So what’s happening here? Well, if your mind is focussed elsewhere, it’s your conscious mind that’s doing the focussing, whether it’s worrying about your health, doubting whether you should be out here on the golf course or just thinking about what you’ll be doing after the game. The only part of you that’s free to think about golf is your unconscious golf mind and trusting your unconscious is one of the most important and effective of my secrets of hypnotic golf.

Now, you probably know that I’m a qualified clinical hypnotherapist and one of the keys to successful hypnosis and hypnotherapy is to pre-occupy or confuse the client’s conscious mind, or simply send it off somewhere nice, while I communicate directly with her unconscious mind, the storehouse off all her knowledge, experience, skill and resources. Coming full circle, that’s just what we’re looking for when we’re on the golf course looking to trust our unconscious golf mind.

That reminds me of a story about the advice that Bob Rotella was giving Mike Weir early in the year before an important tournament. Any advice from Bob is usually good advice and what he told Mike Weir was to “Try to go unconscious on the course.” I looked that up on the internet and found Bob saying pretty much the same thing about avoiding choking under pressure by turning off your conscious mind and switching to your unconscious one. He also tells his clients to, “practice their swing technique all they want on the driving range, but on the course, let instinct take over.”

I agree with Bob that given an absolute choice between playing golf in the conscious or unconscious minds, I’d have to go for the unconscious for better golf. However, I think that the best golf is played using the conscious and unconscious golf minds selectively and independently for different tasks. There’s an important separation in the mind between planning a shot, a conscious process, and executing it, an unconscious process. Have you noticed how when you hit a really good shot, you tend to think,” Wow, what happened there? What did I just do right?” The odd thing is that it usually happens when you didn’t have a thought, at least a conscious one, in your head.

Now isn’t that more or less the same thing that happens when a golfer’s conscious mind is “clogged up” with a cold or flu?

So what are they thinking about when they hit the shot? Well, a lot of them are consciously thinking about some aspect of their swing mechanics and that doesn’t work at all well, because your conscious mind doesn’t work fast enough to control your golf swing.

Have you noticed how when you hit a really good shot, you can’t remember what you were consciously thinking about in your golf mind. You just trusted your unconscious mind and the shot just seemed to happen. If you were throwing a ball to someone for them to catch, I doubt if you’d start thinking about how you move your arm to throw the ball, you’d just throw it to them – unconsciously. You wouldn’t consciously do anything different if the receiver were nearer or further away or if they held their hand high or low. You’d just throw it towards their hand and that’s the target you’d be consciously thinking about.

Many more will be thinking about what they don’t want to happen, like don’t go in the bunker or don’t hit a bad shot. That doesn’t work at all well either, because your mind doesn’t know how to not think of something. If I say to you, "don’t think of a green snowman", you will automatically build an image in your head of a green snowman, whether you like it or not. As a result, you end up consciously thinking about going in the bunker or hitting a bad shot. Now if you remember that your unconscious mind is designed to deliver whatever you’re consciously thinking, then guess what happens. Yes, you got it, the ball probably goes into the bunker or you hit a bad shot.

A smaller number of golfers will be thinking consciously about a specific target when they hit the ball and if they pick the right sort of target, then they are the ones most likely to hit the shot they planned to. Some very well known golf psychologists, like Bob Rotella, will suggest that you pick out a directional target, such as a spot on the ground a few feet, yards or metres along your line or a specific point in the distance to aim at – maybe a building or tree behind your target. Some will even say that you should focus on a specific leaf on the tree or brick in the building.

Now I don’t agree with that approach any more than I would agree that someone throwing a ball should target a spot on the ground on the line to the person they’re throwing to. It would also seem rather odd to target a tree, a house or something on the wall behind them, now wouldn’t it. Once again, you’d target the hand of the person you’re throwing to.

So why not simply target the place you want the ball to finish and let your unconscious mind work out how to hit the ball there. Even better why not think about the route that the ball will take to get there including the way you expect the ball to fly, bounce and roll. If you’re doing the visualisation part of your pre-shot routine correctly, then you’ve already got the picture you should be thinking about when you hit the ball.

I can’t say how delighted I am to see Darren’s back competing in the 2009 US Open at Bethpage Black after qualifying as one of the top 15 in the European Money List last year. He’s only played in the US Open once, in 2006 at Winged Foot, since he pulled out at Pinehurst in 2005 to be with his wife who was seriously ill.

