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?

The older they get, the more golfers tend to forget how easy putting really is. They also forget how good they used to putt when they were younger and more carefree. You often hear the golf pundits on television talking about how some or other up and coming young professional hasn’t yet learned how difficult putting really is. They sometimes go on to talk about how the accumulation of years of missed putts slowly frazzles the nerves and undermines the confidence of the older and more experienced golfers. Maybe that’s how they justify their own inability to maintain their competitiveness on the tour. It’s small wonder that they’re now commentating rather than playing.

I work regularly with an American Senior Professional Golfer and the first time we met was in a practice round for the British Senior Open Championship. He explained that he couldn’t read greens very well. It was a major problem for him and put unnecessary added pressure on the rest of his game.

After walking a few holes with him in his final practice round, I noticed that there was a little white cross painted on each of the greens. I guessed that these were to show the greens staff where to cut the holes on the first round of the tournament, the next day. So I suggested to my client that it would be worth rolling a few balls to these marks to get the feel of these pin positions. As he’d been practicing with several balls and to save time, I suggested that he walked in a 20 foot circle around these “holes” and rolled a few balls by hand to them. It was a lot quicker than putting them, as he didn’t bother to line them up.

I kept quiet for the first few greens where he tried this and just let him do this without much conscious thought. Then I pointed out to him that around 40 percent of the balls he’d rolled this way would have gone in the hole and the rest had finished within 12 inches of the white mark. He burst out laughing when I asked him if he was still sure that he couldn’t read greens. He could when he didn’t try too hard consciously!

Why don’t you try it out for yourself? It’ll confirm how good you really are at reading greens unconsciously and instinctively. All you have to do is to roll a few balls on a few greens. It’s a great way to reinforce the “Reading your Putts Instinctively” golf hypnosis track in my Own the Putting Green” programme.

Own the Putting Green

Own the Putting Green” is one of my most popular programmes and is used by many of my professional clients to very good effect. The programme addresses putting confidence and belief in your putting, as well as learning `to trust your instinctive green reading abilities.

The programme won’t teach you how to putt or how to read greens. What it will do is help you to make the most of the unconscious, instinctive putting abilities you already have.

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.

This new “Anger Management for Better Golf” programme is available in MP3 format for download, with the three golf hypnosis sessions, each running for around 25-30 minutes, and a 15 minute NLP session. 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 5 more new Golf Hypnosis MP3 audio programmes over the next couple of months. As with the other new programmes, I will be including 3, and in some cases, 4 new 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 Playing Zone (Released 20 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 “Anger Management for Better Golf” Hypnosis Programme all about? 

Anger management is often the initial reason for clients approaching me for help with golf hypnosis. I’m pleased to report that it’s often one of the most straightforward and quickest problems for you to overcome. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that NLP and hypnosis are primarily about giving people choices and what the angry golfer lacks is choice. It’s acceptable to be annoyed and frustrated when you hit a bad shot, but it’s disastrous if you’re still annoyed, frustrated or worse when you hit your next shot.

Now people bring anger with them to the golf course for a wide variety of reasons that go beyond the frustrations and difficulties of this sometimes challenging game. Apart from any anger you may bring with you to the course, the main causes of anger in golf are from players’ reactions to the bad and unlucky golf shots they hit, the anticipation of those shots and other fears, the things their opponent does, any outside distractions or interference, real or imagined, the condition of the course, other individuals, crowds, outside agencies, etc. The list is endless.

So what does all this mean for your golf? Well, ask yourself how many shots you would have saved if you never lost your temper, never gave yourself a hard time, always developed a strategy before you hit the ball, and always played within your own capabilities.

And what’s included in “Anger Management for Better Golf” I hear you ask? 

Well, I’ve included three powerful freestanding golf hypnosis sessions and an NLP session to help you to:

• Systematically release, eliminate the things that make you angry
• Control your anger habit by defusing all your past anger experiences
• Plan for a wonderful anger free future for your golf
• Automatically soften your reaction to all the things that make you angry out on the golf course.

Release and Eliminate your Anger – This is a very long and powerful hypnosis session that you should use exclusively for your first few weeks or at least until you are starting to notice some results. The session starts by building a strong resource of confidence and calm before systematically taking you through all the things that used to make you angry and releasing and eliminating all the bad feelings you used to associate with them. all about.

Control your Anger Habit – Once you’re getting some positive results from “Release and Eliminate Anger”, it’s time to start using the second golf hypnosis session, “Control your Anger Habit” to upgrade your unconscious programming to change your old automatic reaction to all the things that used to make you angry. It’s ok to feel angry for a few moments after a bad shot, that’s natural, but it isn’t ok to carry it forward to the next shot.

Enjoy Anger Free Golf – You can use this third golf hypnosis at any time throughout your use of this programme, as it’s all about choosing the right path away from anger and experience a more enjoyable and increasingly rewarding golfing future.

Anger Management on the Golf Course – In addition to the three hypnosis sessions, this special NLP session uses an equally powerful NLP technique for collapsing the old anchors that used to trigger your anger. It captures that trigger and automatically uses it to fire off good feelings of comfort and confidence that overwhelm and replace the old explosive feelings of anger.

Go to the “Anger Management for Better Golf ” 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 “Anger Management for Better Golf” here for instant download and start to Release and Eliminate Your Anger and Play Better Golf .

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.

So what’s happening here? Well, if your mind is focussed elsewhere, it’s your conscious mind that’s doing the focussing, whether it’s worrying about your health, doubting whether you should be out here on the golf course or just thinking about what you’ll be doing after the game. The only part of you that’s free to think about golf is your unconscious golf mind and trusting your unconscious is one of the most important and effective of my secrets of hypnotic golf.

