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.

Well, I always seemed to putt better when I had a playing partner, so I’ll set aside 2-ball match play and stroke play for the moment. Now that I come to think about it, I generally seemed to putt better when I had a partner than when I was just playing for myself.

So why did I putt better with certain partners than I did with others? Well I fairly certain that I putted better when I played with a confident partner who I trusted to read my putts for me. The odd thing is that the partner I remember putting best with was not in my league in terms of handicap. He just seemed to read greens instinctively and he was certainly a good putter. He knew my putting style and trusted my judgement of distance, so he simply told me where to aim and I holed the putts – far more than my fair share.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone like that caddying for you now, I hear you say? Well, you already do, if you are prepared to trust the unconscious green reading instincts you already have. The good news is that I’ve addressed the unconscious aspects of green reading in the final golf hypnosis session in my “Own the Putting Green” programme.

Is that all we can do for putting? What about the power of the conscious mind? If I’m playing a full shot, I have lots conscious tools to help me. I can use yardage charts, GPS systems, laser rangefinders and even the 150 yard posts to help me judge distance. I can even calibrate my hitting distances with each club using devices like Trackman. In addition, there’s often contour information for the greens on the course planner to help me plan where best to land my approach shots.

All of those things, combined with the information we pick up through our senses and experience, help us to plan our full shots consciously in our pre-shot routines. The problem is that we are largely left alone with senses and judgement when it comes to putting. The only alternative to trusting your instinctive green reading skills seems to employ the services of a really good caddy or play with a partner you can trust!

Well that’s what I thought up until I went on an AimPoint green reading clinic recently!

The AimPoint Green Reading Clinic

The clinic was organised by my old friend and putting coach, Jason Gilroy of Gilroy’s Golf, and run by Europe’s senior AimPoint instructor, Jamie Donaldson. I’ll leave it to them to tell you all about AimPoint, other than to say that I started out very sceptical and came away as a convert.

What surprised me about the course was that it was much more intuitive and a lot simpler than I expected. What delighted me was that I learned something very important about my own field.

I talk a lot in my work about the importance of using and extending all of our sensory inputs – sight, hearing, feelings, smells and tastes. When I talk about visualisation, I really mean imagination and we can imagine more than just pictures. In fact many of us are more comfortable recalling and imagining internal and external feelings and sounds than pictures.

As a golfer, I was used to thinking about the feeling of every part of the body in my swing – apart from my feet. That all changed when Jamie started talking about walking around the green and sensing changes in slope with my feet. He was getting us to “look” for inflection points so we could detect break directions. You’ll have to go on the AimPoint Fundamentals clinic to understand the relevance of that information and a lot more besides.

All I know is that it reminded me of all the valuable input we have from all our senses and how we can easily “read” the subtlest change of slope on a green just by walking around on it.

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.

Unusually for me, there are no instructions here about using any formal self hypnosis technique before following these six steps. You’ll usually be using this technique as you transition from the conscious process of planning your putt in your pre-shot routine to the, hopefully, unconscious process of stroking the putt in your shot routine. Having said that, if you’re an experienced user of the “Finger Breathing technique, you’ll only need a couple of deep breaths at this point to get into just the right state.

Step 1: When you approach a putt, start following your normal pre-shot routine and doing whatever you would normally do to read and visualise the putt.

Step 2: If you haven’t already marked the ball, then mark it now, clean it and replace it ready to putt. I suggest that you avoid making any particular conscious effort to line up the markings on the ball with the target. If you normally draw a sighting line on your ball, either ignore it or don’t do it for now.

Step 3: Now stand 2-4 yards behind the ball on the line to your target. Face straight at the target, so that both your eyes are seeing the ball and the hole using your binocular vision.

Step 4: Recall your visualisation of the putt and do your best to imagine the feeling and/or picture of the ball rolling along your expected line before hearing it fall in the hole.

Step 5: Now, keeping that feeling and/or picture in your mind and, while maintaining your gaze at the ball and the hole, take your stance for a practice swing. Take a couple of practice swings while still looking simultaneously at the ball and hole.

Step 6: As soon as you feel the practice swing is a good rehearsal for the putt you want to play, move as quickly and smoothly as you can and take up your stance to the ball. Only roughly align yourself to the hole – your unconscious will automatically allow for any misalignment. Then take one slow look at the hole and as soon as your eyes return to the ball, notice how you automatically and unconsciously start your putter stroke and then stroke the putt. It really is that easy!

