his approach to the green, if he’d actually managed to get one on the fairway, he told me all about the difficulty of avoiding the bunker just short of the green and all the other ways to drop yet another shot on that hole.

What’s interesting is that later in the session, when he was much more relaxed, I asked him to imagine that I was playing his course for the first time and he was caddying for me. He talked me through the first hole, telling me exactly where to land my tee shots, how that would open up the green for me and where to land my approach shots to get the best run in to the pin position. He continued in much the same way through the second hole and, most interestingly, the third hole, his nemesis hole. He never once mentioned the bunkers, the out of bounds, the ditches and the bushes.

Now, I suspect that I would probably have played quite well with him as my caddy. At least I would have had a chance to play positively, even on the dreaded third hole. In fact, it would be just like an experience I had many years ago, when I was selected to play with a good friend of mine as my partner in a County Foursomes team event a course I had never played before. When I got there, there were no yardage charts available and no distance yardage markers on the course, so my foursomes partner, who had played there several times and knew the course well, suggested that he would have to tell me exactly what to do, when it was my turn to hit our ball. In other words, he acted as my caddy, in just the way my client imagined he was doing.

It helped that my friend knew my game well and we played off similar handicaps. So, on every shot I had to play, my partner would tell me the length and style of shot I needed to play and give me a specific target to aim at – a particular tree, bunker or part of a building. And that was all I had to think about. He never told me about any of the hazards to avoid. As a result, I was the perfect partner, hit the ball where and how he told me. You won’t be surprised to hear that we scored far better than we could have possibly expected.

So what happened to my client, the one with the nemesis hole, I hear you ask? Well, I used hypnosis to help him to play like he was his own virtual caddy, advising and guiding himself on the course. The next time out he parred the third hole.

If you need help overcoming that temptation to say “don’t” to yourself on the golf course, then think about using my golf hypnosis recording “Zone Out your Inner Critic”. It starts by helping you to build a powerful, calm, relaxed and resourceful set of feelings. This prepares you to learn more about your inner critic and the hidden meaning behind its negativity. The session also helps you unconsciously learn more about and strengthen the powers of your much more positive and resourceful inner guardian or champion. Finally the session uses and NLP “visual squash” technique to help your inner guardian overwhelm the inner critic while capturing any positive intention from all your old negativity. I know that sounds odd, but it’s a very effective and rewarding process.

“Zone Out our Inner Critic” is the second hypnosis track in my “Golf in the Playing Zone” audio programme, available to download from the Golf Hypnotist Store.

© Phartisan

Now, it’s not that uncommon for enthusiastic golfers to play a practice round before playing an unfamiliar course. Maybe it’s to help them play their best in a friendly game or to score their best in an upcoming competition.

Either way, you generally have so much more time for mental and general practice than you do for actual practice on the courses you are going to compete on. That means that you really have to make the most of those practice rounds and gather as much information as you can to help you with your mental and general physical practice.

The most important information you can get from a practice round comes on and around the greens. When you are looking at each green, assess the likely pin positions and, for each one, consider where you would ideally choose to take your first putt from. Then think about how best to get the ball to finish there. What would be the best choice of target, distance, direction, club and style of shot to safely achieve the result you want?

I was watching Miguel Angel Jimenez in the Pro Am before the PGA Championship at Wentworth. After holing out his real putt and while his amateur partners lined up their putts, he hit a number of approach putts to different parts of the green. Maybe he was doing something similar.

Now you have the options for each likely pin position, you can decide on where best to be for your approach shot. If it’s a tee shot, then which side of the tee would be best. If it’s a fairway approach, evaluate the position you want to hit from in terms of the risk and reward of hitting the ball there. Maybe revise you’re desired approach shot accordingly.

Once you’ve done this, you have a set of options to use in your mental and general physical practice. Even better, when you get out on the course in competition, you just have to identify the approximate pin position to already know the best shot to play.

So, there are many ways to make the most of extra time you have to practice your golf. And even if you don’t have all the time for practice that you’d like, you’ve seen a number of ways to make the most of whatever time you do have to practice.

Finally, don’t forget that you can achieve Better Golf with Less Practice using golf hypnosis.