Now I’m sure that like the rest of us, you’re experiencing all sorts of emotions every minute of every day of your life. It’s a key element of living whether we are playing golf or doing something less important.

So what are these emotions I’m talking about? Well, as the article says, we all see different ones, but the consensus seems to include what psychologists apparently call the Big Six – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise and Disgust. Well they all crop up on a regular basis in golf, now don’t they? And they all appear either as desires or problems with many of the people who seek help from golf psychologists. My new book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf has chapters directly devoted to three of them – Enjoying your Golf; Fear of Golfing Failure and Success; and Anger Management in Golf.

More indirectly, I guess that Sadness, Surprise and Disgust are also addressed in the chapters on Positive Framing on the Golf Course; Post-Shot Routines: Planning your Shot, State Management in Golf; and Protection from Covert Hypnosis.

So what about the Five emotions you never knew you had? Well, according to New Scientist, these are Elevation, Interest, Gratitude, Pride and Confusion. You may not be surprised to hear that these fit in well with golf psychology as well.

Elevation, the uplifting emotion, is something we feel when we are inspired and motivated. In fact we have many expressions for it in our language like “things are looking up”. In golf psychology, I relate it to the concept of managing our physiology between shots. As I describe in the chapter on Physiology and Between Shots, if we walk the fairways with our head held high, we feel uplifted and positive. As a result, we play better golf.

Curiosity is one of the key things that make us human. It’s also the key element to planning our shots – an essential part of our pre-shot routines. I know that I’m always talking about trusting your unconscious mind for better golf. However, the conscious mind with its analytical curiosity has a part to play as well.

What about Gratitude? Isn’t that just the way we feel about a good shot? Well, that’s true, but there’s more to it than just that. As I describe in Positive Framing on the Golf Course, you can feel a lot better about a bad lie on the golf course if you think about how much worse it could have been. Being grateful for small mercies can have a very positive effect on your golf.

Pride can be a two edge sword – the New Scientist article describes it as the emotion with two faces. However, feeling proud about what happens on the golf course is what many of us play for. There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud of a good drive or breaking 90, 80 or even 70 – whatever level you aspire to. You can store that pride as a resource when using NLP Anchoring for Better Golf.

That leaves us with the most enigmatic of the five – Confusion. Surely there’s nothing positive to say about that, Andrew! Well perhaps I should leave that one to Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP, to describe why even confusion is a positive emotion for golf and life.

“Confusion is the doorway to reorganizing your perceptions and learning something new. If you were never confused, that would mean that everything that happened to you fit your expectations, your model of the world, perfectly. Life would simply be one boring, repetitive experience after another.”

Did I happen to mention anywhere that my long awaited book The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf is now available in paperback and e-book format from lulu.com? And remember that you can download the “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis recording, that goes with chapter 12, free when you sign up for my free Ezine.

Now in NLP and golf hypnosis, we have many ways of managing a person’s fears. If it’s a full blown phobia, we can deal with that easily. If it’s a habit or belief that’s blown out of all proportion, we can help there too using techniques like the NLP Swish Pattern. If we need a skill that someone else has we can use modelling and Richard Bandler’s "Stealing a Skill" technique. If the fear is doubt related and, as we might say colloquially, there’s a part of me that wants to play a risky shot and another part that’s saying it’s too dangerous, then we’ve got the NLP Visual Squash parts integration technique. And there are many more NLP tools we can use before we even start looking at golf hypnosis.

So why not use one of these techniques to manage or eliminate fear? Well, you can use these techniques and if they are really deep-seated fears, you may need them. But what about nipping the fears in the bud, so that we don’t have to remember them every time we come to play a similar shot? After all, didn’t I read somewhere that Tiger Woods says about hitting bad shots, "I hit it and forget it?" You can’t go back in time and replay a shot, so just forget it and move on." If there’s a way to forget our bad shots, then surely we don’t need to fear them.

Now that reminds me of a story I’ve used many times before about Jack Nicklaus genuinely only remembering the putts he holed, never the ones he missed. So 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! You can read the full story in my earlier article entitled Better Putting in your Golf Mind with a little help from Jack Nicklaus.

So where is all this going, Andrew, I hear you ask. Well, we hear and read a lot about pre-shot routines and most of the people I know now use them diligently. But few if any use any sort of post-shot routine. They usually just replace any divot, put the club back in the bag – sometimes firmly, sometimes gently – and either, walk forward happily or trudge forward miserably. Of course some rant and rave, but we’ll ignore those for now – seems like good advice to me.

