I developed this “Visualisation Skills for Golf” programme for two reasons. Firstly, to address one of the things that really annoys me about so many of the hypnotists I know. That’s because they simply assume that, because they can see pictures clearly in their minds, then so can their clients. If like used to, you’re struggling to visualise things clearly in your conscious minds, then you’re also frustrated with their insistence that everyone can visualise. The second reason is that the ability to visualise easily and well is a great asset to your use of all the other golf hypnosis programmes in this series.

This new “Visualisation Skills for Golf” programme is available in MP3 format for download, with the three powerful golf hypnosis sessions, each running for around 25-30 minutes. I developed the individual sessions on similar lines to the “Your Own Virtual Caddy” programme, so you’re getting more than three times the hypnosis from each programme. I have outlined the purpose of each track later in this email.

I will also be publishing two more new and intriguing Golf Hypnosis MP3 audio programmes over the next couple of weeks. As with the other new programmes, I will be including at least 3 new golf hypnosis sessions in each programme.

Although the programme names may change a little before release, here is the full list, for now:

• Winning Golf (Released 15 October 2010)
• Overcome the Yips (Released 30 October 2010)
• Own the Putting Green (Released 4 November 2010)
• Confident Golf – Free From Fear (Released 11 November 2010)
• Anger Management for Better Golf (Released 16 November 2010)
• Golf in the Zone (Released 21 November 2010)
• Overcome the Shanks (Released 24 November 2010)
• Visualisation Skills for Golf (Released 2 December 2010)
• Better Golf with Less Practice: Practice and Play Golf in your Mind
• Learn Better Golf with Your Golfing Heroes

So what’s the “Visualisation Skills for Golf” Hypnosis Programme all about?

One of the things that really annoys me about so many hypnotists I know is that they simply assume that because they can see pictures clearly in their mind then so can their clients. If like me, you used to struggle to visualise things clearly in your conscious minds, then you’d also be frustrated with their insistence that everyone can visualise. In fact they often go on to say things like, if you couldn’t visualise, how would you know what to wear every day and how would know where to look for your car.

Now they are right about the fact that every normal person can and does visualise things in their minds, but they are wrong to assume that every person actually sees those pictures consciously. Research suggests that at least 40 percent of the population are not consciously aware of the pictures they make in their minds. If you are one of this 40 percent, then if I was to ask you questions about the colour, style and handle of your front door, you may not see a clear picture of your front door. However, I’m sure that you do somehow know the answers to those questions. Maybe the answers come to you in words or in terms of feelings.

When I think of the handle on my front door, I can feel the shape and texture of it before I can picture it. I used to have the same experience remembering people’s faces. I could tell you a few details about someone’s appearance and maybe remember their name, but I didn’t use to see them in my mind’s eye when asked to describe them. My wife, on the other hand, tells me that she can “see” the faces of people she hasn’t seen for 20 years as if they were standing right in front of her. She just assumed that’s the way it works for everyone.

Now there’s no doubt in my mind about the power of visualisation in golf, especially when I read about the way Jack Nicklaus, one of the best mind game players golf has ever “seen”, uses visualisation to such good effect. I think Jack made that clear in this famous quotation:

“I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. First I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I see the ball going there – it’s path, trajectory and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.”

The good news is that we all have the mental ability to visualise our golf in the same or possibly an even better way than Jack and that’s what this programme is all about.

So what have you included in “Visualisation Skills for Golf to help me visualise like Jack Nicklaus, I hear you ask?

Well this time, I’ve included three powerful golf hypnosis sessions for you to use in sequence to develop your visualisation skills by helping you to:

• Practice describing your better shots from successful past rounds in ways that allow you to unconsciously reveal your unconscious imagery to your conscious awareness
• Imagine your way round your favourite golf courses as if you were caddying blindfold for a good player – yes I know that sounds weird
• Learn what it will be like when you can visualise through using this programme and experience using your newly uncovered visualisation skills on the golf course.

Open your Eyes to Better Golf - As with many aspects of life, perfect practice makes perfect, so the more you describe things visually to other people, and yourself, the better you see the picture in your mind’s eye. So in this first hypnosis session, you’ll practice, in hypnosis, describing your better shots from successful past rounds in ways that allow you to unconsciously reveal your unconscious imagery to your conscious awareness.

