Archive for Golf Psychologist
Lee Westwood and Rory McIlroy played amazing golf at the Dubai World Championships. However, their phenomenal play took second place for me as a golf psychologist given the amount of extreme golf psychology and covert golf hypnosis flying about.
Firstly there was Lee Westwood’s much talked about "Secret Plan." When the dust settled he admitted, "Okay, if you really want to know, the secret was making everyone else think I had a secret, when I didn’t really have one." He had the rest of the field nervously waiting to find out what the plan was and not concentrating on their own plans. In my forthcoming book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf, I talk about protecting yourself against Covert Hypnosis or "Black Ops Golf", as other people refer to it. Although I’m not comfortable with Covert Hypnosis …
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As a golf psychologist, I am especially interested in the importance of separating the conscious and unconscious elements of the pre-shot routine and the actual striking of the ball. In an ideal world, we should use our conscious rational mind, sometimes referred to as our Left Brain, for planning our shots and our unconscious instinctive mind, or Right Brain to manage the execution of each shot. Yes, I know that there’s lots of controversy in psychology circles about where these functions actually exist in the brain, but, however it’s actually organised, the conscious and unconscious processes of the brain do seem to work separately to our advantage.
When we learn to do anything new, we employ our amazing analytical power of our conscious mind to work out how to do it. We keep trying new ways and deciding on which is the best for us in a particular situation. The process is very effective in the long term, but very slow and frustrating. This is what’s going on when we learn to ride a bike, drive a car or have a golf lesson. It often seems frustrating or even down right impossible to achieve.
After much trial, error and frustration, we eventually learn the new skill …
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One of the key success factors of better golf psychology is learning to unconsciously play one shot at a time – in the moment, in the zone or "in the now." And this applies equally to every shot you play on the practice ground, in a friendly game and in the most important round of your golfing life. Playing in the now means that you’re protected from any poor, indifferent shots and ill-judged shots that went before. It also means that you’re protected from future uncertainties and expectation.
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 …
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As a golf psychologist, I’m regularly asked by clients about what they should be thinking about in their golf mind when they’re actually swinging the club or stroking a putt. Many of them will have some sort of pre-shot routine that prepares them to some degree for the shot they’re about to make. A smaller number will also include some sort of visualisation of the shot they want to hit. However, very few will be thinking about that visualisation when they actually hit the ball.
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 …
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If I were to ask you what you do between shots during a round of golf, you’d probably think I was missing the point. After all, golf psychology and teaching should be all about helping you to hit better shots and putts during a round of golf or in practice, shouldn’t it? This applies whether you’re working with a teaching pro helping you with your golf swing or with a golf psychologist, like me, helping to improve your mental approach to golf.
So what do you actually do in the time between assessing and hitting your shots and putts? It really should take a lot less than a minute on average to size up a shot, decide on how to play it, set up to the ball and hit it. I seem to recall from somewhere that the US PGA allows 45 seconds for all this per shot and very few people take that long over a short putt. So all that should add up to a maximum of 54 minutes actually playing golf to go round in 72 strokes and 72 minutes to go round in 90 strokes. If you take just 4 hours to play a round then you’re not actually playing for approximately 3 hours in every 18 holes …
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I work, using Golf Hypnosis and NLP, with different clients on almost every aspect of the game of golf, from the putting psychology and the Yips through to concentration and lack of confidence. My clients often go on to seeking my help with their lives in general. With so many common factors, you could be forgiven for assuming that there’s a standard "cure" for each problem or opportunity a client may bring. The good hypnotherapist sees each client as the unique person they are, with their own set of unique issues and expectations, and develops a unique approach for that client.
Nowhere is this more true than with putting, the game within the game of golf. Putting is the great equalizer in golf and we all have the opportunity for success, regardless of age, sex, build, health and level of fitness …
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How long did your game of golf take this weekend? Maybe 3 hours or less if you played on a traditional Scottish championship course, 5 hours if you played a fourball around a more modern country club or even more if you played in a serious open amateur event. I remember playing in a two-ball at Royal Troon, as the guest of a 70 year old friend, and getting round in 2 hours and 20 minutes and we were chased around by the Club Captain playing in a foursome. I can also remember playing in top amateur events and taking over 11 hours to play two medal rounds as a two-ball and no time for lunch. The quick round was much more enjoyable although we were both a bit out of breath by the end.
As a golf psychologist, I’ve often been falsely accused of contributing to the slow play at my home club. People assume that, with all the extra thinking going on, that my clients will take more time playing their shots. This may be true for people who implement long conscious checklists and complicated pre-shot routines, as outlined in many of the popular "so-called" golf psychology books and magazine articles …
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There’s a lovely lady hypnotherapist called Ellie Blunt who has a really interesting blog called The Transparent Hypnotist. She posts 7 days a week on a broad range of topics – "All about hypnosis, NLP, positive thinking, suggestion work and the reality of it all."
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 Click here to read the full post »
Back in the late 90s and early in the twenty-first century, when I started getting really interested in golf psychology, it seemed that the question everyone was asking was, “Who is Jos Vanstiphout?” At the 2002 Open at Muirfield, he was sharing his talents with both players in the play-off, Ernie Els and Thomas Levet. He was reported as having other irons in the fire that week, with clients including Retief Goosen, Soren Hansen, Sergio Garcia, Michael Campbell and Darren Clarke and quite a few others. As a betting man, he had good odds of backing a winner.
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 …
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Yesterday, in Part 1 of this article, I tackled the first 5 of someone’s web-based list of the top ten mental mistakes golfers make and how to correct them instantly. Today I tackle the last 5 and as I disagree with much of his “how to correct them instantly “advice, I’ve again included my suggestions as to how address them with NLP and Golf Hypnosis …
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