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.

Now, my major concern about swing thoughts and keys is not so much about their content, but rather about when you think of them. Some would argue that there’s no place for them at all during a round of golf and they should be confined to the practice ground. While I broadly agree with this, I feel it’s more important to eliminate conscious thoughts about the swing once you step in to address the ball.

There are parts of a golfer’s routine that require conscious though and there are parts where it’s better to trust your unconscious learned skills to actually hit the ball. When you first learned to drive a car, you had to think about everything you had to do. As a result, you were overwhelmed, perhaps over self-aware, and it was difficult to drive smoothly. Now you know how to drive, you only consciously need to think about things like where you want to go, when you have to get there and have you got enough fuel – your pre-driving routine. The actual driving is performed as naturally and unconsciously as breathing or signing your name. Try copying your signature and you’ll understand how much self-awareness gets in the way.

Although I generally don’t’ interfere with the intricate details of an individual client’s routines, I do encourage them to split their routine into four parts:

• Pre-Shot Routine – where you consciously concentrate on preparing, planning and imagining the shot you want to play
• Rehearsal swing – where you internalise the feel of the shot you imagine
• Shot Routine – where you unconsciously take your stance, have one final look at the hole and hit the ball instinctively
• Post-Shot Routine – where you consciously learn from the shot and either celebrate it or release it to the past where it can’t hurt you.

The only place for swing keys is in the first and possibly second parts, where the physical “feeling” you’re working on can easily be incorporated into the way you plan to play the shot. Once you’ve internalised that feeling in the rehearsal swing, then you can simply step in to the shot and trust your unconscious to deliver that feeling.

Are Golfing Objectives the same as Swing Keys?

Golfers often talk about their objectives for a round and their swing thoughts and keys. For me, these are different. Your objective is generally about “what” you want to achieve and a swing key is more related to “how” you’re going to make it happen. Using the analogy of driving a car, the “what” is the conscious choice of where you want to go, when you want to get there and perhaps the route you plan to take. The “how” is largely dictated by your unconscious learned ability to drive a car.

In golf terms the objective should be decided in the Pre-Shot Routine. It’s what you see the pros discussing with their caddies. One they’ve agreed on the nature of the shot, the caddy steps back and the pro takes a rehearsal swing or two, to get the feel of the shot, and then hits it. For top golfers like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, it only takes 11 seconds to hit the ball from the moment the caddy steps back. That doesn’t leave much time for conscious thought about swing keys, or anything else for that matter. Everything in the Shot Routine is pretty much automatic, including any forward press. That’s just part of the feel of the shot.

So why are some keys more appealing to certain golfers?

This was something that used to catch me out when I first started doing golf psychology, especially using NLP. Almost every NLP technique I was originally taught was based around getting people to visualise – to see pictures in their mind’s eye. The problem was that many of my clients couldn’t consciously “see” those pictures that clearly and neither could I see mine.

What I eventually learned was that we all experience the world through our five senses of sight, sound, feeling, taste and smell. We also code our memories using those five senses. That’s why we can hear a tune or smell a particular aroma and be transported back to some significant past event and experience all the feelings we had at the time. How many couples have “our song”?

More importantly, I also learned that people have their own personal unconscious preferences for the sense they use the most. If you listen to a number of people describing the same event, some will describe mainly in terms of what they saw, some in terms of the sounds or words and others in terms of feelings. How many times have you heard someone saying things like, “I see what you are saying” or “that picture makes me feel bad”? Personally, I tend to use feeling words, perhaps that’s not surprising for a therapist and it’s consistent with the fact that I “can’t” consciously see pictures in my mind. I must see them unconsciously, or I wouldn’t recognise people, places and things.

When working with a client, I now do my best to pay attention to the sensory words that people use in conversation and phrase my own words and techniques to match theirs. If I’m talking to a group of people, it’s more difficult. That’s when I “try” to use seeing, hearing and feeling expressions. If I’m presenting, I make sure my slides include pictures as well as words and I try to use my body to convey feelings.

Now, I don’t think I have to tell you or any experienced golfer about the benefits of gradually warming up your body before every round of golf. However, I do think you need to do something to “warm up” your golfing mind at the same time. Exploring what types of shot are working well for you today, will also help your scoring. Remember, this is a time to learn about making the most of the game you’ve brought to the course, not a time to fix faults or make swing changes.

This is why I named the final hypnosis track of my Winning Golf hypnosis programme, “Making the Most of Your Game”. Perhaps I should have added the word today at the end because with so many variables in golf, our game often seems to change so much from day to day. Have you ever seen hit every shot on the practice tee with a fade and then try in vain to draw their first approach shot on the course. They probably try again on the next hole as well and when that still doesn’t work, they start making changes to their swing!

One of the best ways of “warming up” your mind before a round is to make every shot on the practice tee count. That means picking the shot you want to hit and then following your pre-shot, shot and, most importantly, post-shot routines for every shot – just like you do on the course.

Remember that your post-shot routine includes learning from every shot. By the end of your warm up session, you should have a good idea of the game you’ve brought with you to the course – the shots you are capable of hitting well today. You may also get some other feedback about things like how far the ball will travel today.

