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.

This new “Golf in the Playing Zone” programme is available in MP3 format for download, with the three long and powerful golf hypnosis sessions, each running for around 22-32 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 a further 4 more new Golf Hypnosis MP3 audio programmes over the next month or so. 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 “Golf in the Playing Zone” Hypnosis Programme all about? 

For most players good golf is primarily based on making use of both the analytical conscious and automatic and instinctive unconscious parts of our minds. Nowhere is this more important in what I call the Playing Zone, the time that starts when you arrive at your ball and begin your pre-shot routine and ends after you’ve hit the shot, learned from it and released it to the past. That’ rarely adds up to more than a quarter of the time you spend on the golf course. The rest of the time you’re free to simply enjoy the scenery, share the company of your playing partners and relax as you move between shots. That’s another zone or state completely.

The first time I heard about what we now refer to as the Zone was back in 1970 when I heard Tony Jacklin talk about being in a “cocoon of concentration” in an interview after he won the Open Championship at Royal Lytham St. Annes in 1969. In fact, I recall him saying much the same thing to me, when I played with him in 1970, just a few weeks before he won the US Open at Hazeltine. He wasn’t the only one experiencing that sort of thing back then, with the legendary Arnold Palmer talking of “a tautness of mind but not a tension of the body”, “concentration on the shot at hand” and “the heightened sense of presence and renewal that endures through an entire round or an entire tournament”.

Years later, I remember Nick Faldo talking about getting into a trance-like state when playing in major championships and calling it a “cocoon” of concentration. He went on to describe it as, “a state of oblivion where I shut out all the people on and off the course.”

Have you noticed that, apart from their being in the Zone when they were winning, the common factor with Tony, Nick and Arnie was that they were all trying stay in the zone for entire whole rounds and even tournaments? You have to be really focussed and mentally strong to stay in the zone for that length of time. Maybe that’s why Nick Faldo and Tony Jacklin often seemed so emotionally drained at the end of a championship.

So what about some of the other major winners, people like Tiger Woods, Padraig Harrington and Lee Trevino? Well, they seem to be in the zone only for the time it takes them to plan and play their shots. Between shots, Lee would talk to anyone who’d listen to him and many who wouldn’t, while he entertained the galley with jokes. However, he certainly seemed to be in the zone for the few seconds it took him to hit the ball. Tiger’s considerably less talkative, but you couldn’t lose your temper after a bad shot like he often does and stay in the zone. Again, he’s well into the zone from the moment he gets to his ball to the moment he either twirls his club in celebration or beats it in anger. Padraig’s eyes tell us everything we need to know about his focus and concentration when he’s in the Playing Zone, and the next moment he’s walking jauntily along the fairway laughing and joking with his caddy.

And what have you included in “Golf in the Playing Zone” I hear you ask? 

Well, I’ve included three powerful freestanding golf hypnosis sessions to help you to:

• Build a series of unconscious triggers or anchors to take you automatically into the Playing Zone and step you systematically and unconsciously through your pre-shot routine, your rehearsal swings, your shot routine and your post-shot routine.
• Zone out your inner critic and reinforce your positive inner guardian or champion so you naturally play golf more positively and confidently
• Isolate and set aside all distractions that interfere with your concentration in the Playing Zone.

The Playing Zone – This first session runs for over 32 minutes – I had so much to pack in to it. The recording helps you build a series of unconscious triggers or anchors to take you automatically into the Playing Zone and step you systematically and unconsciously through your pre-shot routine, your rehearsal swings, your shot routine and your post-shot routine. Now I’m not specifying the contents of those routines. As I’ve said before, I feel those are individual to you. What I want to achieve is a set of cascading triggers that take you automatically through from the moment you arrive at the ball through to the time you release the results of the shot and walk on to the next one. For me, that’s the Playing Zone, the time for concentration. The rest of the time you’re out on the golf course, you should be relaxed and unfocussed as you’re walking, talking and enjoying what’s going on around you.

Zone Out your Inner Critic - The second hypnosis session starts by building 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.

Concentration on the Zone - I recorded the third golf hypnosis session in this programme to help you isolate and set aside the thoughts and distractions that interfere with your concentration and enjoyment on the golf course. Some of these will be the usual golf related things, like thinking about your score, your swing, course conditions – the list is endless. There are also the thoughts you bring to the course that have nothing to do with golf apart from getting in the way of Golf in the Playing Zone.

