What’s more important, in the context of his much reported and lengthy annual swing changes, is that it seems that Padraig’s unconscious golf mind simply knew instinctively how to do it. Sure it took a few tries to get the hang of actually doing it, but he seemed to be learning the technique by trial and error. Not unlike Milton Erickson learning to walk, as described in my earlier article entitled Milton Erickson Learned to Walk as Tiger Woods Learns to play Better Golf.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m really looking forward to watching Padraig getting back into his natural and instinctive unconscious golf swing at Bethpage Black this weekend in the US Open. With the narrow fairways and thick rough, let’s hope Padraig’s forgotten all about playing like Happy Gilmore!

Milton Erickson, the father of modern hypnotherapy, often used the story of how he learned to walk again, at the age of 18 after severe bout of Polio, by watching his baby sister learning to walk. He describes it in his book The February Man.

“When she first learns to walk, she picks up her right foot and moves it one step ahead. And then after that she has had the experience of moving her right foot so she moves the right foot again and takes another step ahead. She doesn’t learn to walk all at once, by putting one foot up and then the other, so she learns to walk this way and then she tumbles. But the baby has to learn to do it one foot after another. She makes mistakes in learning to walk, and she learns how with the fewest possible tumbles and without trying to hurry too much.”

He goes on to describe how, when we are very young, we seem to be programmed for this trial and error style of learning and we gradually piece together our experience of what works. That way we come up with our own personal method of doing things. That’s probably how you learned to walk, to tie your shoes, to ride a bike and to drive a car. Hopefully with more trial than error with that last example!

Erickson often used this story as a metaphor for a wide range of learning situations and it applies equally well to our lifetime learning of the wonderful game of golf.

So every time you make a mistake on the golf shot and maybe hit a bad shot, learn from it then release it to the graveyard of all the bad shots anyone ever hit. You’ve taken your learnings from it and discarded it. It will never bother you again, unless you dwell on it. You can also use the same technique to learn from other people’s successes and failures whether they be your playing partners or the players you’re watching in a tournament.

Maybe Tiger’s learning from and then rapidly releasing his bad shots when he rants, raves and cusses after a bad shot. I’d rather he didn’t, but it seems to work for him. And he seldom follows one bad shot with another – unlike a lot of people I know – not you or me, of course!

So what do I mean by Golf Hypnosis Homework

Well don’t worry; it’s not like going back to school. This homework is often just a task that changes your routine or increases your awareness of something you do. I often use tasks to help interrupt habitual patterns of behaviour or thinking. Sometimes I may give a task to directly intervene in a pattern of behaviour and other times the task may appear to my client as completely unrelated to their problem. Despite seeming unrelated, carrying out the task usually brings about a new understanding or allows the client to look at his or her problem in a new light.

The father of modern hypnosis, Milton Erickson, used to give people the most extraordinary tasks. My favourite was when he gave a rather depressed man the task of counting the chimneys on the buildings on his walk to work each day and to note anything unusual he saw up there. Erickson knew that when we in a positive happy state, we tend to hold our heads with our shoulders back. It’s difficult to feel down when you’re looking up.

Dr Karl Morris, one of Europe’s leading sports psychologists recommends that you keep your eyes above the flag while walking between shots for the same reason. As Karl says, “change your body and you will change your mind.”

Homework Task for Your Own Virtual Caddy

If you’ve signed up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine, then you already have the free 25-minute “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis mp3. If you haven’t, then you can get it now by completing the form on the right sidebar of any page of my website. Just fill in your name and email address and click on the “Subscribe Now” button.

Listen regularly to the audio recording and complete the “Caddying” Homework Task. The purpose of this task is to give you the experience of thinking about and planning every shot rather than just walking up and hitting it. As a caddy, you don’t get to hit the shot yourself and have to hand over that task to someone else – like their unconscious ability.

So all you have to do is to caddy for someone else for a few holes or ideally a full round. Alternatively get somebody to caddy for you. If you’re not sure what caddying involves, then go to a tournament or watch one on TV and focus on the interaction between player and caddy.

Once you know roughly what to do then here’s a few different approaches, in descending order of effectiveness.

