What makes the difference is that those consistently successful players combine those skills and knowledge with a controlled and measured level of concentration; while sticking to their routines.

What do I mean by Concentration?

Although a high level of concentration seems to be key to consistent success at the highest levels, there’s more than one way to concentrate. Some players, like Nick Faldo, felt the need to hold their concentration for complete rounds or even tournaments. That’s very hard on the nerves and probably one of the reasons that Nick now prefers to commentate rather than play top-level golf.

By way of contrast, Luke Donald is just as focussed when he’s planning and executing his shots, but between shots he looks much more relaxed and nonchalant between shots. Maybe that’s why he had the capacity to head the money lists on the PGA and European Tours in 2011.

Then there’s the story of European Tour player Phil Archer I wrote about in my book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf. Phil had a reputation for winning the pro-am events on the Wednesdays before the main tournaments and then missing the cut on the Fridays. In the tournament he tried to concentrate like a Nick Faldo, while in the pro-am he’d focus, between concentrating briefly on his own shots, on helping his amateur partners enjoy their day. I bet they thought he was acting cool when they were playing with him! When he started to be nonchalant between shots in the main tournament, he started to win.

How do I become Nonchalant?

The best advice is to focus most of your efforts on consistently following your routines and only really concentrate on the shot in hand. Between shots, you can enjoy yourself and be as nonchalant as you possibly can. There’s really nothing you can do constructively between shots, other than simply relax and enjoy the experience. You can use the “Concentration on the Zone” and “The Playing Zone” hypnosis sessions from my Golf in the Playing Zone programme to help with that.

You can also use “Finger Breathing” to help you relax between shots. You can read about the technique and download a recording of it at http://ezine.golf-hypnotist.com/finger-breathing/.

Remember to keep an eye out for nonchalance on the golf course, especially from the top players. If you were watching Robert Rock winning the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Robert may have been nervous, but he still looked nonchalant as he enjoyed the experience of playing in the final group on Sunday with Tiger Woods.

Even with their well polished mechanics and a good understanding of ball flight physics, the top players still hit a less than perfect shot every now and then. Even if they don’t actually hit a bad shot, the course and conditions and outside agencies can turn a good shot into a bad one. We even have a term for that in golf – “Rub of the Green”.

So what else do the top players do when they experience one or more bad or unlucky shots? Well, I was listening to Rory McIlroy giving a clinic to a large group of young players at the Grand Final of the Faldo Series. Someone asked, to a ripple of laughter, “If you can’t stop making bogeys, how do you bounce back on the next hole?”

The gist of Rory’s reply was, “If you’ve just made a bogey on the 5^th green, you can’t walk on to the 6^th tee going ‘I have to make a birdie because I bogeyed the last’, you have to stick to the process”. He went on to say, “You’re not thinking about bogeys or birdies, all you’re thinking about is the shot at hand and just going through your processes, if you do all these things right, your score at the end of it will take care of itself”.

Focus on the shot in hand

So, in striving for perfection, you need to focus on the shot in hand, and make use of your routines or processes, especially your post shot routine, regardless of what went before. Remember that each shot you play just counts for one shot on the scorecard. And it’s equally important, regardless of whether it’s for a birdie or a bogey. That’s the secret of Winning Golf.

One of the best exponents of this approach is Luke Donald. Yes, I know I’m biased, because he’s a member of my club and I can remember giving him shots in matchplay!

Well what better way to finish my last blog of 2011 than with a reference to Luke Donald. His approach to perfect golf has driven him to be number one in the world and to top the money lists on the European and PGA Tours. What more can I say?

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.

Before I answer his question, here’s a bit of background to that round back in the 1970′s when I was regularly competing as an amateur in national events.

The Hertfordshire Stag, at Moor Park, was the premier open amateur competition in the county, and I was drawn to play with someone I’d never played with before and such was my focus, I didn’t take in his name, even when we exchanged scorecards. However, I was intrigued to be playing in front of a small gallery. That wasn’t something that normally happened to me.

Anyway, I felt I was playing well at the time and this was reflected in the fact that throughout both rounds, I seemed to strike the ball much better than my playing partner on every shot and putt. In fact, he commented on it a number of times. However, when we added up the scores at the end of each round, I was a couple of shots over par and back in the pack, while he was 3 or 4 shots under par and won the event, as I recall! I later found out more about Nick Faldo, my mystery playing partner, when he turned professional a couple of months later – the rest is history, as they say.

Looking back, what I remember most of all, is sitting in my car for a long time at the end of the day puzzling over how he was playing winning golf while I was playing better golf technically and coming nowhere near winning.

So how did I respond to my client’s question about the difference between Nick and me that day?