Go to the “Golf in the Playing Zone” 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 “Golf in the Playing Zone” there for instant download and start to Anchor Hypnosis Unconsciously for Golf in the Playing Zone and Silence your Inner Critic.

One of the key techniques in the application of golf hypnosis is the use of metaphor to communicate a concept that may be rejected or over analysed by the conscious mind. As an example, if I wanted someone to swing their golf club naturally and unconsciously, I might talk to them about the way they throw a ball of paper into a wastepaper basket or skim a stone across a pond – without any conscious thought.

So I’m always on the lookout for a good metaphor and right now I need one to use in my golf hypnosis to help people with their post-shot routines. In particular, to help them to learn whatever they can from a bad shot and then forget about it and move on "in the zone" or "in the now" to their next one. Perhaps that’s too difficult a concept for many of us and it’s always difficult to remember to forget something when you’re blowing a fuse after hitting a bad shot.

So, imagine my delight when I was listening to Nick Faldo on the television commentating on the Tour Championship. Tiger Woods had just pushed his tee shot way out to the right and was just in the middle slamming his driver into the ground with a dramatic lunge. Then suddenly he just seemed to switch off, his eyes glazed over like he was in a light hypnotic trance and he calmly bent down, picked up his tee and walked off in the direction of his ball. As he did so, Nick commented about Tiger hitting the "reset button" and getting back "in the now". A very large, if metaphoric, light bulb lit up in my head and I just knew that I have to include that idea in my work.

So, the next time you’re feeling bad or angry after a bad or unlucky shot, just mentally hit your "reset button" and learn from the shot, consign it to the past where it can’t hurt you and step back into the now.

But how do I do that, Andrew? Well, you could try in vain to consciously remember a time when you hit a bad shot and followed it with a good one, but it would probably be in vain as you’d be consciously pre-occupied with your anger and forget.

The best way, if you’re familiar with self hypnosis, is to incorporate it into your hypnotic post-shot routine and it’ll just happen unconsciously. Alternatively, you could create your own "reset button" with an NLP anchor that fires off automatically whenever you’re in that situation.

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.

Now I’m not taking anything away from Rafael. He played remarkably well for an 11-under par 60 to beat Benn into second place in the Austrian Open on the European Tour by a single shot. I read somewhere that it’s one of only 13 rounds of 60 in the history of the European Tour and Darren Clarke had two of those, so Rafael’s one of only 12 phenomenal golfers.

What’s more interesting to me as a golf psychologist watching every shot of their final rounds is that they both played to the best of their ability on the day. It was just that Rafael scored better. Better even than Benn’s 63 in the opening round on Thursday. What’s also interesting is that they both seemed to be playing their mental golf one shot at a time.

You could see that in the way that Benn calmly holed a series of difficult recovery putts to keep things going in the first 9 holes on Sunday. Except he didn’t seem to be "trying" to keep things going, he just seemed to be playing each shot on its merits, disregarding the shot that had gone before, good or bad. He also didn’t look like a man who was getting ahead of himself. He just seemed to be focussing on playing the shots and letting the score just happen. Even the final result didn’t really faze him judging by his comment afterwards that "I’m very happy with the way I have played but disappointed to finish second."

Rafael certainly looked to me like he was doing the same thing and he confirmed it afterwards when he’s quoted as saying.

“It’s just amazing – I played the best golf of my life and I can’t believe it, I was so far back at the start of the final round that I wasn’t thinking about winning. I just tried to play a shot at a time and it worked out really good.”

So how do I play each shot "in the now", I hear you asking. Well, I’ll be talking a lot more about that in future articles, but for now, here’s a simple suggestion that will bring most people abruptly into the now. Just imagine that the shot you are about to play is the last golf shot you will ever play. There’s no point in thinking about the next shot, as there isn’t going to be one. Just make the best you can of this one last shot. Make it a shot to remember. You wouldn’t want to mess up your last ever shot by trying too hard, now would you.

Hypnosis tends to be experienced in many different ways with different [people and what works in one session with a client may not work as well, if at all, the following week. That means that golf psychologists and hypnotherapists have to be flexible in their approach to every client session. It also means that it’s difficult if not impossible to analyse and document hypnosis and hypnotic technique scientifically. For some people that means that hypnosis doesn’t exist and that it’s dangerous because it can’t be explained.

Now I’ve often explained the unconscious mind as the source of our autonomous or instinctive actions. I illustrate this with stories about how difficult it was to consciously learn to drive, tie your shoelaces or a bow or ride a bike and how at some point it just becomes an automatic process that we don’t have to think about.

