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”.

So today, I’m pleased to announce a new, improved and, very important this, free 12-minute MP3 audio version of a simple technique for taking yourself into a safe, light and relaxing trance. Using it will help you in getting the most out of the golf psychology ideas included in my other articles, newsletters and posts. You can also use this technique to calm and relax yourself at times of stress and anxiety, like taking an exam, meeting the boss, first-tee nerves or standing over an important shot on the golf course.

You can learn how to use the Finger Breathing self-hypnosis and relaxation technique by regularly following the “Seven Steps to Learning Finger Breathing” outlined on my ezine website. That page also includes download instructions for new and improved Finger Breathing MP3 recording.

As you’ll soon realise, this “Finger Breathing” technique does require a bit of imagination, but you must already be pretty imaginative if you’re looking to use golf psychology to improve your golf!

So let’s have a look at an example. Quickly read the next sentence and see what you think it says.

Now raed tihs snectene aagin slwoly to see waht it auctlay syas hree in balck and wihte. I ssucept taht it may be vrey dfreneift.

If that one’s a bit too easy for you, have a go at this next one. It’s one of my favourite quotes from my golfing idol.

“I neevr hit a soht, not eevn in paccirte, whiotut hainvg a sahrp, in-fcous pcirtue of it in my haed. First I see the blal wehre I wnat it to fiinsh, ncie and wihte and siinttg up hgih on the birght geern garss. Tehn the secne qcikluy caeghns and I see the blal ginog tehre – it’s ptah, tacejorrty and sahpe, eevn its baehiouvr on ladinng. Tehn tehre is a srot of fdae-out and the nxet snece shwos me maikng the knid of sinwg taht will trun the peioruvs pctruies itno raeilty.”
Jcak Naciklus

So what’s happening here and what’s does all this have to do with golf? Well, firstly it suggests that you don’t need to have the spelling absolutely correct for our message to be understood. However, we do have to have the right letters in each word and the first and last letters of each word have to be correct. Secondly, it says that we are unconsciously very good at making a well informed guess about what we are seeing. So why shouldn’t the same skill apply to reading a shot or putt on the golf course?

Well, of course it does. When you throw a ball to someone, you look at your target and, without you thinking consciously about any precise measurements, your mind makes the necessary assessment of what you’re asking your body to do and simply does it. If on the other hand, you were executing a similar “throw” with a cannon, you’d be wanting to know the exact distance, the wind strength and direction, the temperature and all the other factors you’d need to assess the trajectory, direction and amount of gunpowder you’d need to send the cannon ball to the target. It can be the same when you hit a putt, if you trust your unconscious mind to do all the necessary calculations for you without you consciously analysing things too much.

But what about a full shot, don’t you have to calculate the distance precisely before you hit the shot? Well yes you do, especially if the distance can be deceptive, for example with a blind shot. Knowing the distance also helps with choosing the best club to use. However, note that I said the best club. The better golfers can hit the same distance with a wide range of clubs. I remember playing years ago with a group of people who would always look in my bag to see what club I had just hit. I remember totally confusing them one day by hitting every shot I could, from 100 to 220 yards distance, with my 2-Iron. That sure confused them! I also remember that the scores in club competitions where you’re only allowed to take 3 clubs and a putter always seem to be just as good, if not better, than when people have the full 14 clubs.

So remember that you have an amazing computing resource in your head that bases it’s assessment of what you see, feel and hear not on precise measurements., so trust your unconscious for better golf.

Just in case you found the scrambled quotation difficult to read, here’s what Jack had to say about visualisation.

“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.”
Jack Nicklaus

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?

You may remember my recent article about mental foursomes practice with golf hypnosis the other week. Now shortly after writing that I was watching a rerun on television of a recent US PGA Tour event and enjoying the overhead pictures from the blimp, when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Why not visualise my shots in 3D and incorporate an overhead shot of how I visualised the shot I was about to play. It sounded difficult until I realised that if I can see it on TV, then surely I can visualise it. After all, I already had the overhead view on the course planner, so why couldn’t I incorporate it in my pre-shot routine visualisation and mental golf practice.

So, later that evening I took myself into a light trance using self-hypnosis and played an imaginary round of golf at Beaconsfield, my home course. I visualised playing every hole and every shot in 3D, even the putts. It worked great and I couldn’t wait to take the idea to the course. That Friday, I got the chance to use it in my pre-shot visualisation on the real course and it worked amazingly well. Initially I found that I got the best results from visualising the shot normally, as a picture in 2D, and then "seeing" it again as if from a blimp, just as I stepped into the shot. By the time I’d played a few holes, visualising the shot in 3D just became a natural part of my routine.

