Now, my major concern about swing thoughts and keys is not so much about their content, but rather about when you think of them. Some would argue that there’s no place for them at all during a round of golf and they should be confined to the practice ground. While I broadly agree with this, I feel it’s more important to eliminate conscious thoughts about the swing once you step in to address the ball.

There are parts of a golfer’s routine that require conscious though and there are parts where it’s better to trust your unconscious learned skills to actually hit the ball. When you first learned to drive a car, you had to think about everything you had to do. As a result, you were overwhelmed, perhaps over self-aware, and it was difficult to drive smoothly. Now you know how to drive, you only consciously need to think about things like where you want to go, when you have to get there and have you got enough fuel – your pre-driving routine. The actual driving is performed as naturally and unconsciously as breathing or signing your name. Try copying your signature and you’ll understand how much self-awareness gets in the way.

Although I generally don’t’ interfere with the intricate details of an individual client’s routines, I do encourage them to split their routine into four parts:

• Pre-Shot Routine – where you consciously concentrate on preparing, planning and imagining the shot you want to play
• Rehearsal swing – where you internalise the feel of the shot you imagine
• Shot Routine – where you unconsciously take your stance, have one final look at the hole and hit the ball instinctively
• Post-Shot Routine – where you consciously learn from the shot and either celebrate it or release it to the past where it can’t hurt you.

The only place for swing keys is in the first and possibly second parts, where the physical “feeling” you’re working on can easily be incorporated into the way you plan to play the shot. Once you’ve internalised that feeling in the rehearsal swing, then you can simply step in to the shot and trust your unconscious to deliver that feeling.

Are Golfing Objectives the same as Swing Keys?

Golfers often talk about their objectives for a round and their swing thoughts and keys. For me, these are different. Your objective is generally about “what” you want to achieve and a swing key is more related to “how” you’re going to make it happen. Using the analogy of driving a car, the “what” is the conscious choice of where you want to go, when you want to get there and perhaps the route you plan to take. The “how” is largely dictated by your unconscious learned ability to drive a car.

In golf terms the objective should be decided in the Pre-Shot Routine. It’s what you see the pros discussing with their caddies. One they’ve agreed on the nature of the shot, the caddy steps back and the pro takes a rehearsal swing or two, to get the feel of the shot, and then hits it. For top golfers like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, it only takes 11 seconds to hit the ball from the moment the caddy steps back. That doesn’t leave much time for conscious thought about swing keys, or anything else for that matter. Everything in the Shot Routine is pretty much automatic, including any forward press. That’s just part of the feel of the shot.

So why are some keys more appealing to certain golfers?

This was something that used to catch me out when I first started doing golf psychology, especially using NLP. Almost every NLP technique I was originally taught was based around getting people to visualise – to see pictures in their mind’s eye. The problem was that many of my clients couldn’t consciously “see” those pictures that clearly and neither could I see mine.

What I eventually learned was that we all experience the world through our five senses of sight, sound, feeling, taste and smell. We also code our memories using those five senses. That’s why we can hear a tune or smell a particular aroma and be transported back to some significant past event and experience all the feelings we had at the time. How many couples have “our song”?

More importantly, I also learned that people have their own personal unconscious preferences for the sense they use the most. If you listen to a number of people describing the same event, some will describe mainly in terms of what they saw, some in terms of the sounds or words and others in terms of feelings. How many times have you heard someone saying things like, “I see what you are saying” or “that picture makes me feel bad”? Personally, I tend to use feeling words, perhaps that’s not surprising for a therapist and it’s consistent with the fact that I “can’t” consciously see pictures in my mind. I must see them unconsciously, or I wouldn’t recognise people, places and things.

When working with a client, I now do my best to pay attention to the sensory words that people use in conversation and phrase my own words and techniques to match theirs. If I’m talking to a group of people, it’s more difficult. That’s when I “try” to use seeing, hearing and feeling expressions. If I’m presenting, I make sure my slides include pictures as well as words and I try to use my body to convey feelings.

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.