In my next Golf Hypnotist blog post, I’ll continue this series on Best Practice for Better Golf with part 3, “Best General Practice for Better Golf”.

How do you make the most of extra time to practice your golf? What’s the best way to practice for better golf? Those are questions a lot of my clients have been asking me in recent weeks. For some it’s the long summer evenings, for others it’s holiday time and, for a lucky few, it’s about devoting themselves to playing golf full time.

Whatever your reason, one of the first things to consider is what form of practice will help you the most. Remember that practice doesn’t just have to be confined to beating balls on the range. What about

• working on your swing – perhaps after a session with a coach
• warming up before a round – loosening up and seeing what works today
• general practice between rounds
• mental practice – away from the golf course
• practice rounds before a competition – especially away from home.

So starting in this post with Best Practice for Better Golf Swing Change, I’d like to start by suggesting you keep your swing change practice completely separate from the other types of practice and especially from your golf on the course. The last thing you want, when you are playing, warming up and rehearsing your golf, is to think consciously about your swing. It’s so much better to be thinking about how well you can score with your current swing when you’re confidently following your routines and trusting your natural ability.

When you are working on a swing change on the range, there are two key things to remember. Firstly, treat every practice shot as if it were a real shot in a round of golf. That means going through your routines and only consciously thinking about the swing changes during the pre-shot planning and rehearsal swing elements. Once you get the feeling you are looking for, just step into your shot routine and begin trusting your unconscious mind to integrate the swing changes.

Secondly, after every three shots you hit while concentrating on your swing change, select another club and hit three shots the way you would on the golf course. That means following your normal routines without thinking about the swing change. With your natural ability, you can make any swing change work to some degree after three practice shots. By switching back to your normal routines for a few shots, you give your unconscious mind the chance to integrate the new techniques into your natural game. This will help you to practice for your next round while at the same time working on your swing changes.

You can also work very effectively on your swing, in the comfort of your own home or anywhere else for that matter, using hypnosis techniques. That’s why I developed my hypnosis audio programme for Better Golf with Less Practice.

In my next Golf Hypnotist blog post, I’ll continue this series on Best Practice for Better Golf with part 2, “Warming Up to Winning Golf”.

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.

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 in NLP and golf hypnosis, we have many ways of managing a person’s fears. If it’s a full blown phobia, we can deal with that easily. If it’s a habit or belief that’s blown out of all proportion, we can help there too using techniques like the NLP Swish Pattern. If we need a skill that someone else has we can use modelling and Richard Bandler’s "Stealing a Skill" technique. If the fear is doubt related and, as we might say colloquially, there’s a part of me that wants to play a risky shot and another part that’s saying it’s too dangerous, then we’ve got the NLP Visual Squash parts integration technique. And there are many more NLP tools we can use before we even start looking at golf hypnosis.

So why not use one of these techniques to manage or eliminate fear? Well, you can use these techniques and if they are really deep-seated fears, you may need them. But what about nipping the fears in the bud, so that we don’t have to remember them every time we come to play a similar shot? After all, didn’t I read somewhere that Tiger Woods says about hitting bad shots, "I hit it and forget it?" You can’t go back in time and replay a shot, so just forget it and move on." If there’s a way to forget our bad shots, then surely we don’t need to fear them.

Now that reminds me of a story I’ve used many times before about Jack Nicklaus genuinely only remembering the putts he holed, never the ones he missed. So has Jack ever missed from inside of six feet on the last hole of a major? Of course he has! Does he remember it? Not a chance. And do you think he cares that he can’t remember? Some people would probably say that Jack is deluded in his thinking, that it is not based on reality. Well, we all create our own realities and Jack’s seem pretty good to me! You can read the full story in my earlier article entitled Better Putting in your Golf Mind with a little help from Jack Nicklaus.

So where is all this going, Andrew, I hear you ask. Well, we hear and read a lot about pre-shot routines and most of the people I know now use them diligently. But few if any use any sort of post-shot routine. They usually just replace any divot, put the club back in the bag – sometimes firmly, sometimes gently – and either, walk forward happily or trudge forward miserably. Of course some rant and rave, but we’ll ignore those for now – seems like good advice to me.

If you react positively after hitting a golf shot, your brain produces lots of happy chemicals and associates those good feelings to the shot you’ve just hit and to the hole you’ve just played. The next time you play that hole or a similar shot, you have the opportunity to unconsciously remember that feeling and the associated result. In NLP we call this anchoring. Something similar happens if you react badly after hitting a shot and that bad shot can get anchored too. So my recommendation is to really enjoy your good shots – you want to remember them – and release the bad shots to the past without any emotion, like someone else hit that bad shot. You can’t go back in time and replay a shot, so just forget it and move on.

Now I don’t like prescribing detailed pre-shot routines to people as it is far better to develop your own one from what works best for you. I think the same applies to a post shot routine, so I’ll just list these few simple pointers:

1. Identify a specific trigger for the post-shot routine, like seeing the ball stop moving
2. If it’s a good shot, then really feel good and replay the shot in your mind just as it felt when you hit it
3. If it’s not a shot to remember, then don’t react at all and just see it briefly as if you were watching someone else play the shot
4. Good or bad, consciously release the shot to the past and relax as you start walking forward to the next shot.