What surprised me most was that it gives me so much more confidence, especially when hitting over a hazard or trees to my target. Instead of seeing the trees or hazards and estimating how far to hit past them, I’m finding myself seeing the whole shot from above. I’m getting a much clearer idea of the shot I’m playing and that’s taking away a lot of the normal doubt I normally have when playing these shots.

Vivid visualisation, using all the senses, is an essential part of the pre-shot routine you should be using when physically playing golf. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you about what Jack Nicklaus says about how he never played a shot without having first watched himself execute the swing perfectly and seen the ball flying or rolling to his target before finishing up, "sitting there and shining white on the bright green grass."

So try this out when you’re next out playing on the course and on the practice ground, especially when you’re practicing your golf in your minds eye. Maybe you’ll see a new low score up on the leader board – in 3D.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the importance, in golf psychology terms, of a quick transition from the conscious processes of planning your golf shot and selecting the right club and the unconscious process of taking your stance and hitting the ball. What concerns me most is that while the best golfers seem to take as little as 11 seconds to complete this transition the average golfer seems to take that long just to align their stance and the clubface.

Now, I don’t want you to go straight out and time how long you take, as that would introduce an unnecessary conscious activity into what should be an unconscious process and I don’t want you blaming me for making you play worse. You probably already know whether you are quick or slow in this area and if you don’t, just ask a golfing friend to tell you.

How accurately can you consciously aim your club face? Well, let’s look at a few technical facts. A typical club head is about 3 inches long from heel to toe and the hitting area is less than 2 inches wide. With a mid-iron, those two inches sit on the ground about 4-5 feet from your eyes, depending on your height and style.

And how precise can you be with the alignment of that clubhead from that distance? If you were an eight of an inch out with the face alignment, then your club would be facing about 10 yards wide of your target 160 yards away – the difference between hitting or missing an average green. Now, I know that the path the club head takes at impact has more affect on the direction the ball starts flying than the alignment of the clubface, but that’s more than compensated for by the slice or draw swing created and the tendency for us golfers to swing square to our clubface.

So, how do the better golfers maintain their accuracy if it’s so difficult to align the clubface accurately? Well, let’s look at other sports where the action is so rapid that we don’t have time to think consciously about alignment. How often have you seen a top-class cricket fielder throw the ball from maybe 40 yards more than a yard either side of the wicket-keeper? That’s despite having to run some way for the ball, pick it up, turn and throw it back as quickly as possible. I suspect that something similar happens in baseball. Now, do they spend any time aligning themselves consciously before they throw the ball? I don’t think so, they just turn and throw the ball and trust their amazing bodies and unconscious mind to assess all the variables and let fly.

The same goes for tennis where there’s little or no time for alignment. Timothy Gallwey’s original Inner Game book made similar arguments for the capabilities of the unconscious mind in the game of tennis. When he talked about Self 1 and Self 2 he was talking about what I describe as the conscious and unconscious minds. Even with the dynamic nature of tennis, he found a need for a distraction to stop the conscious mind interfering with the shot – calling out "Bounce" and "Hit" when the ball bounced or you hit it with the racket.

Now, what are you suggesting I should do to shorten my alignment time, Andrew? Well, all I’m saying is to think about taking less time with your club alignment when you’re setting up to play your shots and trust your unconscious to hit the shot where you want it to go. Work on it on the practice ground and in your mental practice until it becomes second nature and you know it works well for you. Then take it to the course and enjoy the results.

Well today is different, as the man who can give such an effective putting tip that it helps Phil Mickelson to win the Tour Championship just has to be seen and heard. So here’s a brief video of Dave Stockton describing his approach to putting.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Don’t worry, as I’ll be back on track with Golf Psychology and Golf Hypnosis in my next article.

You’ve probably heard about Phil’s putting woes and his comments about how "I’ve hit the ball so well and yet my scores haven’t reflected that." You’ve probably also heard about how "Bones" Mackay, Phil’s longstanding caddie, urged him to get help the week before the Tour Championship from Dave Stockton, one of the best putters in golf and twice a major winner. As if those weren’t sufficient reasons, Stockton also putts a bit like Phil does when he’s at his best.