Before starting on a long car journey, most drivers spend a little time planning their journey. They consider the merits of different routes, taking into consideration factors like road works, whether they prefer to drive on main roads, the impact of rush-hour traffic and many other factors including the weather. Once they start driving, most of these people drive safely while settling down to conscious pursuits like talking to their passengers, working out the personal and business problems in their mind or just daydreaming. Their unconscious mind keeps them safe and follows all the techniques and processes they learned years ago. How often have you drivers been on a long familiar journey and suddenly just seemed to "wake up" thinking, "How did I get here?" It can be quite worrying the first time it happens, but your unconscious mind has protected you along the way.

If a top golfer described a similar experience, we’d be inclined to think they were "in the zone" or, as Tony Jacklin famously referred to it after his major wins in the early 70s, in a "cocoon of concentration." Years later, Nick Faldo talked about getting into a trance-like state, he called it a "cocoon", during the week of a major. He went on to describe it as "a state of oblivion where I shut out all the people on and off the course."

So, like the driver I described earlier consciously plans the journey in advance, the golfer consciously plans his shot taking into account all the information available, including his lie, how he’s playing today, the weather and wind conditions, the distance, the landing area and his chosen target. He completes his conscious preparation and then transitions to his unconscious mind by recalling a similar shot and vividly imagining the experience of hitting by stepping into his stance and trusting his unconscious mind to hit the ball. Put differently, the golfer is “in the zone” or in a “cocoon of concentration”, a trance-like state of oblivion. That sounds good to me!

He played there after being told what a tough course it was going to be. He mentioned the great greens, the way that lots of run off areas were shaved down low and the high swirling winds. What a perfect set up in the run in to the Masters.

Casey was clearly focussed and in the zone, as he explained at the press conference, “I kept my head down, to be honest, and didn’t pay too much attention to what was going on. I just thought it was incredibly difficult out there, so why burden myself with knowing too much.” He went on to say, “It wasn’t until the last green I looked up when I was in the bunker and knew I had to get up and down to beat J.B. Otherwise a play off.” He went on to beat long-hitting J.B. Holmes in the playoff.

Now this isn’t the same Paul Casey who went into a dramatic slump back in 2005. The new Casey has rebuilt himself to a new level with the help of sports Psychologist, Dr Don Greene, as well as coach, Peter Kostis. Back then, Casey was losing his way mentally and that was impacting his golf physically as well. Now he’s about as far from a slump as can be imagined.

So, who exactly is Don Greene? Well he’s no ordinary golf psychologist. He started out as a champion diver and Green Beret before earning his doctorate in sports psychology. For the last 25 years he’s been working with people under pressure ranging from police SWAT officers, through professional golfers, Grand Prix drivers, Olympic athletes and for the last 15 years he’s been specialising in the performing arts with musicians, singers and actors – and Paul Casey.

To be fair, the article I’ve just read from Lorne Rubenstein at Globe and Mail talks about the advice that Bob Rotella is giving Mike Weir in preparation for this weekend’s World Golf Championships. And any advice from Bob is usually good advice. You can read Lorne’s article at “Trying to ‘go unconscious’ on the course”

I talk a lot in my golf hypnosis work about the difference between the conscious and the unconscious mind in my work and I truly believe that better golf is played in the unconscious mind – by being in the zone, as it’s more commonly called.

There’s an important separation in the mind between planning a shot, a conscious process, and executing it. 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. You certainly can’t remember what special move you made to get that result. You rarely get those special shots when you’re consciously thinking about all those things the pro told you to remember at your last lesson.

I know I’m always talking about being your own virtual caddy, but that idea also fits in well with this idea of unconscious golf. Just watch Tiger Woods consciously discussing his shot with his caddy and then seeming to glaze over as he unconsciously executes the shot. He’s getting the benefit of their collective experience in planning the shot and then trusting his unconscious swing memory to hit the shot.  If you haven’t already, you can get your free download of my “Your Own Virtual Caddy” article and Golf Hypnosis mp3 by subscribing to my free Golf Hypnotist ezine. You’ll  find a sign up box on the right of every page of my website.

It works in reverse too. I personally use one of the Explanar Golf Training & Fitness Systems to groove my swing and I often take myself into self hypnosis before practicing on it. That way, all the feelings and muscle actions elicited by the Explanar are going straight into my unconscious muscle memory without any interference from my critical factor – my conscious mind.