Now one of the first things I learned in golf psychology was that "What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves" to quote Robert Anton Wilson in his famous book about how the mind works, Prometheus Rising. In hypnosis terms this means that whatever we consciously think about we unconsciously make happen. In simple terms, if we consciously think about an ice-cream we unconsciously decide we want one and instinctively begin to taste one. If you’re driving on a motorway and someone draws your conscious attention to something way off to the right, you may suddenly notice yourself unconsciously steering in that direction.

Have you ever noticed how if you tell someone to not do something accidentally, that they automatically seem to do it anyway? This is especially true with children, so if you say to a child, "don’t spill your milk", then don’t be surprised if they to do just that. Contrary to what some believe, children don’t do this out of spite, it’s just what you made them consciously think about.

So what’s all this got to do with the fear of hitting a bad shot then Andrew? Well, you have to consciously think the bunker you don’t want to go in to fear going in it. The same goes for your fear of hitting a shank or yipping a putt. But, I hear you say, I make a point of thinking to myself "don’t hit it in the bunker" rather than just thinking about the bunker. Well, it makes no difference to the outcome, because you have to think of a thing in order to not do it. If I say don’t think of a blue elephant, you have to imagine a blue elephant to know what I’m talking about. The same goes for thinking of not hitting the ball into the bunker. If that’s in your head when you hit the ball, then you’ll unconsciously do your best to it there.

I’ve hear Paul McKenna tell a good story about this. He had a top golfer, one who’d already won major championships, come to him for help. The golfer explained that he was consistently hitting shots into bunkers and not just any bunkers. These were the bunkers he specifically wanted to avoid and he wasn’t just rolling into them, his ball was landing right in the middle of them. Paul watched him play a few holes then gave him a simple verbal instruction to follow for the next few holes. Amazingly, the champion golfer started hitting almost every shot just where he wanted to. So what did Paul say to him? He told him to decide on where he wanted to land the ball on each shot and then focus on not hitting the ball there. He was now consciously thinking about his target, not the bunkers.

So next time you’re out playing golf and you start saying to yourself "don’t go in that bunker", "don’t shank this shot" or something similar. Then compensate for your fear by stopping and rethinking your target taking into account whatever you’d like to avoid. Now focus your conscious mind on that new target before handing over control to your unconscious golf mind to hit the shot. For a more positive slant on all this, have a look at my earlier blog article entitled Focus your golf mind on your target not the hazard for better golf scores.

So moving from the balance of my life to the balance of the golf swing, I was intrigued to read recently about how many people view this as a key element of a successful golf swing. Now you know that I never comment on the mechanics of the swing as I’m neither a golf professional nor a swing coach. However, I do believe that balance is a key component of golf psychology and that psychological balance contributes significantly to balance in the golf mind and the golf swing. It also works wonders for your putting stroke.

When I was first studying NLP, Paul McKenna got us to do an exercise that he explained was based to some extent on Aikido. He asked for a volunteer and got her to just stand in an upright, relaxed posture and then to focus her mind on the audience. He then gently pushed her sideways with his hand against the outside of her shoulder. We saw how easily Paul caused her to sway off balance with just a light push.

Paul then asked the volunteer to focus all her attention on a point about two inches below her navel. Paul explained that this is known in Aikido as the ‘hara’ – the location of a person’s spirit and their centre of mass. He then repeated the push on her shoulder, but this time he couldn’t budge her, however hard he pushed. I was particularly surprised that the volunteer remained calm and relaxed despite Paul’s inability to shove her off balance. Paul then split the audience into pairs and I was able to confirm the experience for myself by working with someone much smaller than me. Despite his frailty, I couldn’t easily budge him when he focussed on his hara.

So what’s does all this have to do with golf, I hear you say. Well, just try it the next time you are out practicing. I did and I found that focussing on my hara when hitting a shot seemed to smooth out my swing and massively improve my balance. Let me know what it does for you.

Every week, Ellie posts a standard questionnaire based interview with a hypnotist somewhere in the world and last week, it was my turn to provide the answers for "10 Questions with Andrew Fogg." As her questions are quite direct, my answers go well beyond the information on the About the Golf Hypnotist page on my website and I felt it appropriate to share it with you here.

10 Questions with Andrew Fogg

1. Are you a full time hypnotist, a part-time hypnotist, a professional who incorporates hypnotism occasionally in your other practice, or are you a hobbyist?