Golf with your Eyes Closed - The second hypnosis session is a bit weird and very effective. I based it, with an unusual twist, on an intriguing experience I had many, many years ago. I was selected to play with a good friend of mine as my partner in the Hertfordshire County Foursomes team event at the old East Herts. Golf Club, a course I had never played before.

Despite my best endeavours, I didn’t have the time to play the course before the event, so I had to play it blind, so to speak. Back in those days, there were no yardage charts available and no distance 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 where to hit the ball and act as my caddy when it was my turn to hit our ball, as there were many doglegs and blind shots on the course.

So what’s the unusual twist with this session? Well this time you’re going to be my caddy, as I play one or other of your favourite courses in your mind. What makes it an interesting learning experience is that you will be caddying blindfold for me and you’ll have to picture and visually describe the shots I have to play. Before you say it, yes I know that sounds weird, but I think you’ll find it quite revealing

Imagine Your Way to Better Golf - The power of the unconscious mind is truly phenomenal, especially when it comes to synthesising new ways of working from our lifetime of experiences and resources. This third hypnosis session builds on your successful work with the first two sessions to help you build a vivid imaginary future experience of playing great golf using all your newly rediscovered visualisation skills. I then ask your unconscious mind to work out how that could have happened. After all, if your unconscious mind can create that vivid imaginary future, then it can also work out a plan to get you there without interference from your conscious analytical mind under hypnosis.

The power of the imagination and the ability to see things in the “mind’s eye” is often very obvious to us as spectators when we see golfers thinking out their most difficult shots. You only have to think of some of those amazing chip shots Sergio Garcia and Jose Maria Olazabal play, the pitch shots of Padraig Harrington and those unbelievable shots that Phil Mickelson pulls off, to name but a few.

Visualisation is also a key part of the pre-shot routines of these top players and I suspect that most of them consciously or unconsciously think about it in a similar way to Jack Nicklaus.

Go to the “Visualisation Skills for Golf” page at the Golf Hypnotist Store for more information about this exciting new golf hypnosis programme, including some of the stories behind the individual sessions. You can buy “Visualisation Skills for Golf” there for instant download and start using the programme to Imagine Your Way to Better Golf.

If you need some golf mind help while I’m away then remember there’s lots of interesting material here on the website and in the golf articles section under the resources tab. You will also benefit from listening to my "Your Own Virtual Caddy" golf hypnosis programme that’s available free when you subscribe to my Golf Hypnotist Ezine.

Finally, if all else fails, just watch and listen to this soothing and relaxing video, full of positive suggestions for your golf, from one of my mental game colleagues in the US. And yes, I know that it flashes up their website address half-way through – I’m not afraid of competition, am I now!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Every week, Ellie posts a standard questionnaire based interview with a hypnotist somewhere in the world and last week, it was my turn to provide the answers for "10 Questions with Andrew Fogg." As her questions are quite direct, my answers go well beyond the information on the About the Golf Hypnotist page on my website and I felt it appropriate to share it with you here.

10 Questions with Andrew Fogg

1. Are you a full time hypnotist, a part-time hypnotist, a professional who incorporates hypnotism occasionally in your other practice, or are you a hobbyist?

I’m a full-time hypnotist focussing on building my golf psychology business. I just love applying hypnosis, NLP, EFT and other mind techniques to help my clients get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf.

In addition to the golf psychology, I practice with a wide range of clients as a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner.

2. Do you specialize in any type of hypnotism?

I generally use a mixture of hypnosis and NLP techniques to match the emerging needs of my clients. In many cases I teach my clients to use basic self-hypnosis between sessions, as I believe that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. To that end, I’m also licensed to teach Adam Eason’s two-day Secrets of Self Hypnosis seminar.

Although interactive hypnosis sessions are my preferred working method, I also recognise that great value can be achieved using golf hypnosis recordings. I am currently developing a number of these recordings to accompany my forthcoming book. “The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf” and the first golf hypnosis audio recordings, “Your Own Virtual Caddy” is available free when you sign up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine.

3. Is there any form of hypnotism that you do not practice and why (i.e. entertainment, past-life regression, pain management)?

I’m not comfortable doing past life regression with clients as it’s an area I haven’t made up my mind about yet. If I’m not comfortable, then it wouldn’t be professional or congruent for me to do it with a client.