Well, you know, I never did work out what made the difference between us that day. It was a long time later that I got deeply into golf psychology, so the details of the shots he played aren’t that clear to me now. However, I suspect it was that he believed he could deliver on his intentions, while I was less sure of myself. Maybe it would have been different if I’d been listening back then to my favourite Winning Golf track, Make the Most of Your Game!

I think Nick’s attitude that day was very similar to that of Tiger Woods when he’s at his best. In the introduction track of my Own the Putting Green programme, I talk about that amazing horseshoe chip that Tiger Woods holed on the 16th at the Masters a few years ago. Even with all his talent, I’m sure he didn’t honestly expect to hole it, but I suspect that he did intend to and believed he could. That’s more than enough direction for the unconscious instinctive mind to work on, unhindered by doubt.

The Winning Golf, Own the Putting Green, and Overcome the Yips golf hypnosis programmes are all available from the Golf Hypnotist Store.

Self talk really comes into its own when we are internally analysing and evaluating complex choices in our lives. A good example is when you are starting your pre-shot routine and deciding on the type of shot you’re going to play. Have you ever had one voice in your head proposing an ambitious shot with a driver and another one encouraging you to make a more conservative shot with an iron? Don’t worry about it. It’s perfectly normal and unlikely to be a symptom of schizophrenia!

Now, I’ve often written about the concept that whatever we consciously think about our unconscious mind does it’s best to deliver. And self-talk is the most powerful and influential mechanism for conscious thought. So if you talk to yourself about the bunker you’re trying to avoid, rather than the green you should be aiming to hit, your unconscious is likely to put you in the bunker! So it’s important to think and talk to yourself positively about your target and your desired shot – the one you visualised earlier, perhaps.

What you say to yourself after you hit your shot is just as important as what you say when you’re hitting the shot. Internal communication has a really significant impact on your mood, attitude and effectiveness, and also on those around you. Berating yourself angrily is only going to make you feel bad. It also means that you’re likely to relive that same feeling the next time you have a similar shot to play and consequently hit an equally bad shot. It’s important to learn from a bad shot, as long as you do it positively and release it to the past where it can’t hurt you. I really love Nick Faldo’s TV commentary about Tiger Woods "Hitting the Reset Button" after a bad shot during the Tour Championship.

Positive self-talk is even better for you than negative self talk is bad for you. So talk positively to yourself about the shot you’re about to play. One of the best ways to do this is to talk to yourself about the shot you want to make, visualise your target and the shot vividly and think about your visualised shot as you hit the ball. It’s difficult to allow negative self-talk to enter your head when you’re focussing completely on something positive.

The same applies to your post shot routine, especially after you’ve hit a good shot. Relish your good shots, feel really good about them, review them vividly in your mind and tell yourself how good they are. That way, you’ll feel really good the next time you have a similar shot.

Now, I think you’ll agree that positive self-talk is what you’re looking for and the only person you can rely on to say those positive things is you.

But there’s a problem. How do you imagine hitting shots from difficult lies if you’re playing an imaginary round? Surely you’d have to hit bad imaginary shots in order to get into the difficult positions. Wouldn’t that be bad golf psychology?

When you play golf for real, you’ll probably hit the odd bad shot now and then. Hopefully, you’re already using a good post-shot routine, so you’ll be able to learn from the bad shot and release it to the past. It can’t hurt you there. Maybe you could use the "Reset Button" technique Nick Faldo spoke of when commentating on Tiger Woods the other week.

You may remember my earlier article about mental golf practice and recall the story about an American Major, James Nesmeth. He practiced golf in his mind for much of the seven year’s he spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Every day, he played 18 holes of golf in his mind. He imagined everything in vivid detail from the country club he was playing at to the smell of freshly cut grass in the summertime. He would imagine the grip of the clubs and practice his swing mentally many times until he perfected it. In reality, he had no place to go, so he spent four hours a day on the course in his mind never leaving any detail out. When he was released from prison and returned home, he played his first real game of golf after 7 years, he scored 74!

Having said all that, you wouldn’t want to see yourself hitting bad shots in your imaginary round, now would you? That would be counterproductive and defeat much of the purpose of practicing with the secrets of hypnotic golf.

So how do you get the opportunity to hit some shots from bad lies and difficult positions around the course without playing the imaginary bad shots that get them there? Well, one way would be to just imagine walking round the course dropping the ball in all those difficult positions. Unfortunately that wouldn’t be an actual round of golf and you’d have to unconsciously take responsibility for deciding where might have hit bad shots to. There has to be a better way.

Well, there is a better way. How about playing some of those imaginary rounds in golf hypnosis as foursomes, playing alternate shots with an imaginary partner? You could choose a partner who is a less than consistent player. It could be someone you know that hits a lot of bad shot or just an imaginary partner. That way you’ll get to play all sorts of difficult shots, without taking any conscious or unconscious responsibility for the bad shots. After all, you didn’t play them that partner of yours did. What’s better is that you don’t need to worry about his golf, as you’ll never play with him in real life!