I’m a full-time hypnotist focussing on building my golf psychology business. I just love applying hypnosis, NLP, EFT and other mind techniques to help my clients get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf.

In addition to the golf psychology, I practice with a wide range of clients as a clinical hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner.

2. Do you specialize in any type of hypnotism?

I generally use a mixture of hypnosis and NLP techniques to match the emerging needs of my clients. In many cases I teach my clients to use basic self-hypnosis between sessions, as I believe that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. To that end, I’m also licensed to teach Adam Eason’s two-day Secrets of Self Hypnosis seminar.

Although interactive hypnosis sessions are my preferred working method, I also recognise that great value can be achieved using golf hypnosis recordings. I am currently developing a number of these recordings to accompany my forthcoming book. “The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf” and the first golf hypnosis audio recordings, “Your Own Virtual Caddy” is available free when you sign up for my Golf Hypnotist Ezine.

3. Is there any form of hypnotism that you do not practice and why (i.e. entertainment, past-life regression, pain management)?

I’m not comfortable doing past life regression with clients as it’s an area I haven’t made up my mind about yet. If I’m not comfortable, then it wouldn’t be professional or congruent for me to do it with a client.

4. Do you use self-hypnosis regularly in your life? If so, how?

All the time! I believe trance is a powerful tool in my life and provides access to all my unconscious resources. I’m a firm believer that a good hypnotist leads the client into trance by going into trance first. I find that my unconscious mind comes up with the best and most appropriate techniques to help the client find the solution to their problems or desires.

I also use self-hypnosis as a tool to help me through many difficult situations and to get the best out of some of the better ones. I just count to seven and I’m there… thanks Adam.

5. Describe your hypnotism office or work setting.

As a golf hypnotist, I work wherever it’s most appropriate to the clients needs. This can include playing golf with the client, working with them during a practice round, on the putting green, on the driving range or in a quiet corner of a golf clubhouse. I also work from consulting rooms, at the client’s home or on the telephone.

6. Describe a typical day in your life.

Currently, I’m a one-man band, so I do everything from hypnosis, which I like, through writing blogs, newsletters, books and making recordings, which I sort of like, to running the business side which I like least. The good thing is that I like them all to some degree, the difficulty is striking the balance.

7. Where did you get your training in hypnotism and are you certified by any organization?

I first got interested in NLP as a means of becoming more consistent in the most important areas of my life: my family interactions, my golf performance and my work – in that order! I did my NLP Practitioner and Hypnotic Practitioner training with Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna. As I got more interested in helping other people with these wonderful tools, I completed my NLP Master Practitioner certification with the same team.

Even with all the NLP training, I didn’t feel that I had the full complement of skills to work with clients and found the solution in the Hypnotherapy Diploma Course run by Adam Eason, the world renowned hypnotherapist, trainer and best-selling author.

8. What is the most fabulous hypnotism technique you use or prefer?

Now this is a difficult one. I think that the hypnosis technique that works best for the client in front of me is the most fabulous technique of the moment and I don’t consciously know why I chose it.

If you really pushed me, I’d have to go for a combination of the “As If “ or “Pretend” Frame with a bit of timeline work. I get the client to vividly imagine what their desired future would be like, and then get them travel back down their timeline to the present time unconsciously remembering how they achieved their imagined future. I don’t want their conscious mind to remember, otherwise it’ll say, “I could never do that.” This has helped clients achieve unbelievable results.

9. What was the worse moment you ever experienced in a hypnotism setting that ended up being a valuable learning experience?

One of my Diploma Course case study clients wanted me to help him become a non-smoker and I spent hours preparing a lengthy hypnosis script that I proceeded to read to him. Half way through I realised that I had written the script on the assumption he had started smoking as a teenager when in fact he started in his mid 20’s to help him focus on his studies. I had to dump the script and trust my unconscious to get me through. It did, it worked and I haven’t used a script since.

10. Do you have any words of advice to potential clients or other hypnotists that you would like to share?

The most important thing for any client is to find a hypnotist you feel comfortable with and can trust. I’d also recommend avoiding hypnotists that use prepared scripts for their work or start out saying they know just what you need. These people are unlikely to have the flexibility to help you to get to the root of your issue quickly and easily.

I’m still learning so much about hypnosis that I’m hesitant to advise other hypnotists. However, the key thing would be to lead your client into hypnosis and let your unconscious guide you.

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