So what major flaws did Dave Stockton notice in Phil’s putting stroke and what major changes did he prescribe? You’d expect them to be fairly severe given Phil’s recent comments about the inconsistent putting that has plagued him off and on over the last two years. He’s also talked about how his poor putting has detracted from the progress Butch Harman’s been making with his swing over the same period.

Well, Phil described the change in an interview as a "minor tweak" and went on to say "No, it’s very minor. It’s very minor. But [my] hands are back ahead like I used to putt, and the ball is just rolling much better." In another interview, he talked about Dave Stockton’s comments just "reaffirming the way I’ve putted since I was a kid."

So what golf psychology lessons can we learn from that then, Andrew, I hear you say? Well first of all, it confirms that if you’ve hit a particular shot well in the past, then you already unconsciously know how to hit it that well again – without changing your technique. All you need to do is to vividly recall one of those earlier successful shots and allow your unconscious golf mind to get on with the job as you get back into your comfort zone. I’d certainly include this type of visualisation in your pre-shot routine.

All that probably happened to Phil was he missed a few putts, lost his confidence and started to fear putting rather than enjoying the challenge. When that happens with any part of our golf game, we stop enjoying ourselves as much as we did and we start consciously analysing things. It doesn’t take too long before we start thinking there’s something drastically wrong with our swing or putting stroke and we start changing things, even though we seemed to have a perfectly effective method before.

This doesn’t just happen over a long period of time. For many of us it can happen in the middle of a round. Have you ever had the experience of playing a series of shots quite well and then hitting a bad shot, maybe a big slice? Did you badly pull or hook the next shot? If you did, you probably consciously thought you needed to make a swing correction, despite already knowing how to hit the ball quite well unconsciously. Well, you did say that you’d hit a series shots quite well, didn’t you.

Another golf psychology lesson was written on Phil Mickelson’s face all day on Sunday, not just when he won. He was clearly enjoying himself immensely, even before he started scoring well. After the round, he commented that, "Today was a lot of fun" and that’s not the way he’s been talking in recent weeks. Isn’t it odd how golfers seem to play so much better when they’re enjoying themselves, even if some, like a certain future Ryder Cup captain, have a hard time convincing us of that fact.

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.

So today, I’m going to describe a simple technique for taking yourself into a safe, light and relaxing trance. Using it will help you in getting the most out of the golf psychology ideas included in my other articles, newsletters and posts. You can also use this technique to calm and relax yourself at times of stress and anxiety, like taking an exam, meeting the boss, first-tee nerves or standing over an important shot on the golf course.

As you’ll soon realise, this "Finger Breathing" technique does need a bit of imagination, but you must already be pretty imaginative if you’re looking to use golf psychology to improve your golf!

Finger Breathing

Step 1: Start by finding a peaceful location, it can be in the middle of a crowd or on the golf course, just as long as you can quietly ignore what’s going on around you. It doesn’t matter if you’re standing up or sitting down and you can have you’re eyes open or closed. What’s important is to be as comfortable as you can be wherever you are.

Step 2: Quietly take a few slow deep breaths while noticing how the air you’re breathing in is cooling your body and calming your mind and the air you’re breathing out is releasing all the tension from your body.

Step 3: Now, this is the bit where you need to use that imagination of yours. As you’re inhaling, start imagining that you’re breathing the air in through your fingers and noticing how the air seems to cool your fingers.

Step 4: With each subsequent breath in, imagine that cooling feeling slowly spreading up through your hands to your wrists, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, neck and on up to the top of your head; relaxing all the muscles as it goes. And once it gets to the top of your head, let it continue down over your face and into your upper body as you continue breathing in.

Step 5: Once the cooling sensation and relaxation spreads through to your upper body, start noticing how the flow continues on each out-breath down through your lower body and on through your thighs, knees, lower legs and ankles into your feet with each subsequent breath. Learn how each out-breath cools and relaxes the muscles until it finally seems to flow out of your toes leaving a slight tingling sensation there.

Step 6: Now imagine that the cooling and relaxing air flowing out of your toes as you breathe out seems to flow back in through your fingers as you breathe in again. Notice how your breathing just seems to be a steady rotating cycle with the air simply flowing in through your fingers, continuing through your body, exiting through your toes and then back in through your fingers again.

Step 7: Just continue with this cycle of breathing until you’re feeling calm and relaxed and ready to tackle whatever golf psychology technique or challenging situation you’re undertaking now.

Wow, I’m feeling so relaxed just writing about that. I expect you are too, whether you’re reading it or simply running through it in your mind. It’s much simpler to remember than it is to read or write down.