Play Better Golf Psychology In The Now and One Shot at a Time

One of the key success factors of better golf psychology is learning to unconsciously play one shot at a time - in the moment, in the zone or "in the now." And this applies equally to every shot you play on the practice ground, in a friendly game and in the most important round of your golfing life. Playing in the now means that you're protected from any poor, indifferent shots and ill-judged shots that went before. It also means that you're protected from future uncertainties and expectation.

Now why am I talking about this today? Well, isn't the world's golf press just amazing, if a little predictable? They see Benn Barham score a fourth round 69 for a phenomenal total of 19 under par and they say he failed and focus their attention on his few bad shots, like his drive down the last hole "that cost him a birdie." If he'd played like that, scored like that and won, then they'd be talking about his amazing success and knocking Rafael Cabrera Bello's disastrous failure.

Now I'm not taking anything away from Rafael. He played remarkably well for an 11-under par 60 to beat Benn into second place in the Austrian Open on the European Tour by a single shot. I read somewhere that it's one of only 13 rounds of 60 in the history of the European Tour and Darren Clarke had two of those, so Rafael's one of only 12 phenomenal golfers.

What's more interesting to me as a golf psychologist watching every shot of their final rounds is that they both played to the best of their ability on the day. It was just that Rafael scored better. Better even than Benn's 63 in the opening round on Thursday. What's also interesting is that they both seemed to be playing their mental golf one shot at a time.

You could see that in the way that Benn calmly holed a series of difficult recovery putts to keep things going in the first 9 holes on Sunday. Except he didn't seem to be "trying" to keep things going, he just seemed to be playing each shot on its merits, disregarding the shot that had gone before, good or bad. He also didn't look like a man who was getting ahead of himself. He just seemed to be focussing on playing the shots and letting the score just happen. Even the final result didn't really faze him judging by his comment afterwards that "I'm very happy with the way I have played but disappointed to finish second."

Rafael certainly looked to me like he was doing the same thing and he confirmed it afterwards when he's quoted as saying.

"It's just amazing - I played the best golf of my life and I can't believe it, I was so far back at the start of the final round that I wasn't thinking about winning. I just tried to play a shot at a time and it worked out really good."

So how do I play each shot "in the now", I hear you asking. Well, I'll be talking a lot more about that in future articles, but for now, here's a simple suggestion that will bring most people abruptly into the now. Just imagine that the shot you are about to play is the last golf shot you will ever play. There's no point in thinking about the next shot, as there isn't going to be one. Just make the best you can of this one last shot. Make it a shot to remember. You wouldn't want to mess up your last ever shot by trying too hard, now would you.

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 for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it is about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that is played in the 6 inches between your ears.

Sign up for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine at http://www.golf-hypnotist.com/ and get your free 25- minute Your Own Virtual Caddy golf hypnosis MP3 that goes with this article.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/golf-articles/play-better-golf-psychology-in-the-now-and-one-shot-at-a-time-1274961.html

Use Golf Psychology to Overcome Bad Luck and Play Well Despite It

What impact does luck have on your game of golf? By that I mean do you treat good luck and bad luck as two sides of the same coin? Statistically, our golfing luck is going to even out over the long term. If you keep tossing a coin, you may get long runs of heads or tails, but I'm sure that deep down we all know that every time there's an equal chance of one or the other. Luck's been a part of golf for a long time and the earliest golfer's defined good luck and bad luck as "Rub of the Green."

So how do you feel if you hit a really good drive down the middle of the fairway only to see it bounce off unexpectedly into a bunker or end up in a divot? Does it make you angry and affect your next shot or even the rest of the round? Did you see Lee Westwood's tee shot on the 72nd hole when he was in contention to win the Open Championship at Turnberry? He hit it perfectly only to see it roll on and on before veering off into a bunker and leaving him with a seemingly impossible shot to the green. Would your shoulder's "drop"? Would you feel the world was against you? Or would you just treat it as just one of those things and, like Lee Westwood, just accept the new challenge and hit the best possible shot from where the ball lay under the face of the bunker? Wasn't that an amazingly well thought out and executed recovery shot he hit onto the green from there?