So why does this work? Well, the object is to get all the conscious thought and analysis out of the way before handing over to your unconscious mind to finally assess the shot and hit the putt. Looking at the hole with both eyes while you get the feel of the putter stroke allows your unconscious mind to take in all the information it needs to deliver the putt that you saw and/or felt in step 1. Finally, the faster you can smoothly take your stance, look at the hole and start your swing, the more of that unconscious information you’ll retain and the less time there is for the conscious mind to step in and start analysing things again – and potentially sowing the seeds of doubt.

Remember that you can use a similar technique for chips and, with practice, for longer shots as well. It’s also a good technique for helping overcome the Yips for both putting and chipping.

I remember avoiding the suggestion, at the time, that Darren started doing that after he or one of his support team read about it in my ezine. However, it was obviously helping him in overcoming some of the “demons” that seemed to be afflicting his putting confidence back then. The six steps and his action back then of gripping left hand low and then re-gripping right hand low were clearly keeping his conscious mind occupied while just trusting his unconscious mind to hit the putts.

The technique was so effective I included it, along with three golf hypnosis sessions, in my “Own the Putting Green” golf hypnosis programme.

Imagine my delight a year later when he was still using those six steps in his magnificent win in the 2011 Open Championship at Royal St Georges.

Remember you are a great putter

I first used the Six Steps to better Putting in Your Unconscious Mind technique when I was working with a young tournament professional having serious problems with his putting. He’d been struggling to put a good score together despite often hitting 15 greens in regulation in a round. It wasn’t his putting stroke, because he’s already spent a lot of time working with his coach on his putting and everything was looking good there. The problem was that he seemed to have forgotten that he was a good putter. And that was putting more and more psychological pressure on his game.

We spent some time on a very undulating putting green and experimented with various techniques until we came up with the Six Steps to Unconscious Putting that I’ll post tomorrow. My client was uncomfortable at first, but after about 45 minutes, I suddenly noticed him relax and smile as he said something quietly to himself. I’m not sure what the exact words were, but it was the cheeky nickname he’d been given by his friends at college when he kept holing putts as they played for candy bars and sodas.

He remembered how good a putter he was and the following week, he went out and won his first pay cheque as a professional. He putted rather well that day!

Tomorrow, I’ll take you through those Six Steps to Unconscious Putting, a key part of the pre-shot routine that Darren Clarke used so effectively at Royal St Georges in wining the Open Championship

Now I’m not suggesting that Darren started doing that after he or one of his support team read about it in my ezine. However, it is obviously helping to overcome some of the “demons” that seemed to be afflicting his putting confidence in recent years. The six steps and his action of gripping left hand low and then re-gripping right hand low are clearly keeping his conscious mind occupied while he’s just trusting his unconscious mind to hit the putts. It certainly seems to be working for him.

Why not give it a try? You can still read that ezine edition here and subscribe to regularly receive my free Golf Hypnotist Ezine using the box on the right hand side of this page. The new edition of the ezine comes out later today and includes the opportunity to download a free audio recording of the Finger Breathing relaxation technique I’m always talking about.

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.

Coming back to those New Year’s resolutions, have you made your ones yet? No, don’t tell me what they are, that’s supposed to be unlucky. It’s enough that you’re clear about what you would like to change in your life and your golf in 2010? You know what you’d like to accomplish and where you want your life to go. That’s enough, isn’t it?

Well, I’ve got some bad news and some good news for you. Which would you like first? Okay, let’s start with the bad news. The bad news is that New Year’s resolutions generally don’t work. Recent articles suggest that that over 80% of the resolutions we make fall by the wayside within a few weeks or months? That’s not the good news, is it?

New Year’s Resolutions traditionally don’t work because they are based primarily on willpower and that’s a function of our conscious mind. If willpower worked 24 hours a day 365 days a year, then we’d all be the shape we want and we’d be fit, rich and happy. We’d all be great golfers as well. How often have you gone out to play golf determined to concentrate hard on every shot only to suddenly experience a lapse of concentration and hit a disastrous shot? I know I have. How often have those dieters amongst you remembered you’re on a diet, but not until after you’ve eaten something fattening?

