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

Now I’m not suggesting that Darren started doing that after he or one of his support team read about it in my ezine. However, it is obviously helping to overcome some of the “demons” that seemed to be afflicting his putting confidence in recent years. The six steps and his action of gripping left hand low and then re-gripping right hand low are clearly keeping his conscious mind occupied while he’s just trusting his unconscious mind to hit the putts. It certainly seems to be working for him.

Why not give it a try? You can still read that ezine edition here and subscribe to regularly receive my free Golf Hypnotist Ezine using the box on the right hand side of this page. The new edition of the ezine comes out later today and includes the opportunity to download a free audio recording of the Finger Breathing relaxation technique I’m always talking about.

Now why am I talking about this today? Well, isn’t the world’s golf press just amazing, if a little predictable? They see Benn Barham score a fourth round 69 for a phenomenal total of 19 under par and they say he failed and focus their attention on his few bad shots, like his drive down the last hole "that cost him a birdie." If he’d played like that, scored like that and won, then they’d be talking about his amazing success and knocking Rafael Cabrera Bello’s disastrous failure.

Now I’m not taking anything away from Rafael. He played remarkably well for an 11-under par 60 to beat Benn into second place in the Austrian Open on the European Tour by a single shot. I read somewhere that it’s one of only 13 rounds of 60 in the history of the European Tour and Darren Clarke had two of those, so Rafael’s one of only 12 phenomenal golfers.

What’s more interesting to me as a golf psychologist watching every shot of their final rounds is that they both played to the best of their ability on the day. It was just that Rafael scored better. Better even than Benn’s 63 in the opening round on Thursday. What’s also interesting is that they both seemed to be playing their mental golf one shot at a time.

You could see that in the way that Benn calmly holed a series of difficult recovery putts to keep things going in the first 9 holes on Sunday. Except he didn’t seem to be "trying" to keep things going, he just seemed to be playing each shot on its merits, disregarding the shot that had gone before, good or bad. He also didn’t look like a man who was getting ahead of himself. He just seemed to be focussing on playing the shots and letting the score just happen. Even the final result didn’t really faze him judging by his comment afterwards that "I’m very happy with the way I have played but disappointed to finish second."

Rafael certainly looked to me like he was doing the same thing and he confirmed it afterwards when he’s quoted as saying.

“It’s just amazing – I played the best golf of my life and I can’t believe it, I was so far back at the start of the final round that I wasn’t thinking about winning. I just tried to play a shot at a time and it worked out really good.”

So how do I play each shot "in the now", I hear you asking. Well, I’ll be talking a lot more about that in future articles, but for now, here’s a simple suggestion that will bring most people abruptly into the now. Just imagine that the shot you are about to play is the last golf shot you will ever play. There’s no point in thinking about the next shot, as there isn’t going to be one. Just make the best you can of this one last shot. Make it a shot to remember. You wouldn’t want to mess up your last ever shot by trying too hard, now would you.

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