1. Caddy for a golf professional – may be difficult to arrange
2. Caddy for a good amateur golfer – 4 handicap or lower
3. Caddy for a friend – the better the player, the better the results and there may be mutual benefit from the exercise
4. Watch Tiger Woods in a tournament on TV and imagine being his caddy
5. Imagine a round of golf with you as your own caddy.

If you work at it, you may suddenly surprise and delight yourself by finding your golf improving dramatically with the unconscious help of your own virtual caddy.

So let’s focus on golf. Well Alan’s a hard-working golfer, practising or playing most days, somehow. He has a good swing, is excellent around the greens and is an instinctively superb putter. He’s good at visualisation as well and practices stepping into the shoes of his golfing heroes. He often practices on his own with two balls – one played in his mind by Tiger Woods and the other by Jack Nicklaus. He also works hard on his physical fitness with long cross-country walks and almost daily workouts in the pool – whatever the weather.

Alan’s problem in golf is that he consistently scores much worse than he should due to unforced errors – accidents you could say. The main causes of these accidents are his desire to overcomplicate the shot he needs to play and the resultant lapses of concentration. Instead of hitting a normal shot, that he can regularly execute consistently well – he suddenly decides to try something more complicated on impulse and doesn’t think the shot through. You won’t be surprised to hear that these shots are normally disastrous and expensive!

Now Alan presented me with a few problems. It would be easy to help him overcome his problem by using golf hypnosis, but he seemed alarmed at the idea of formal hypnosis. Maybe he’d had a bad experience with stage hypnosis, or some “well informed” religious advisor telling him that he shouldn’t have anything to do with hypnosis! But he’d come to me through a friend and I’d agreed to help him without using formal hypnosis.

The solution was to prepare a therapeutic metaphor; a complex story or set of stories. The object is to keep his conscious mind occupied with the complexity of the story the unconscious mind finds the literal meaning hidden in the central story. That allows the unconscious mind to find it’s own way for him to overcome the problem. I knew that if I embedded the story in the middle of several other loosely related stories, I could keep his conscious mind sufficiently occupied while my hidden message could get through to his unconscious.

So what metaphor should I use? I knew that Alan’s an enthusiastic football supporter as well, so I decided to use a football metaphor. Now some of the story’s based on facts I remembered and other parts are just made up, so don’t write to me to tell me that’s not what happened!

I had an initial meeting with Alan and we sat down in a quiet corner of the golf club and at the appropriate moment when he was relaxed in conversation, I brought the conversation round to this story.

“I used to play golf with Dexter Adams, a former Captain of England at football in the 1950’s– even though he was an amateur and played for Hendon FC. Oddly, he had a footballer friend called Billy Wright, who I also used to play golf with, but he wasn’t the famous one who used to play for England and married one of the Beverley Sisters!

Now Dexter told me once about a really talented footballer called Laurie. Laurie played a really good game of football, “much better than I did” Dexter told me. He had all the skills and the knack of being in the right place at the right time. But Laurie was failing to fulfil his promise. If he was faced with an open goal, he would try to hammer the ball into the far top corner rather than just roll it safely in. If he could head a cross easily past the goalkeeper, he would try an overhead scissor kick. Of course he often missed, but when he scored in his own sensational way, he forgot about all the misses. Sadly, Dexter told me, the selectors didn’t. They knew he was a talent worthy of selection, but they couldn’t afford for him to waste what might be Hendon FC’s only opportunity to score in a tight match.

I later found out that Laurie later worked as a toolmaker at a big machine tool company in the Hendon area. I’d been telling the story to my father and he recognised Laurie as a man who worked in the company he ran. He checked out Laurie’s past and it turned out that I’d met Laurie when I worked there before going up to University t Imperial College.

The crowds loved Laurie too, when he was on target, but they began to boo him loudly when he wasn’t. Finally, Dexter told me, Hendon dropped him after he reacted badly to adverse comments from the manager. Fortunately for him, Laurie had a good friend outside the team who helped him to realise that what he loved most was playing for a winning team – much more important to him than scoring the occasional outrageous goal. Without the need to look for sensational opportunity, he found his concentration improved and with it his consistency.