4. Do you use self-hypnosis regularly in your life? If so, how?

All the time! I believe trance is a powerful tool in my life and provides access to all my unconscious resources. I’m a firm believer that a good hypnotist leads the client into trance by going into trance first. I find that my unconscious mind comes up with the best and most appropriate techniques to help the client find the solution to their problems or desires.

I also use self-hypnosis as a tool to help me through many difficult situations and to get the best out of some of the better ones. I just count to seven and I’m there… thanks Adam.

5. Describe your hypnotism office or work setting.

As a golf hypnotist, I work wherever it’s most appropriate to the clients needs. This can include playing golf with the client, working with them during a practice round, on the putting green, on the driving range or in a quiet corner of a golf clubhouse. I also work from consulting rooms, at the client’s home or on the telephone.

6. Describe a typical day in your life.

Currently, I’m a one-man band, so I do everything from hypnosis, which I like, through writing blogs, newsletters, books and making recordings, which I sort of like, to running the business side which I like least. The good thing is that I like them all to some degree, the difficulty is striking the balance.

7. Where did you get your training in hypnotism and are you certified by any organization?

I first got interested in NLP as a means of becoming more consistent in the most important areas of my life: my family interactions, my golf performance and my work – in that order! I did my NLP Practitioner and Hypnotic Practitioner training with Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. As I got more interested in helping other people with these wonderful tools, I completed my NLP Master Practitioner certification with the same team.

Even with all the NLP training, I didn’t feel that I had the full complement of skills to work with clients and found the solution in the Hypnotherapy Diploma Course run by Adam Eason, the world renowned hypnotherapist, trainer and best-selling author.

8. What is the most fabulous hypnotism technique you use or prefer?

Now this is a difficult one. I think that the hypnosis technique that works best for the client in front of me is the most fabulous technique of the moment and I don’t consciously know why I chose it.

If you really pushed me, I’d have to go for a combination of the “As If “ or “Pretend” Frame with a bit of timeline work. I get the client to vividly imagine what their desired future would be like, and then get them travel back down their timeline to the present time unconsciously remembering how they achieved their imagined future. I don’t want their conscious mind to remember, otherwise it’ll say, “I could never do that.” This has helped clients achieve unbelievable results.

9. What was the worse moment you ever experienced in a hypnotism setting that ended up being a valuable learning experience?

One of my Diploma Course case study clients wanted me to help him become a non-smoker and I spent hours preparing a lengthy hypnosis script that I proceeded to read to him. Half way through I realised that I had written the script on the assumption he had started smoking as a teenager when in fact he started in his mid 20’s to help him focus on his studies. I had to dump the script and trust my unconscious to get me through. It did, it worked and I haven’t used a script since.

10. Do you have any words of advice to potential clients or other hypnotists that you would like to share?

The most important thing for any client is to find a hypnotist you feel comfortable with and can trust. I’d also recommend avoiding hypnotists that use prepared scripts for their work or start out saying they know just what you need. These people are unlikely to have the flexibility to help you to get to the root of your issue quickly and easily.

I’m still learning so much about hypnosis that I’m hesitant to advise other hypnotists. However, the key thing would be to lead your client into hypnosis and let your unconscious guide you.

Now, when I first started playing golf, like most beginners, I focussed all my attention on developing my golf swing. I was lucky to start out with a good swing teacher in Colin Christison, who hailed from Blairgowrie and learned his golf on the picturesque Rosemount Course. He instilled many of the basics and taught me to play well enough to get down to 4 handicap in my first year and to play off 2 handicap for the next decade or so. Colin also took me with him to caddy or just watch from inside the ropes when he went to play tournaments. I remember watching him play in the Agfa Tournament at Stoke Poges with the legendary Dave Thomas, one of the UK’s foremost golfers in the 1950’s and 1960’s winning many European tournaments and later designing the Brabazon, Derby and PGA National courses at The Belfry and many others . Dave tied for the 1958 British Open at Royal Lytham St Anne’s, losing to the legendary Peter Thomson in the playoff. He also finished second to Jack Nicklaus at Muirfield in 1966 and played in four Ryder Cups. The other member of their threeball was Ian Connelly who later taught Nick Faldo when he started out in golf at Welwyn Garden City. Some experience for an 18 year old playing off 4 handicap.

