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, I’m not qualified to comment on the technicalities of the golf swing. However, I am qualified to comment on what for me is an even more important transition in golf psychology. It’s the transition from the conscious analytical planning phase of your pre-shot routine to the unconscious instinctive phase of actually hitting the ball. Unlike the pause at the top of the backswing, the faster you can comfortably make this transition, the better and more consistently you’ll find yourself striking the ball or rolling the putt.

If you watch the top players in the world, like Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods, you’ll notice that they take very little time between taking their chosen club out of the bag and hitting the ball. A recent study suggested that Tiger and Phil consistently take around 11 to 12 seconds to do this and they are very consistent with the timing. If they took any longer, they often hit a less than good shot – these guys don’t hit many downright bad shots.

So what do they do in those 11 to 12 seconds? Well, every player has his own idiosyncrasies, including re-gripping, waggling, breathing, blinking and countless other rituals. However, they all seem to

1. take one or two practice swings to get the feel of the shot they visualise playing
2. step forward to the ball and take their stance
3. align their body and clubface
4. take a final look at their target
5. finally, hit the "start button" and swing the club or putter.

What’s interesting is that they don’t seem at all rushed in fitting all that into such an apparently short time. They certainly don’t have any spare time for self doubt and that little voice in their head telling them they’re doing it all wrong! In fact, they complete the process like they’re in some sort of trance and that means that they are leaving the whole process to their unconscious golf mind, just like driving a car or riding a bike.

Now some of the players you watch on TV or out on the course take a lot longer to make this transition and the time they take is less consistent. How well did you see them play? If you watched Sergio Garcia playing golf a few years ago, you’d have often seen him take an inordinately long time to hit the ball. He had a pained expression on his face that suggested he was experiencing a lot of negative self-talk and he seemed to be wringing the life out of the club as he repeatedly re-gripped his hands. It’s no surprise that his golf was inconsistent at best and he certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying his golf.

So how do I speed up my transition from taking my club out to hitting the ball, I hear you say. Well one way is to make the whole process an instinctive or unconscious activity. Streamline your own transition process and use it every time you hit a shot on the golf course, at the driving range, on the practice putting green and in your mental golf practice. You do practice and play golf in your mind, now don’t you?

I’ve been out of the office a lot this week and without the means of posting on this blog. The good news is that I’ve had some time to think about golf and the general trend of my posts here.

One theme that comes up a lot in my thoughts and in my writing is the idea that one of the main reasons for most people playing golf is the pursuit of enjoyment, both for ourselves and the people we play with. As a golf psychologist, this is also my primary motivation in my working life and it’s reflected in my mission, as a hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner, of helping people to do things better and get more enjoyment out of the things they do in life and in golf.

What about the professional golfer pursuing fame and money from golf success? Well, I suspect that the pursuit of enjoyment played an important part for them when they started out and it probably still features high on their list of priorities as a professional. The top 50 players in the world are probably sufficiently well off that money is not their only motivator. Just remember the look on Phil Mickelson’s face after that duel with Tiger Woods at the 2009 Masters. The fact that he didn’t win didn’t seem to outweigh his euphoric enjoyment responding to the challenge. It’s a shame that we don’t so often see that clear enjoyment coming from certain other golfers when they aren’t playing their best. In recent posts here, I’ve talked about these failings from Colin Montgomerie, Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia.

All this talk about enjoying golf got me thinking about what specifically we all enjoy about golf. That led me to recall what Timothy Gallwey wrote in The Inner Game of Golf about the triangular link between enjoyment, performance and learning – the three main parts of everyone’s experience of golf. Although I agree with Gallwey’s idea, very few of the clients I work with seem to think about anything but their golfing performance.

In my first meeting with new clients, I tended to ask questions about what they want to achieve from working with me, what their definition of success in golf is and how will they know when they have achieved it. When I first started out as a golf psychologist, I had expected the answers to be about things like enjoyment, confidence, concentration and consistency. Instead, I tend to hear about things like how to stop their slice, get out of bunkers, avoid hitting the ball in the water on a particular hole or avoid three-putting.

More recently, I’ve expanded my initial questions to include asking new clients about why they play golf and what I can do to help them achieve that. This usually provides me with a much more constructive starting point to improving and much more importantly enjoying their golf.

If I look at my own reasons for playing golf when I started at the age of 18, they were relatively sensible. I was looking for a sport that

• I could play, given reasonable health, for the next 50 years or more
• would give me a complete mental break from work
• offered a modest amount of regular exercise
• was challenging and competitive
• allowed me to develop some good friendships
• breaks down social and business barriers
• and would give me something I could enjoy doing.

Given those reasons, why did I spend the next 30 years, until I got into golf psychology, beating my head against the wall of lowering my handicap? Why did I spend all the hours I could spare and more beating balls on the driving range? Why did I spend all that money on golf lessons, books, magazines and practice aids? Why did I have all those days of frustration and anger when I didn’t quite play to the level I wanted? The answer to all those questions is "that’s why I first got properly interested in golf psychology."

So if you’d like to get more enjoyment from your golf and play better, why not write down your list of the real reasons why you play golf. Then you can make sure that whatever you strive for in golf will help you to address those reasons you listed.