I know I'm labouring this point, but how would it affect you, if you had not just one, but a whole series of unlucky breaks in the middle of a round of golf? Would you notice any good breaks along the way? I suspect not. Maybe you'd start to feel like the course was against you or it was just not your day. Either way, you'd probably not be in the right frame of mind to play well and you'd start thinking more about your bad luck than the shot you're about to hit. If you just knuckle down and focus all your attention on playing the next shot, then you're either brain dead or, like Lee Westwood, you're using good golf psychology.

Good luck can have an equally strong positive impact on the golf mind as bad luck can have a negative one. Looking back on my early years of playing golf, long before I knew anything about golf psychology, I now realise my perception of whether I was being lucky or unlucky early in the round had a major effect on my final score for the round. There was a long walk around a lake to the par 3 sixth hole at Brookmans Park, my home club back then, and there was often a long wait on the tee. As a result, there was plenty of time to ponder on how the round was going. If I was around 2 over par after those first five holes and hitting the ball poorly, I felt lucky despite already using up all my shots as a 2 handicap golfer. My ball striking would gradually improve through the round and I'd usually have a really good score. If, on the other hand, I was over par after those same five holes and striking the ball really well, then I'd feel resentful about that bad luck, my swing would deteriorate and I'd have a really terrible score.

If I'd looked at my bad luck objectively back then, accepted it and simply played each shot as it came, it would have cost me at most 2 or 3 shots in the round not the 10 or 15 shots it often cost me through bad golf psychology. In all probability, it wouldn't have cost me even that as I'd probably have some good luck elsewhere in the round to compensate.

So how do I just accept my bad luck, I hear you say. Well just about everything I've learned about golf psychology helps and most importantly, it's the ability to have a good post-shot routine supported by golf hypnosis. After you hit any shot or putt, regardless of whether it's a good or bad and lucky, unlucky or just a normal one, you should learn from it, release it and consign it to the past. It can't hurt you there. If it's a really good shot, then savour the moment and file it away in your mind as a resource for a future time when you need inspiration and confidence.

If a bad or unlucky shot's difficult to get over, then fire off a strong Resource Anchor to change your state. If you're familiar with self-hypnosis, you can use that to achieve the same result or use my Finger Breathing technique. Another approach is to use the Positive Reframing approach to consider how much more unlucky and worse off you could be.

(ArticlesBase ID #1196124)

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 for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it is about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that is played in the 6 inches between your ears.

Sign up for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine at http://www.golf-hypnotist.com/ and get your free 25- minute Your Own Virtual Caddy golf hypnosis MP3 that goes with this article.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/golf-articles/use-golf-psychology-to-overcome-bad-luck-and-play-well-despite-it-1196124.html

Anchor your Good Golf Shots with a Post Shot Routine using NLP and Golf Hypnosis

I've been writing a lot lately about the negative and positive golf psychology of fear on the golf course. While I've been thinking all about golf fear consciously, it seems that my unconscious mind has been quietly working away on the question of how we actual do this "fear" thing in our golf minds. Using a post-shot routine was the answer - to the problem, not the question.

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

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

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

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

If you react positively after hitting a golf shot, your brain produces lots of happy chemicals and associates those good feelings to the shot you've just hit and to the hole you've just played. The next time you play that hole or a similar shot, you have the opportunity to unconsciously remember that feeling and the associated result. In NLP we call this anchoring. Something similar happens if you react badly after hitting a shot and that bad shot can get anchored too.

So my recommendation is to really enjoy your good shots - you want to remember them - and release the bad shots to the past without any emotion, like someone else hit that bad shot. You can't go back in time and replay a shot, so just forget it and move on.