Moving back to Darren’s putting psychology problems, I was interested to hear that he has considered putting to be his Achilles heel for most of his career. I was also interested to read how hard he’s been pushing himself over the years to improve his putting. It’s interesting to note that Bob Rotella has tried to get him to go much easier on himself. In fact, Darren’s been quoted recently as saying "He says just go and play and let the results happen themselves." That sounds like good advice to me!

It’s intriguing how similar that is to what Bob’s been telling Padraig Harrington about his over practising and excessive focus on his swing changes. As I suggested in my earlier article, entitled Play your Best with Golf Psychology Before Changing your Unconscious Golf Swing, the destructive shots you hit are more likely to come from your conscious thoughts than from your unconscious golf swing.

If I was advising Darren Clarke "blind", so to speak, then apart from helping him to use golf hypnosis of course, I’d encourage him to build on a couple of mental golf approaches from the great Jack Nicklaus. Firstly, I’d suggest that before he strikes a putt he imagines "seeing" the line the ball will run on and "watching" the ball rolling along that imaginary line and dropping in the hole before popping back out and running back along the line back to his putter head.

Secondly, I’d help him find a way to remember every good putt he’s ever holed and to develop amnesia for every bad one. There’s a story I’ve heard about Jack Nicklaus that illustrates this perfectly.

Jack was giving a presentation to a group of eager and attentive golfers at his son’s university. During the speech, Jack makes the comment that he has never three putted on the back nine of a major championship or missed from inside of six feet on the last hole.

As Jack opens the floor to take questions, a man puts up his hand and says "Jack you say you have never missed from inside of six feet on the last hole in a major, but I was watching you last year in the US Seniors Open and that’s exactly what you did." Jack looked at the man with those piercing blue eyes and repeated what he had said. "But Mr Nicklaus," the man insisted, "I saw it, I have it on film, I can send it to you if you like." "No need", Jack replied, "I have never missed from inside six feet on the last hole of a major. Any more questions?"

Now, has Jack ever missed from inside of six feet on the last hole of a major? Of course he has! Does he remember it? Not a chance. And do you think he cares that he can’t remember? Some people would probably say that Jack is deluded in his thinking, that it is not based on reality. Well, we all create our own realities and Jack’s seem pretty good to me!

Here’s hoping that the weather clears and Darren has a good US Open at Bethpage.

So, what exactly did Jos do for his clients? Well, they gave him lots of credit for their success – Retief Goosen handing him much of the credit for his US Open Win at Southern Hills in 2001. But what was he actually doing with his clients to help them? I’m scouring the web for answers to that question and finding absolutely nothing, apart from his having no apparent training or qualification as a golf psychologist. Neither are there any clues in his background and despite his 50+ years, his career history only seems to mention his leaving school at 14, becoming a Belgian pop singer and working as an advertising salesman.

I have found references to his being inspired by Edward de Bono, best known for his ideas on Lateral Thinking, and Timothy Gallwey, the man behind the Inner Game books. Jos seems to have had a very direct approach to life and apparently spent a lot of money getting to spend time with Gallwey. He continued this approach by following the European Tour for 3 years touting for business before becoming an overnight sensation.

Although I’m finding very few examples demonstrating his methods, he does appear to have based his approach on the Inner Game idea of changing your thinking to change your golf performance. The only quote I’ve found from hours of searching suggests that he may be a fan of visualisation and unconscious golf.

“Even if you don’t believe that you can change a particular feeling, pretend that you believe it. If you pretend, then you can fool your subconscious. The good thing is that your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between truth and pretending …”

Although he appeared to have a strong following among the top professionals for a few years, he dropped off the radar almost instantly and I’m finding nothing to say what happened to him.

So where am I going with all this? Well, for a short time each of these professionals seemed eager to attribute some of their success to Jos Vanstiphout and clearly believed in him. However, I’m finding nothing to say what he actually did for them or the golf psychology techniques he was teaching them. Maybe that’s why the effect wore off so quickly.

The lesson for me is that before you commit to working with a golf psychologist, you should know as much as possible about what techniques they are likely to use to help you and how qualified they are to use those techniques.

By the way, if anyone out there knows what happened to Jos, please let us all know. You can add a comment to this post using the form below

So what about Jack Nicklaus and 90% of golf in the mind?