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? I’m scouring the web for answers to that question and finding absolutely nothing, apart from his having no apparent training or qualification as a golf psychologist. Neither are there any clues in his background and despite his 50+ years, his career history only seems to mention his leaving school at 14, becoming a Belgian pop singer and working as an advertising salesman.

I have found references to his being inspired by Edward de Bono, best known for his ideas on Lateral Thinking, and Timothy Gallwey, the man behind the Inner Game books. Jos seems to have had a very direct approach to life and apparently spent a lot of money getting to spend time with Gallwey. He continued this approach by following the European Tour for 3 years touting for business before becoming an overnight sensation.

Although I’m finding very few examples demonstrating his methods, he does appear to have based his approach on the Inner Game idea of changing your thinking to change your golf performance. The only quote I’ve found from hours of searching suggests that he may be a fan of visualisation and unconscious golf.

“Even if you don’t believe that you can change a particular feeling, pretend that you believe it. If you pretend, then you can fool your subconscious. The good thing is that your subconscious doesn’t know the difference between truth and pretending …”

Although he appeared to have a strong following among the top professionals for a few years, he dropped off the radar almost instantly and I’m finding nothing to say what happened to him.

So where am I going with all this? Well, for a short time each of these professionals seemed eager to attribute some of their success to Jos Vanstiphout and clearly believed in him. However, I’m finding nothing to say what he actually did for them or the golf psychology techniques he was teaching them. Maybe that’s why the effect wore off so quickly.

The lesson for me is that before you commit to working with a golf psychologist, you should know as much as possible about what techniques they are likely to use to help you and how qualified they are to use those techniques.

By the way, if anyone out there knows what happened to Jos, please let us all know. You can add a comment to this post using the form below

Number 6: ”Trying” to consciously control your swing mechanics

Do you remember how hard it was to tie your shoe laces the first time and how it’s just an automatic process? To see what I mean, write down the step by step instructions for how you tie your shoelaces and then give them to someone else and ask them to follow them to the letter. Even if they succeed, it’ll take them much longer than just using the unconscious program. Now imagine consciously following those instructions in the time it takes to swing a golf club.

The only effective way to swing a golf club is to switch off your conscious mind and all its thoughts about swing mechanics and trust your unconscious mind – you’ve already programmed it to repeat the best shot you’ve ever hit. And the way to make sure you do that is, as before, to get a good hypnotist to install an appropriate post-hypnotic or use self-hypnosis.

Number 7: Criticising your shot and looking for flaws in your swing

Even using hypnosis, you’ll occasionally mishit a shot or be unlucky. However, that’s no cause for criticism and certainly no reason for changing your swing mechanics out on the course. Just learn from the shot and move on as described in my response to the dwelling on your mistakes and bad shots.

Number 8: Comparing yourself to some other golfer

You can learn a lot in golf from watching a good player at his or her best, but the real challenge of golf is you playing against the course. It really doesn’t matter how well or badly your playing partners or opponents are playing. If you play to the best of your ability and lose, then well done you and well done them. That’s one of the many special things I love about golf.

If it still bothers you then install the post-hypnotic suggestion that you’ll treat every shot as if it’s the last one you’ll ever play There’d be no reason to dwell on your past shots and there wouldn’t be any in the future, so you might as well make the most of the one you’re playing now.

Number 9: Thinking about what could go wrong

In your mind this is interpreted in a similar way to telling yourself what NOT to do. Your unconscious mind will have to think about the thing that could go wrong happening and it will do your best to make it happen. If you want to evaluate what could go wrong, that’s fine, before you make up your mind what you do want to happen. Then you can use your post-hypnotic suggestion or self-hypnosis to switch off your unconscious mind and let your unconscious programming get on with hitting your desired shot.

Number 10: Worrying about other people watching you

If you’re using hypnosis and NLP to manage your state and concentration during the round, you will be consciously unaware and untroubled by the actions of others. Even if they are thinking bad or critical thoughts about you, those thoughts are in their heads and not yours. Once you go into your playing trance you will be blissfully unaware of your conscious self-talk.

So are my overall conclusions changing today?

Well, no they aren’t and you’ll notice I’m avoiding naming the “someone” who published the original list and hidden his responses. I know that if you really want to read them, you can probably find them on the web, but I don’t want them on my website.

Now, it won’t surprise you to hear that my suggestions still revolve around the use of a good hypnotist helping you with appropriate post-hypnotic suggestions and tying those suggestions to carefully chosen golf psychology techniques for your specific golfing issues and opportunities.

One of the reasons that I failed to benefit from the Inner Game of Golf and the many other books, DVDs and CDs I purchased over my earlier the years is that none of them installed any way of remembering not to forget to do their techniques when I needed them.  The nearest anyone has ever got to achieving that has been Dr Karl Morris with his Circle Game, but that worked very intermittently for me.

It would be an improvement if I had a caddy every time I played and the caddy had a checklist of all the golf psychology instructions I had to remember. Even then, I would still need something like hypnosis to manage the interference from my conscious mind while I hit the shots. That’s why I developed my “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis programme that you can download free when you sign up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine.

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.”