If you react positively after hitting a golf shot, your brain produces lots of happy chemicals and associates those good feelings to the shot you’ve just hit and to the hole you’ve just played. The next time you play that hole or a similar shot, you have the opportunity to unconsciously remember that feeling and the associated result. In NLP we call this anchoring. Something similar happens if you react badly after hitting a shot and that bad shot can get anchored too. So my recommendation is to really enjoy your good shots – you want to remember them – and release the bad shots to the past without any emotion, like someone else hit that bad shot. You can’t go back in time and replay a shot, so just forget it and move on.

Now I don’t like prescribing detailed pre-shot routines to people as it is far better to develop your own one from what works best for you. I think the same applies to a post shot routine, so I’ll just list these few simple pointers:

1. Identify a specific trigger for the post-shot routine, like seeing the ball stop moving
2. If it’s a good shot, then really feel good and replay the shot in your mind just as it felt when you hit it
3. If it’s not a shot to remember, then don’t react at all and just see it briefly as if you were watching someone else play the shot
4. Good or bad, consciously release the shot to the past and relax as you start walking forward to the next shot.

For many people the buzz is part of the enjoyment. Perhaps that’s what Mark Twain was referring to when he wrote that "Golf is a good walk spoiled" and HRH Princess Anne meant when she said “Golf seems to be an arduous way to go for a walk. I prefer to take the dogs out."

Personally, I feel that if I’m not nervously shaking when I get near the end of a seriously good scoring round or close game of match play then I might as well give up golf and go and do something else that excites and inspires me. Jack Nicklaus knew that if you didn’t feel nervous at the end of a tournament you’re trying to win then there’s something wrong with you – he thrived on it. It’s said that he stopped winning golf tournaments when he no longer got so nervous in competition. And you don’t have to be winning to get that feeling, just competing hard in some way. If you watched the duel between Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson during the last round of the 2009 Masters, you’ll know just what mean.

The important thing to remember is to channel that nervous energy into an enhanced state of focus using self hypnosis with deep breathing is one of the best ways I know for doing just that. Alternatively, you could follow the instructions in my earlier post entitled Balance your golf mind and body for better golf – focus on your Hara. Now anchor that feeling and add it to your unconscious golfing resources. Now you can access the great feeling, that Jack Nicklaus loves so much, whenever you want it or need it.

Like so many of the things I have learned as a golf psychologist, I do so wish I’d known about all this wonderful NLP and golf hypnosis a long time ago when I got so nervous at Hexham, playing with Tony Jacklin at Brookmans Park and whenever I seemed to be on the first tee anywhere!

Now one of the first things I learned in golf psychology was that "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" to quote Robert Anton Wilson in his famous book about how the mind works, Prometheus Rising. In hypnosis terms this means that whatever we consciously think about we unconsciously make happen. In simple terms, if we consciously think about an ice-cream we unconsciously decide we want one and instinctively begin to taste one. If you’re driving on a motorway and someone draws your conscious attention to something way off to the right, you may suddenly notice yourself unconsciously steering in that direction.

Have you ever noticed how if you tell someone to not do something accidentally, that they automatically seem to do it anyway? This is especially true with children, so if you say to a child, "don’t spill your milk", then don’t be surprised if they to do just that. Contrary to what some believe, children don’t do this out of spite, it’s just what you made them consciously think about.

So what’s all this got to do with the fear of hitting a bad shot then Andrew? Well, you have to consciously think the bunker you don’t want to go in to fear going in it. The same goes for your fear of hitting a shank or yipping a putt. But, I hear you say, I make a point of thinking to myself "don’t hit it in the bunker" rather than just thinking about the bunker. Well, it makes no difference to the outcome, because you have to think of a thing in order to not do it. If I say don’t think of a blue elephant, you have to imagine a blue elephant to know what I’m talking about. The same goes for thinking of not hitting the ball into the bunker. If that’s in your head when you hit the ball, then you’ll unconsciously do your best to it there.

I’ve hear Paul McKenna tell a good story about this. He had a top golfer, one who’d already won major championships, come to him for help. The golfer explained that he was consistently hitting shots into bunkers and not just any bunkers. These were the bunkers he specifically wanted to avoid and he wasn’t just rolling into them, his ball was landing right in the middle of them. Paul watched him play a few holes then gave him a simple verbal instruction to follow for the next few holes. Amazingly, the champion golfer started hitting almost every shot just where he wanted to. So what did Paul say to him? He told him to decide on where he wanted to land the ball on each shot and then focus on not hitting the ball there. He was now consciously thinking about his target, not the bunkers.

So next time you’re out playing golf and you start saying to yourself "don’t go in that bunker", "don’t shank this shot" or something similar. Then compensate for your fear by stopping and rethinking your target taking into account whatever you’d like to avoid. Now focus your conscious mind on that new target before handing over control to your unconscious golf mind to hit the shot. For a more positive slant on all this, have a look at my earlier blog article entitled Focus your golf mind on your target not the hazard for better golf scores.