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

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

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 for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it is about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that is played in the 6 inches between your ears.

Sign up for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine at http://www.golf-hypnotist.com/ and get your free 25- minute Your Own Virtual Caddy golf hypnosis MP3 that goes with this article.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/golf-articles/anchor-your-good-golf-shots-with-a-post-shot-routine-using-nlp-and-golf-hypnosis-1011132.html

Focus Your Golf Mind on Your Target Not the Hazard for Better Golf Scores

One thing I've learned from golf psychology is how my unconscious mind automatically follows where my conscious mind leads. Have you ever noticed that if one of your playing partners warns you about a particularly difficult bunker or some hidden golf hazard on a hole, your ball seems to be mysteriously drawn to that hazard? And it doesn't matter whether they were trying to help you or to put you off. So if you’re standing over the ball thinking or saying to yourself, "Don't hit it in that bunker," then you are unconsciously focussed on the bunker and that's where you'll probably hit the ball.

This can also work in reverse. Many years ago, I was selected to play with a good friend of mine as my partner in the Hertfordshire County Foursomes team event at the old East Herts. Golf Club, on a course I had never played before. Despite my best endeavours, I didn't have the time to play the course before the event, so I had to play the course blind. When I got there, there were no yardage charts available and no distance yardage markers on the course, so my foursomes partner, who had played there several times and knew the course well, suggested that he would have to tell me where to hit the ball when it was my turn to hit our ball, as there were many doglegs and blind shots on the course. On every shot I had to play, my partner would tell me the length and style of shot I needed to play and gave me a specific target to aim at - a particular tree, bunker or part of a building - and that was all I had to think about. He never told me about any of the hazards to avoid. As a result, I was the perfect partner, hit the ball where and how he told me and we scored far better than we could have possibly expected.

Now, the action of unconsciously following your conscious thoughts doesn't just happen when you play golf. Have you ever been driving happily along a long straight road, perhaps a motorway, and someone points out a landmark way off to the right or left? Even if you do no more than glance at it a few times, you'll probably notice that you will unconsciously start deviating towards it. Thankfully, your unconscious programme for safe driving is likely to be more grooved in your mind than your interest in the landmark and your unconscious mind will soon bring you back to the straight and narrow of the road. As it's an unconscious and instinctive reaction you may not even be aware as the driver, but your passengers may well let you know what happened!

So what can I do to avoid hitting the ball in the hazard when I'm already thinking about it and isn't it better no know about it than not? Wouldn't I rather know it's there, so I can avoid it? Well, if you're going to focus on the hazard when you hit the ball, it may almost seem to be better not to know it's there. However, if you take the hazard into account when planning your shot, you can consciously choose a style of shot and an appropriate target that will reduce the likelihood of your ball going into the hazard. If you then focus on that alternative target when you hit the ball, then as I described above, your unconscious mind will always do it's best to follow your conscious thoughts. So when you're standing over the ball about to hit, focus your thoughts on the shot you want to play and the place you want the ball to land safely rather than on the hazard where you don't want it to land.

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 for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it is about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that is played in the 6 inches between your ears.

Sign up for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine at http://www.golf-hypnotist.com/ and get your free 25- minute Your Own Virtual Caddy golf hypnosis MP3 that goes with this article.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/golf-articles/focus-your-golf-mind-on-your-target-not-the-hazard-for-better-golf-scores-997660.html

Grind Out a Winning Score Using Golf Psychology and Golf Hypnosis

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 for information on how to get the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from the wonderful game of golf. More specifically, it is about how to improve your golf by working on the 90 percent of the game that is played in the 6 inches between your ears.

Sign up for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine at http://www.golf-hypnotist.com/ and get your free 25- minute Your Own Virtual Caddy golf hypnosis MP3 that goes with this article.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/golf-articles/grind-out-a-winning-score-using-golf-psychology-and-golf-hypnosis-997663.html

 Page 2 of 2 « 1  2