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Have you noticed how good some of the leading professionals are at grinding out a good score, even if they are swinging the club below their best or downright badly. It's interesting to note that the real greats like Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus always seem to be able to do this, however they're playing, and whatever the "rub of the green throws" at them when they get to the last nine holes of a championship.
If I look back to my early years in golf, before I had any thoughts about golf hypnosis or golf psychology in general, I was lucky to have a fair amount of natural ability. At the same time, I was rather too inconsistent for my liking. It seemed that if I started out a round playing really well, but not scoring that brilliantly, then my golf would gradually go from good to bad to worse and I'd have a frustratingly high score. On the other hand, if I started off playing relatively badly, but scoring ok, then my golf would often improve as the round went on and I'd have a bewilderingly good score. What was really odd was that my score after 6 to 9 holes in these two types of round was often similar.
Back in those days, I was a member at Brookmans Park Golf Club and there was a fairly long and secluded walk around a small lake between the fifth green and the sixth tee. It was also quite common for there to be a bit of a delay on that tee, so all in all there was plenty of time to think. Over a couple of years I began to notice that I could predict my final score when I got to that sixth tee. If I was two over par or better and playing badly, I'd break 80 easily. If I was over par, even by just one shot, and playing really well, then I'd really struggle to break 80.
Now I'm an expert in golf psychology, what do I think I was doing back then and what could you do to avoid the same trap? Well, if I started out the round playing well and scoring badly, I used to interpret that as bad luck or blame the condition of the course for my dropping shots. I also tended to feel that my normally excellent short game had deserted me and try to find out what I was doing wrong. These thoughts rapidly become self-fulfilling prophecies as I found more and more external reasons for my poor scores. I was probably not a nice person to be with!
On the days when I started playing poorly but was scoring reasonably well, I used to marvel at how well I was scrambling. I just seemed to know that if I hit a bad shot, I could scramble a par and move on. As a result, the pressure to hit the ball well went away and I started swinging much more freely and naturally - today I'd call that trusting my unconscious golf mind.
There are many golf psychology, NLP and self hypnosis techniques that can help you if you have a similar problem. One of the best would be to regularly listen to a golf hypnosis audio programme. Other golf mind techniques you can use for this include
- perceiving your bad luck as being good luck, as described in my earlier article entitled Positive Reframing for Better Golf Performance like Justin Rose
- using an NLP resource anchor to help you manage your state. There's a self-hypnosis script for this in my earlier article entitled Anchoring Resources for Better Golf - an Experience with Self Hypnosis for Golf.
Andrew Fogg, the Golf Hypnotist, is an enthusiastic golfer, hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner. He is a practicing golf psychologist and author of a soon to be published book "The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf'and a series of golf hypnosis MP3 programmes.
Visit his website www.golf-hypnotist.com for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it's about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that's played in the 6 inches between your ears.'
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