Now, when you’re doing this mental practice, remember to visualise the whole process of playing golf, including your pre-shot routine. And remember to imagine all the usual shot planning, lots of visualisation and comfortable practice swings, before stepping into the shot and hitting it quickly after just one last look at the target. Finally, remember to watch the shot fly and/or roll to a finish, appreciate the good shot and consign it to your memory – just like you would a good shot on the course.

I’m assuming that you don’t hit bad shots in your head, so there’s no need to learn from them and release them to the past before you hit Nick’s "Reset Button."

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.

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!

There’s absolutely no doubt that this weekend and so many times before in majors Greg Norman has struck the ball brilliantly and enjoyed a great short game, it just seems that he’s missed out on the mental side of the game, especially in the closing holes. As far as I can recall, Greg has never worked with a golf psychologist and sadly it shows at times like these. If he had Tiger’s training and could use golf psychology and self hypnosis at these critical times, just imagine how many majors he would have won by now.

Coming back to the venue, Sir Michael Bonallack, one of the UK’s and possibly the world’s finest amateur golfers of all time and secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews for 15 years, describes Sunningdale very aptly on the welcome page of the club’s website:

“All that one would hope to find in the ideal golf club is in abundance at Sunningdale. Two magnificently conditioned courses of superb design and so pleasing to the eye, a clubhouse which provides members and visitors with an unforgettable experience of pampered comfort, accompanied by exceptional food and wine, a staff that anticipates and provides for the members’ wishes, no matter how eccentric they may be, a first class professional’s shop and competent instruction on hand, the most knowledgeable caddies in the game and the finest halfway house I know.”

My first memory of playing at Sunningdale was in the early 1970s when I played in an event there run by The Plus Four Society an elite group of golfers sponsored by the Surrey Golf Union with membership restricted to handicaps of 4 and less under the old handicapping system. Thankfully, I can’t remember much about my rounds that day, but I do remember one of my fellow golfers playing both courses of the championship tees in 68 for a total of 136. It must have really felt like he was being cheated when his plus 2 handicap was added back to his score and he ended up with a net 140 for the handicap event. It certainly seemed so unfair to me, as someone playing off 2 handicap and desperately needing both my shots! Unlike today, there were very few players of plus 2 in those days. I was intrigued to see that same man playing in the Senior Open Championship there last week and still as an amateur.

I really enjoyed watching so many of my golfing heroes out there playing just as well as I remembered back in their heydays. People in their 50s and 60s playing that standard of golf is an inspiration to people like me of a similar age and, like last week at the Open, it reminded me that I really can’t use my age as an excuse for playing less golf.

I found it difficult to choose who to follow and who I really wanted to win and it came down to a choice of Greg Norman and Tom Watson. They are both players I admire and both have played remarkable golf in major championships in the last two years. I felt sorry that Tom again missed out after coming so close at the Open. However the person I really wanted to win was Greg Norman. Although Greg has won the Open twice before, I hadn’t realised how many times he had slipped up in the last round of majors. I remember of course his pushed long iron on the final hole of the Masters in 1986 when a par would have got him into the playoff and his turning a six shot lead in the last round there ten year’s later into a 5 shot defeat by Nick Faldo.

When I checked the records, it turned out that Greg had just had those two Open victories out of 23 majors where he finished in the top 6. In addition he came second in 8 of those majors and third in 4 more. So he clearly has a problem finishing off his rounds.

So what happened last weekend, well Greg was striking the ball awesomely well and his shots were going long and straight. Despite dropping a few shots, that you’d expect from a man who plays so little competitive golf, his short game was just amazing. He was probably playing as well as he played in all those top-six finishes in majors. But when he got to the 16th on Sunday, needing one more birdie to tie the lead or two to win outright, he pushed his drive way right just like he had hit that long-iron back at the Masters in 1986. He made a miraculous recovery from deep in the trees and hit his third fairly close to the pin, he was out of it and three putted. He was still hitting the ball well on 17 and 18, but he was a defeated man.

Here’s wishing Greg Norman and all my other golfing heroes every success at the US Seniors Open this coming weekend.

Now, whatever Ian does in today’s second round doesn’t matter, he’s made it back to the game he loves – and in a classy way. That said, seeing him make the cut and have a good result at the weekend will be wonderful for him, and the world of golf. I’ll be glued to the television this evening to give Ian my support.

Come on Nick Faldo; don’t let Ian beat you in the comeback stakes. We like to hear you both as commentators, but we’d much rather hear your clubs do the talking.