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.

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?

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”.

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.

Now I’m sure that like the rest of us, you’re experiencing all sorts of emotions every minute of every day of your life. It’s a key element of living whether we are playing golf or doing something less important.

So what are these emotions I’m talking about? Well, as the article says, we all see different ones, but the consensus seems to include what psychologists apparently call the Big Six – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise and Disgust. Well they all crop up on a regular basis in golf, now don’t they? And they all appear either as desires or problems with many of the people who seek help from golf psychologists. My new book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf has chapters directly devoted to three of them – Enjoying your Golf; Fear of Golfing Failure and Success; and Anger Management in Golf.

More indirectly, I guess that Sadness, Surprise and Disgust are also addressed in the chapters on Positive Framing on the Golf Course; Post-Shot Routines: Planning your Shot, State Management in Golf; and Protection from Covert Hypnosis.

So what about the Five emotions you never knew you had? Well, according to New Scientist, these are Elevation, Interest, Gratitude, Pride and Confusion. You may not be surprised to hear that these fit in well with golf psychology as well.

Elevation, the uplifting emotion, is something we feel when we are inspired and motivated. In fact we have many expressions for it in our language like “things are looking up”. In golf psychology, I relate it to the concept of managing our physiology between shots. As I describe in the chapter on Physiology and Between Shots, if we walk the fairways with our head held high, we feel uplifted and positive. As a result, we play better golf.

Curiosity is one of the key things that make us human. It’s also the key element to planning our shots – an essential part of our pre-shot routines. I know that I’m always talking about trusting your unconscious mind for better golf. However, the conscious mind with its analytical curiosity has a part to play as well.

What about Gratitude? Isn’t that just the way we feel about a good shot? Well, that’s true, but there’s more to it than just that. As I describe in Positive Framing on the Golf Course, you can feel a lot better about a bad lie on the golf course if you think about how much worse it could have been. Being grateful for small mercies can have a very positive effect on your golf.

Pride can be a two edge sword – the New Scientist article describes it as the emotion with two faces. However, feeling proud about what happens on the golf course is what many of us play for. There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud of a good drive or breaking 90, 80 or even 70 – whatever level you aspire to. You can store that pride as a resource when using NLP Anchoring for Better Golf.

That leaves us with the most enigmatic of the five – Confusion. Surely there’s nothing positive to say about that, Andrew! Well perhaps I should leave that one to Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP, to describe why even confusion is a positive emotion for golf and life.

“Confusion is the doorway to reorganizing your perceptions and learning something new. If you were never confused, that would mean that everything that happened to you fit your expectations, your model of the world, perfectly. Life would simply be one boring, repetitive experience after another.”

Did I happen to mention anywhere that my long awaited book The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf is now available in paperback and e-book format from lulu.com? And remember that you can download the “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis recording, that goes with chapter 12, free when you sign up for my free Ezine.

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.

You may remember my recent article about mental foursomes practice with golf hypnosis the other week. Now shortly after writing that I was watching a rerun on television of a recent US PGA Tour event and enjoying the overhead pictures from the blimp, when I had a sudden flash of inspiration. Why not visualise my shots in 3D and incorporate an overhead shot of how I visualised the shot I was about to play. It sounded difficult until I realised that if I can see it on TV, then surely I can visualise it. After all, I already had the overhead view on the course planner, so why couldn’t I incorporate it in my pre-shot routine visualisation and mental golf practice.

So, later that evening I took myself into a light trance using self-hypnosis and played an imaginary round of golf at Beaconsfield, my home course. I visualised playing every hole and every shot in 3D, even the putts. It worked great and I couldn’t wait to take the idea to the course. That Friday, I got the chance to use it in my pre-shot visualisation on the real course and it worked amazingly well. Initially I found that I got the best results from visualising the shot normally, as a picture in 2D, and then "seeing" it again as if from a blimp, just as I stepped into the shot. By the time I’d played a few holes, visualising the shot in 3D just became a natural part of my routine.

What surprised me most was that it gives me so much more confidence, especially when hitting over a hazard or trees to my target. Instead of seeing the trees or hazards and estimating how far to hit past them, I’m finding myself seeing the whole shot from above. I’m getting a much clearer idea of the shot I’m playing and that’s taking away a lot of the normal doubt I normally have when playing these shots.

Vivid visualisation, using all the senses, is an essential part of the pre-shot routine you should be using when physically playing golf. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you about what Jack Nicklaus says about how he never played a shot without having first watched himself execute the swing perfectly and seen the ball flying or rolling to his target before finishing up, "sitting there and shining white on the bright green grass."

So try this out when you’re next out playing on the course and on the practice ground, especially when you’re practicing your golf in your minds eye. Maybe you’ll see a new low score up on the leader board – in 3D.

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.