Now, you probably know that I’m a qualified clinical hypnotherapist and one of the keys to successful hypnosis and hypnotherapy is to pre-occupy or confuse the client’s conscious mind, or simply send it off somewhere nice, while I communicate directly with her unconscious mind, the storehouse off all her knowledge, experience, skill and resources. Coming full circle, that’s just what we’re looking for when we’re on the golf course looking to trust our unconscious golf mind.

That reminds me of a story about the advice that Bob Rotella was giving Mike Weir early in the year before an important tournament. Any advice from Bob is usually good advice and what he told Mike Weir was to “Try to go unconscious on the course.” I looked that up on the internet and found Bob saying pretty much the same thing about avoiding choking under pressure by turning off your conscious mind and switching to your unconscious one. He also tells his clients to, “practice their swing technique all they want on the driving range, but on the course, let instinct take over.”

I agree with Bob that given an absolute choice between playing golf in the conscious or unconscious minds, I’d have to go for the unconscious for better golf. However, I think that the best golf is played using the conscious and unconscious golf minds selectively and independently for different tasks. There’s an important separation in the mind between planning a shot, a conscious process, and executing it, an unconscious process. Have you noticed how when you hit a really good shot, you tend to think,” Wow, what happened there? What did I just do right?” The odd thing is that it usually happens when you didn’t have a thought, at least a conscious one, in your head.

Now isn’t that more or less the same thing that happens when a golfer’s conscious mind is “clogged up” with a cold or flu?

So what happened? Well after writing my recent article about talking yourself into better golf, I sat down to watch a replay of the television coverage of the World Cup from Mission Hills in China. Now I ‘m always thinking very positively after completing an article, so I was amazed at how quickly I was becoming negative watching the golf and more importantly listening to the negative messages coming from the commentators. Here’s a list of the ones I remember from just 30 minutes of watching and listening.

“He’s got to think about trying not to let his partner down”

“Very few golfers have found winning easy”

“The nap is into him as well as the slope – he has to hit it hard”

“Perhaps he was afraid of thinning it”

“They might have felt a bit intimidated”

“It’s not finished yet”

“It’s only a par, but it’s not terminal”

“He missed one of this length at the last hole”

“There’s a tough driving hole coming up”

“He’ll be disappointed to be much further away from the hole in 2 shots”

“He and his playing partner have it all to do”

“I still wouldn’t like to call it, would you? No.”

“For the third hole in a row he gets just this length of putt”

“He’s just 20 years old, what can you expect?”

“Had that gone in, there might have been a glimmer of hope, but they’re running out of holes”

It makes depressing reading doesn’t it? More worryingly, I wonder how many of those negative suggestions have been taken in by my unconscious while I was watching and listening. I dread to think how depressing and potentially bad for your golf it would be playing with some of of those commentators, if they talk like that when they actually play golf.

I’m not saying that television golf commentators don’t say anything positive. You only have to hear them talking about Tiger Woods to hear them talking positively, even when he’s playing badly. To be fair, some of the commentators are very positive, particularly the one’s who played golf at the very top, like Nick Faldo and Peter Alliss, unless he’s talking about putting!

So, be careful when you watch golf on TV. Enjoy watching the golf, learn from your favourite golfers and consciously filter out the negative comments from the positive commentary.

Well, I’m not qualified to comment on the technicalities of the golf swing. However, I am qualified to comment on what for me is an even more important transition in golf psychology. It’s the transition from the conscious analytical planning phase of your pre-shot routine to the unconscious instinctive phase of actually hitting the ball. Unlike the pause at the top of the backswing, the faster you can comfortably make this transition, the better and more consistently you’ll find yourself striking the ball or rolling the putt.

If you watch the top players in the world, like Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods, you’ll notice that they take very little time between taking their chosen club out of the bag and hitting the ball. A recent study suggested that Tiger and Phil consistently take around 11 to 12 seconds to do this and they are very consistent with the timing. If they took any longer, they often hit a less than good shot – these guys don’t hit many downright bad shots.

So what do they do in those 11 to 12 seconds? Well, every player has his own idiosyncrasies, including re-gripping, waggling, breathing, blinking and countless other rituals. However, they all seem to

1. take one or two practice swings to get the feel of the shot they visualise playing
2. step forward to the ball and take their stance
3. align their body and clubface
4. take a final look at their target
5. finally, hit the "start button" and swing the club or putter.

What’s interesting is that they don’t seem at all rushed in fitting all that into such an apparently short time. They certainly don’t have any spare time for self doubt and that little voice in their head telling them they’re doing it all wrong! In fact, they complete the process like they’re in some sort of trance and that means that they are leaving the whole process to their unconscious golf mind, just like driving a car or riding a bike.

Now some of the players you watch on TV or out on the course take a lot longer to make this transition and the time they take is less consistent. How well did you see them play? If you watched Sergio Garcia playing golf a few years ago, you’d have often seen him take an inordinately long time to hit the ball. He had a pained expression on his face that suggested he was experiencing a lot of negative self-talk and he seemed to be wringing the life out of the club as he repeatedly re-gripped his hands. It’s no surprise that his golf was inconsistent at best and he certainly didn’t seem to be enjoying his golf.

So how do I speed up my transition from taking my club out to hitting the ball, I hear you say. Well one way is to make the whole process an instinctive or unconscious activity. Streamline your own transition process and use it every time you hit a shot on the golf course, at the driving range, on the practice putting green and in your mental golf practice. You do practice and play golf in your mind, now don’t you?