Laurie’s new found success in reserve games quickly persuaded the manager to bring him back into the club team and the national manager started to notice how easy Laurie made the art of goal scoring. The national manager called him up for the England team and he rapidly became the regular winner that he always wanted for club and country.

He continued to try out his more sensational goal scoring techniques, but not in the course of a game. He tried them on the practice ground for his own pleasure and for the amusement of his friends – “you never know when they might come in handy and they keep me sharp”, he would say. But he knew that his real satisfaction came from winning.”

We finished off our quiet conversation talking about this and that and went our separate ways. A few weeks later, I heard from Alan. He told me that he’d started winning more and playing much more consistently. He even told me that he’d got over some of his eccentric play – he’d never described it that way before. He went on to suggest that maybe there was no need for us to meet up for our first golf psychology session as his problem had gone away. Thankfully, he had paid me up front and he’d got a good return on his investment. It seemed a shame to tell him that we’d already done the work, but I had to – to justify my fee.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting an example of another even more powerful kind of therapeutic metaphor: what’s known in NLP circles as a Nested Loop, so keep watching my Golf Hypnotist blog.

I just seem to keep coming across different versions of what I suspect are a series of articles about hypnosis as a secret weapon for golf and I disagree most strongly with that – now that’s a surprise coming from me, the Golf Hypnotist!

Well, I fully agree with the idea of golf hypnosis as a secret weapon for better golf and I support many of the author’s opening arguments. If he’d put his name in the article, I’d even go so far as thanking him here.

Anyway, here’s some of what he says that I agree with.

“Using hypnosis for golf can be your secret weapon on the course. Hypnosis directs your mental focus and harnesses the power of your other-than-conscious. Crystal-clear concentration under pressure is the secret of success of all the great pros….

The remarkable thing is that even though most golfers acknowledge that the game of golf is mainly a mental game almost no one does anything to improve their mental focus.”

He even goes on to say some nice things about Milton Erickson – the father of modern hypnosis and the model for much of NLP as well.

So what am I uncomfortable with then? Well, it’s the later suggestion that hypnosis can be used and the implication that it should be used in a negative way to somehow spoil your opponent’s game. Quoting another of the articles:

“It’s great to use hypnosis to improve your own game, but some people take it farther and, let’s say, ‘help’ the rest of the foursome by using hypnosis against them.

When someone uses hypnosis this way, an opponent who’s a superior golfer may find themselves somehow shanking the ball, having their drives slice into the rough, making poor club choices, deciding to try to drive the green when they shouldn’t, or making any number of other such mistakes.”

The article goes on too suggest:

“It’s up to you to decide the right and wrong of this, but a certain type of hypnosis does give someone the tools to influence their opponent’s state of mind in addition to their decisions.  Some say ‘All’s fair in love and war’.  Maybe that’s true in golf as well.”

For me this suggestion goes totally contrary to the spirit of golf and no different than suggesting that you actively seek to use hypnosis to distract or disturb your opponent’s play.  Apart from any moral consideration, that sort of behaviour is outlawed by Section 1 of the Rules of Golf.

A good example of Anchors in my own life comes from my late teenage years, when I went through a sad, lonely and confused phase. The feelings were strongest when I regularly walked along a sea wall on the East Coast quietly humming the latest Beatles record – Hey Jude. The whole repeated experience strongly anchored those memories to the song, the location, the feelings, the smell of the sea, the plants along the walk, the sounds of the boats, etc. Now 40 year’s later, the whole scene, the emotional feelings, all the smells, sounds, images and my state return whenever I experience one or more of those sensations. Sometimes it’s a mixed feeling, when one of the stimuli fires of another memory. If I hear the Hey Jude song, I get those sad feelings mixed with the pleasure of growing up in the 60’s and all those wonderful Beatles songs.

If these anchors can be set up automatically, as in the example above, I can set up anchors deliberately to trigger physiological and emotional states and behaviours – in myself and in others. All I have to do is to elicit the state and or behaviour that I want, amplify it and then anchor it clearly and precisely in as many representational systems as possible. Visual, Auditory and internal Kinaesthetic ones are best. Conversationally it’s unlikely that I can use olfactory and gustatory externally, unless it’s a wine or food tasting event.

