The average golfer is often preoccupied with his current set of – sometimes conflicting – technical swing thoughts, from coaches, books, websites and golf magazines and TV programmes. And even if he isn’t, someone may have given him a set of the tee pegs I saw recently that had different swing thoughts printed on each one!

Now to be absolutely clear, I do believe that you should take adequate time to consciously plan your shots before stepping up to the ball and taking your stance. And this should include time to fully visualise and rehearse the shot or putt that you are about to make. I’ve written before about Jack Nicklaus describing how he’s never hit a shot without first seeing himself playing it.

I also believe that once you have that clear visualisation of the shot you are about to make and the confidence of the short-term recent memory of your rehearsal or practice swing, then the sooner you hit the ball with that thought in your mind, the better. If your rehearsal swing was adequate, then there’s nothing more to do than to take your stance, briefly check your alignment, take one last look at your target and start your swing – before you forget how you rehearsed it. If you needed any specific swing thoughts, then you must really have incorporated them in your rehearsal swing.

That’s what I mean when I keep harping on about unconscious golf. Your unconscious mind knows all about the shot you’re visualising and it also knows about the rehearsal swing you just made. Now’s the time to get your conscious mind out of the way and let your unconscious mind do its job and hit the ball the way you visualised and rehearsed. It’s that simple.

How I wished I’d understood this back in my youth when I played off 2-handicap. I even had regular demonstrations of it when I played with my father’s friend. If you haven’t already read the article that comes with my free "Your Own Virtual Caddy" golf hypnosis programme, then let me explain. He was a fanatical newcomer to golf – yes we’ve all been one – and whenever I played with him he would try to get to my ball before I did so that he could ask me how I planned to play the shot. What I didn’t realise at the time was that by describing my thoughts in detail, I had to visualise the shot to describe it.

By the time I’d finished explaining it all, I was rushing to hit the ball and didn’t have any time for any swing thoughts. I just quickly took a practice swing and hit the ball without further conscious thought. If only I’d realised how much better my shots went and how well I scored playing with him. I didn’t realise until I started developing my own approach to golf psychology and understood the power of trusting my unconscious.

Now I’ve written here before about the perils of Analysis Paralysis , the benefits of Visualisation and the need to Speed up your shot routines, but I’m not alone. In researching this article I found an interesting question asked by Karl Morris,

"Whenever you have played your very best golf, is it usually down to MORE or LESS thinking?"

I’ll leave you to answer that one for yourself.

Concentrating on how you swing will often prevent you from playing your best and most natural game of golf. You probably recall similar messages from me before and it ties into the concept that there’s a place for thinking consciously on the golf course, about where you want the ball to go and how you want it to get there, and a place for trusting your unconscious to put your best swing on the ball without any interference from the conscious mind.

I’ve heard over the years and read in some of the older golf books in my library about Ralph Guldahl a really great golfer from the 1930s. After a relatively slow start as a professional golfer he ended up winning 16 PGA Tour events in a nine-year period. He peaked with three Major wins towards the end of this period, but never won again after 1940. His Major wins were at the US Open in 1937 at Oakland Hills and again the next year at Cherry Hills and finally the Masters in 1939. What’s always seemed odd to me is that until recently, I’ve never come across anything about his record after that time. I guess I thought that he had died or been injured in the Second World War. Perhaps, in a similar way to many great British golfers of the late 1930s, he never got back into winning again when professional golf competitions started up again after the war years.

So imagine my surprise when I came across an old news article that confirmed that he had continued to play professional golf in the 1940s before becoming a successful club professional. However, he completely lost his game after taking a couple of months off in 1939 to work on his book "Groove Your Golf." He started to struggle with his golf after completing the book and never won again after 1940. Paul Runyan, twice US PGA Champion, said of him, "It’s the most ridiculous thing, really. He went from being temporarily the absolute best player in the world to one who couldn’t play at all."

So what happened? Well according to his wife, he went into such detail analyzing his swing in order to write the book, that he could never play his natural game again. Others spoke of him practicing shots in front of a mirror so that he could describe his exact movement in the book.

It certainly seems to me that up to the time he was commissioned to write the book Ralph Guldahl played with a natural free-flowing swing that he had learned unconsciously. Other articles I’ve read suggest that he was relaxed on the golf course and just took a few moments to pan his shot before hitting the ball. Until he started analyzing his swing for the book, he probably had never even consciously thought about how he swung the club while he was on the course. In fact, it seems that everybody described him as a natural gifted golfer.

So if you want to play your best golf on the course, leave your swing thoughts on the practice ground, use your conscious mind to assess the shot and then trust your unconscious free-flowing swing to hit the ball.

Note: After first posting this article, the latest copy of New Scientist dropped through the letterbox. I was intrigued to see it included an article entitled "How Ralph lost his groove." I was more intrigued to read it’s use of seemingly unrelated studies to suggest that Ralph Guldahl’s fate had little to do with his overthinking his game. You won’t be surprised that I remain unconvinced of their arguments!

So you can imagine my amusement when I came across this short video on YouTube with JC Anderson demonstrating just what I was talking about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now don’t get me wrong about the general standard of teaching from PGA golf professionals, it’s truly magnificent and in nearly always cases their swing coaching advice is well thought out, simple, elegant and tailored to the golfer in front of them.

So what am I griping about, you may ask? Well, unfortunately the coaching advice available from many websites, magazines and books is over complicated and, of necessity over-generalised. Face-to-face with a golfer, a good pro will identify perhaps one or two key things for the golfer to work on at any one time. The author of a book or article, on the other hand, has little or no information about the individual golfing reader and therefore has to generalise. Now, that might be ok if the author has only one or two key points to get across. More than one or two points in any article or chapter and it’ll lead to analysis paralysis and the opposite of golf improvement.

No Analysis Paralysis with Golf Hypnosis

With Golf Hypnosis, the effect is totally different. Hypnosis concentrates on communicating with your unconscious mind and the changes you implement unconsciously become part of your automatic responses. You don’t have to analyse them to use them. In fact, you don’t even need to remember them consciously.

Analysis Paralysis on a Golf Improvement Website

To show you what I mean, here’s a list of swing thoughts from a single article on a golf improvement website. No, I’m not going to let you know the website address, but if this doesn’t lead to analysis paralysis, I don’t know what will!

• The first headline talks about reducing the moment of inertia of your swing to get more distance for less input
• Delay the Hand Release
• Increase the swing torque
• Reduce the moment of Inertia – a function of the size of the mass and the radius of the mass and it applies because the swing is a rotating entity.
• The swing radius is determined by the angle of your hand cock to keep the a small swing radius
• Keeping your hands cocked longer in the downswing allows you to accelerate your trunk turn at specific moments
• The longer you keep your hands cocked in the downswing
• You’ll need to reset your tempo and timing
• Eliminate muscle tension
• The final suggestion talks about swinging naturally and keeping your hands quiet!

Just imagine what it would be like to have this kind of instruction when learning to drive a car!

So what does St Andrews University say about Analysis Paralysis?

Well a putting study run by St Andrews University and the University of Michigan concluded that too much analysis made the golfer’s game worse. Psychology Professor Michael Anderson said, "This effect was especially dramatic in skilled golfers who were reduced to the level of performance of novices after just five minutes of describing what they did.”

You can read more about the study and watch a brief video on the BBC Scotland website.