What Colin didn’t teach me was anything about the mental side of golf. Pros didn’t teach those things then and in many cases still don’t now. He did give me every encouragement and always told me what I was doing well with my swing before suggesting a few small improvements. What a contrast to a few later coaches who seemed to delight in focussing on what I was doing wrong before giving me a long list of the changes “you have to make…”

Although I had progressed through some really good coaches over the next 15 years and read a library full of golf instruction books, I was still “trying” to develop a consistent swing when I started to hear about golf psychology. One of the first really good books on the subject I came across was The Inner Game of Golf.

I read Timothy Gallwey’s book from cover to cover so many times it fell apart. What’s more it seemed to work when I remembered to follow the instructions. The problem was that the only time it seemed to work with any consistency was on the practice range when I was hitting shots repeatedly without thinking too much about the target and there were no hazards and opponents to think about. Mind you, it didn’t work on the practice range if I was working on one of the many swing ideas that my teachers regularly gave me.

On the course, I simply forgot to remember to follow the instructions on every shot as I was too preoccupied with every thing else that was going on and “trying”, that word again, to keep my swing together.

This “forgetting to remember” problem seems to apply, at least for me, to every golf psychology book, DVD, CD and MP3 recording I’ve used since and I’ve got a library full of them. I’m sure that the many of these products would work for me if I had someone to remind me to follow the instructions every time I play a shot, but I don’t have a caddy to remind me. That’s why I came up with the idea for my “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis programme that comes free when you sign up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine.

It seems that I’m not the only one to recognise this problem in that a number of golf psychologists have devised drills to help remind you to remember what to do. One of the most creative comes from Dr Karl Morris’s “Golf – The Mind Factor” and his “Circle Game”, where you circle the hole number on your score card after each hole, if you remember all the things you wanted to on every shot in the round. You know how well you’re doing by the number if circles at the end of the round. The problem is that it doesn’t work and when I challenged him at one of his clinics, Karl said that circling just a few holes per round would be a real sign of progress. It didn’t sound like he expected me to succeed with it on every hole.

So what’s my solution? Well it won’t surprise you to hear that it involves hypnosis, self-hypnosis and your unconscious golf programming. Unless you are seriously ill, you don’t have to remember to perform other unconscious tasks like breathing, controlling your body temperature, digesting the food you’ve eaten or to ride a bicycle, assuming you already learned how to. So why not install the things you want to remember as unconscious programming. You can learn to remember this way by years of consistent practice or overnight with hypnosis. With an unconscious approach, you won’t forget to remember what to do.

I’ll be writing more about this in future posts and especially in my forthcoming book “The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf.”

What’s possibly worse is that many players have similar negative internal dialogue whenever they plan and execute a shot. They recall all the bad shots they’ve ever hit in this situation and focus more on what can go wrong than on what they’re trying to do.

I was surprised to hear Geoff Ogilvy saying that he used to experience negative self talk earlier in his career. In an interview after his recent victory in the World Golf Championship Match Play event, he said that early in his career, he found it almost impossible to suppress any negative feelings he was experiencing. You wouldn’t think that, watching his cool demeanour when playing last week.

After some more research, I found a much older interview where he was talking about how half the Tour talks to themselves badly when they’re out there playing bad. They do it every day and it’s very unconstructive. When asked what he meant, he said

“Yeah, just call yourself useless and what are you doing out here and all sorts of stuff. And I was hopeless. And I’m still not the best out here, but I’m getting a lot better.”

Clearly Geoff has come a long way since then and I’m sure that golf psychology has had a lot to do with it.

With hypnosis and NLP we can do a lot to channel and manage that negative self-talk. One simple approach from NLP is just to give that negative voice in our head a silly or a sexy accent – it would be hard to take the negative self-talk if it came from Donald Duck or a seductive Marilyn Munro. You make up the voice in your head, so it’s yours to do whatever you want with.

Another alternative would be to give that destructive voice a constructive job to do. That’s one of the things I offer clients with my “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis programme. Did I mention that it’s free when you sign up for my Golf Hypnotist ezine? Just enter your name and email address in the form on the right hands side of every page of the Golf Hypnotist website.