When I started out in golf in the late 60’s I recall hearing Jack Nicklaus talk on TV about golf being 90% in the mind. However, when I eagerly read his first book, The Greatest Game of All published in 1969, I found very little information about golf psychology. In fact, two thirds of the book was biographical and the remaining third was about the golf swing. Maybe that was what the public wanted to hear or what Herbert Warren Wind, his co-writer, wanted to write about. There wasn’t any more about golf psychology in Jack’s Golf My Way published 5 years later.

Surely Ben Hogan’s secret was about swing mechanics?

I only recently found a similar contradiction about Ben Hogan in an article I read somewhere online. Now I got interested in Ben’s ideas a few year’s back when I first bought my Explanar swing trainer. I had a series of lessons with its inventor Luther Blacklock up at Woburn Golf and Country Club. Now Luther is a real advocate of Ben Hogan’s swing technique and has published a well thought out instructional DVD called The Lost Fundamentals of Hogan. Luther demonstrates these lost fundamentals while looking like, swinging and dressing exactly like the great man.

So what was the contradiction? Well, the article I read suggested that according to Bob Rotella, one of the golf psychology greats, he interviewed Ben Hogan shortly before Hogan’s death in 1997 and asked what Hogan’s real swing secret was. Hogan told Rotella that the technical secret was something to do with how he cupped his wrist at the top of backswing.

Hogan went on to say that the real secret to his starting to win major championships came when he eliminated all swing thoughts from his tournament play and focussed instead on imagination and instinct. I would describe that as trusting his unconscious mind. Hogan added that he only told people about his swing secrets because that’s what they wanted to hear about.

Well what about other top professionals

So how many other top professionals are being similarly misrepresented in this way? Two that I’ve played with, a long time ago admittedly, are Tony Jacklin, in a fourball in 1970, and Nick Faldo, in an open amateur competition called The Hertfordshire Stag at Moor Park back in 1976 – just before he turned pro. Oh I am a name dropper, aren’t I. Tony talked a lot about his cocoon of concentration when he won his majors, but most of what I’ve read about him refers to his swing and his life in general. There’s very little said about his mental strength and golf psychology techniques.

When I played with Nick Faldo, he was very impressive mentally and no one who saw him winning tournaments and major championships would doubt his mental strength and focus., However, at the time all the media focus was on his swing change and everyone was surprised when he appointed a golf psychologist to help with the Ryder Cup team when he was captain.

Even with Tiger Woods, and no I haven’t played with him, we here more about his swing and prodigious length off the tee than his amazing mental resilience, his obvious use of self-hypnosis and the fact that he’s had a mind coach from a very early age in Jay Brunza.

So who’s suppressing the mind golf secrets?

For some reason the golfing media doesn’t think it’s that important to promote golf psychology as the secret of golf success. I wonder if the golf equipment manufacturers want you to know about that secret either.

To be fair, the article I’ve just read from Lorne Rubenstein at Globe and Mail talks about the advice that Bob Rotella is giving Mike Weir in preparation for this weekend’s World Golf Championships. And any advice from Bob is usually good advice. You can read Lorne’s article at “Trying to ‘go unconscious’ on the course”

I talk a lot in my golf hypnosis work about the difference between the conscious and the unconscious mind in my work and I truly believe that better golf is played in the unconscious mind – by being in the zone, as it’s more commonly called.

There’s an important separation in the mind between planning a shot, a conscious process, and executing it. Have you noticed how when you hit a really good shot, you tend to think,” Wow, what happened there? What did I just do right?” The odd thing is that it usually happens when you didn’t have a thought, at least a conscious one, in your head. You certainly can’t remember what special move you made to get that result. You rarely get those special shots when you’re consciously thinking about all those things the pro told you to remember at your last lesson.

I know I’m always talking about being your own virtual caddy, but that idea also fits in well with this idea of unconscious golf. Just watch Tiger Woods consciously discussing his shot with his caddy and then seeming to glaze over as he unconsciously executes the shot. He’s getting the benefit of their collective experience in planning the shot and then trusting his unconscious swing memory to hit the shot.  If you haven’t already, you can get your free download of my “Your Own Virtual Caddy” article and Golf Hypnosis mp3 by subscribing to my free Golf Hypnotist ezine. You’ll  find a sign up box on the right of every page of my website.

It works in reverse too. I personally use one of the Explanar Golf Training & Fitness Systems to groove my swing and I often take myself into self hypnosis before practicing on it. That way, all the feelings and muscle actions elicited by the Explanar are going straight into my unconscious muscle memory without any interference from my critical factor – my conscious mind.