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.

Research shows that the act of “Imagining” yourself doing something fires up the identical parts of the brain that would be activated if you were actually doing it. So if you’re imagining yourself playing golf, the neurons you’re using in your brain are the very same ones that you’re using when you’re physically playing the game. Indeed, some of the actual muscles involved in playing a real shot are activated and make the same movements at a barely noticeable level. You really do “physically” practice your swing when you imagine hitting the ball and you have no reason to hit a bad shot when you’re practicing and playing in your imagination.

This means that if you can augment your physical practice by using your mind to follow the same suggestions that I gave you earlier for best general practice between rounds. Find a quiet, comfortable relaxing place and let your imagination run free. You can use the Finger Breathing technique as an easy way to achieve a good state of relaxation.

If you want to take this even further, then why not have a look at my Better Golf with Less Practice hypnosis audio programme. It includes hypnosis sessions for Playing Golf in Your Mind, Practicing Golf in Your Mind and Playing Golf in Your Dreams.

In my next Golf Hypnotist blog post, I’ll continue this series on Best Practice for Better Golf with part 5, “Best Practice Rounds for Better Golf”.

I feel that it’s best to think of and use your general practice time as an opportunity to rehearse every aspect of your physical and mental game in a controlled environment. On the golf course, success is only really measured by what’s written on your score card, not by the quality of your shot making and your mental game. On the practice tee and green, we have the opportunity to measure every shot objectively and precisely, using feedback from cameras, coaches, shot monitors, alignment tools, etc.

So what I’m talking about here is:

· Rehearsing “real” rounds of golf

• thinking about the courses you plan to play
• considering all the likely pin positions on each green
• thinking about the ideal position to be hitting your first putt from
• deciding on the best place to land the ball for those pin positions, allowing for contours and balancing risks
• choosing the best possible position and distance to hit each of those possible approach shots from – where on the fairway or which side of the tee
• deciding on how to get the ball into your ideal positions on the fairway.

· Simulating playing those “real” rounds of golf

• playing each rehearsal shot, each practice swing, in turn using the clubs and shots you’ve decided on
• using your pre-shot, shot and post-shot routines on very shot.

· Enhancing your post-shot routine by taking advantage of all possible feedback information.

· Walking away and taking your time between shots, so that you take an hour or more to hit a bucket of 60 balls.

· Making every shot count – just like you do in a real round of golf.

· Practicing your putting and chipping with one ball.

And don’t forget that you can extend all this using hypnosis to imagine stepping into the shoes of any golfer you admire to Learn Better Golf with Your Golfing Heroes.

In my next Golf Hypnotist blog post, I’ll continue this series with part 4, “Best Mental Practice for Better Golf”.

Now, I don’t think I have to tell you or any experienced golfer about the benefits of gradually warming up your body before every round of golf. However, I do think you need to do something to “warm up” your golfing mind at the same time. Exploring what types of shot are working well for you today, will also help your scoring. Remember, this is a time to learn about making the most of the game you’ve brought to the course, not a time to fix faults or make swing changes.

This is why I named the final hypnosis track of my Winning Golf hypnosis programme, “Making the Most of Your Game”. Perhaps I should have added the word today at the end because with so many variables in golf, our game often seems to change so much from day to day. Have you ever seen hit every shot on the practice tee with a fade and then try in vain to draw their first approach shot on the course. They probably try again on the next hole as well and when that still doesn’t work, they start making changes to their swing!

One of the best ways of “warming up” your mind before a round is to make every shot on the practice tee count. That means picking the shot you want to hit and then following your pre-shot, shot and, most importantly, post-shot routines for every shot – just like you do on the course.

Remember that your post-shot routine includes learning from every shot. By the end of your warm up session, you should have a good idea of the game you’ve brought with you to the course – the shots you are capable of hitting well today. You may also get some other feedback about things like how far the ball will travel today.

In my next Golf Hypnotist blog post, I’ll continue this series on Best Practice for Better Golf with part 3, “Best General Practice for Better Golf”.