Conversationally, whether in a one-on-one or group situation, I can use more or less any combination of clearly marked gesture, facial expression, word, phrase, tonality change, etc. to anchor my audience’s current state. Paul McKenna uses the word “Now!” spoken in a clear tonality with an exaggerated snap of the fingers of his left hand, out to his left side and level with his elbow, and combine with a noticeable dip of his knees. With physical gestures and actions, the location of the gesture is as important as the gesture itself.

At Paul’s training courses, each presenter has their own specific theme tune that booms out as they walk out to the stage at the beginning of their session. At the end of their session, they boost the audience crowd up to a crescendo and then anchor it by with the theme tune as the leave the stage. At the end of every lunch or coffee break, there is the usual hubbub of chatter and movement, but as soon as the theme tune starts, everybody changes state back to the crescendo and rushes back to their seat.

You may have noticed that stand-up comedians use different parts of the stage to anchor and later elicit specific reactions from the audience. If they move to a specific place and make the right gestures, the audience will laugh at whatever they say. They can move from slapstick to pathos simply by moving around the stage.

We don’t need to move around to anchor well conversationally; we just make the gesture parts of our anchors in consistent spatial locations around ourselves.

So what might I want to anchor conversationally? I might want anchors to let people know when I am being serious, sad, relaxed, focussed or elated. I might want to bring back a specific learning experience, such as a metaphor or story. I could use an anchor to stop an unhelpful action. There’s a story of John Grinder In fact, more or less any memory, behaviour or state that might help me to communicate better.

You can use anchors to stop unhelpful behaviours and states as well. There’s a story of John Grinder utilising a woman’s mild fear of snakes to control her repeated disruptive behaviour in a training course. He conversationally anchored her more focussed and interested states to a set of his eye movements, where he watched an imaginary snake wriggle its way across the floor towards her. Every time she looked distracted, he looked pointedly at her and then followed the imaginary snake.

Milton Erickson uses a conversational anchor for resourceful emotions of an old memory in the Monde case study in the book Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton Erickson Volume II – Transcript I. Erickson asks Monde to find a happy experience and she remembers when she was 2 years old and splashing in the water. Erickson this verbally and whenever he needs that state in therapy, he says with a particular tonality “2 year old Monde … splashing in the water.”

My “Control Panel”

In conversation and when presenting, it is useful to have a consistent personal set of anchors to set and trigger to elicit particular memories and states in the people I talk with. If I use the same ones for every situation, they will be easier to remember. Whenever I am in conversation with someone new, I can then look out for or elicit a desired state in the other person or people and anchor it in my normal way for that response.

My initial control panel of conversational anchors are for when I want people to be

• Amused – gently throwing my head up and back, while bringing my elbows in, back and up, smiling exaggeratedly with my lips closed and quietly chuckling to myself
• Focussed – moving the top of my body and head slightly up and forward, while bring my hands up and slightly clenching my fists with the palms vertical and markedly focussing my eyes on the audience and saying “Now!” gently
• Relaxed – slowly breathing out deeply, while bringing in a relaxed smile and saying/sighing “OK”
• Excited – lightly clenching my fists as I lift my hands upwards in front of me from the elbows, while slightly smiling, widening my eyes and saying “Yes!”
• Sad – slowly shrugging my shoulders in and down, dipping my head to my lift (their right), partially closing my eyes and dipping my forehead forwards while sighing quietly and saying a downwardly inflected “Huh!”
• Quick – bringing my elbows in to my side with my lower arms pointing forward and level, while gesturing up with my fingers/hands, nodding my head slightly and a bit quickly and saying “Right!”
• Slow – bringing my elbows in to my side with my lower arms pointing forward and level, while gesturing down with my fingers/hands, nodding my head slightly and a bit slowly and saying “Slow…” quietly and fading out
• Visual – looking upwards a few times while quietly saying “see!”
• Auditory – looking from side to side a few times while quietly saying “hear” or “here”
• Kinaesthetic – looking down to my left (their right) while rocking my stomach slightly from side to side once or twice while saying “mmm…” quietly and inflexed upward for good feelings and downward for less good ones