The problem is that your conscious mind can only focus on a few things at a time and those are the ones we are thinking about right now. Research tells us that typically a human being can consciously hold between five and nine bits of information – often referred to as seven plus or minus two – in our mind at any one time. That’s why long phone numbers can be difficult to remember, even for the short time from looking at them in the phonebook to dialling them. So the chances are that your resolutions will have dropped out of your seven plus or minus two most of the time.

The good news is that your unconscious mind is switched on to everything you know all the time. You don’t have to remember to breathe, to regulate your heart-beat, to blink if something flies at you, to drive a car or to ride a bike. That’s assuming that you’ve already learned how to drive a car or ride a bike! And mentally there’s no limit to how many things you can do unconsciously at the same time. It’s not recommended, but people can drive a car, hold a conversation, smoke a cigarette and ponder their place in the universe all at the same time and if a car pulls out from a side road they’ll still avoid it and probably check the rear view mirror as they do it.

So how do you hand my New Year’s resolutions over to your unconscious mind? Well that’s easy. You use hypnosis programmes, self-hypnosis and NLP to install them in your unconscious mind. That’s exactly what happens with golf hypnosis programmes like Your Own Virtual Caddy.

So let’s have a look at an example. Quickly read the next sentence and see what you think it says.

Now raed tihs snectene aagin slwoly to see waht it auctlay syas hree in balck and wihte. I ssucept taht it may be vrey dfreneift.

If that one’s a bit too easy for you, have a go at this next one. It’s one of my favourite quotes from my golfing idol.

“I neevr hit a soht, not eevn in paccirte, whiotut hainvg a sahrp, in-fcous pcirtue of it in my haed. First I see the blal wehre I wnat it to fiinsh, ncie and wihte and siinttg up hgih on the birght geern garss. Tehn the secne qcikluy caeghns and I see the blal ginog tehre – it’s ptah, tacejorrty and sahpe, eevn its baehiouvr on ladinng. Tehn tehre is a srot of fdae-out and the nxet snece shwos me maikng the knid of sinwg taht will trun the peioruvs pctruies itno raeilty.”
Jcak Naciklus

So what’s happening here and what’s does all this have to do with golf? Well, firstly it suggests that you don’t need to have the spelling absolutely correct for our message to be understood. However, we do have to have the right letters in each word and the first and last letters of each word have to be correct. Secondly, it says that we are unconsciously very good at making a well informed guess about what we are seeing. So why shouldn’t the same skill apply to reading a shot or putt on the golf course?

Well, of course it does. When you throw a ball to someone, you look at your target and, without you thinking consciously about any precise measurements, your mind makes the necessary assessment of what you’re asking your body to do and simply does it. If on the other hand, you were executing a similar “throw” with a cannon, you’d be wanting to know the exact distance, the wind strength and direction, the temperature and all the other factors you’d need to assess the trajectory, direction and amount of gunpowder you’d need to send the cannon ball to the target. It can be the same when you hit a putt, if you trust your unconscious mind to do all the necessary calculations for you without you consciously analysing things too much.

But what about a full shot, don’t you have to calculate the distance precisely before you hit the shot? Well yes you do, especially if the distance can be deceptive, for example with a blind shot. Knowing the distance also helps with choosing the best club to use. However, note that I said the best club. The better golfers can hit the same distance with a wide range of clubs. I remember playing years ago with a group of people who would always look in my bag to see what club I had just hit. I remember totally confusing them one day by hitting every shot I could, from 100 to 220 yards distance, with my 2-Iron. That sure confused them! I also remember that the scores in club competitions where you’re only allowed to take 3 clubs and a putter always seem to be just as good, if not better, than when people have the full 14 clubs.

So remember that you have an amazing computing resource in your head that bases it’s assessment of what you see, feel and hear not on precise measurements., so trust your unconscious for better golf.

Just in case you found the scrambled quotation difficult to read, here’s what Jack had to say about visualisation.

“I never hit a shot, not even in practice, without having a sharp, in-focus picture of it in my head. First I see the ball where I want it to finish, nice and white and sitting up high on the bright green grass. Then the scene quickly changes and I see the ball going there – it’s path, trajectory and shape, even its behaviour on landing. Then there is a sort of fade-out and the next scene shows me making the kind of swing that will turn the previous images into reality.”
Jack Nicklaus

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?