Posts Tagged internal dialogue
The Top 10 mental golf mistakes that golfers make
Posted by in golf on June 11th, 2009
I recently found someone’s list of the top ten mental mistakes golfers make and how to correct them instantly. As I disagree with much of the “how to correct them instantly” advice, I’ve included his first 10 mental mistakes below with my suggestions as to how address them with NLP and Golf Hypnosis.
Number 1: Letting your internal dialogue run wild
Get a good hypnotist to install a post-hypnotic suggestion that you go into a trance as you step into each shot or use self-hypnosis to achieve the same result. Whichever way, you’re allowing your unconscious mind to get on with playing the shot to the best of your technical ability while keeping your chattering conscious mind out of the action. That seems to work for Tiger Woods.
Number 2: Tightening up on your difficult shots
Learn to use hypnosis or an NLP anchoring technique to relax before planning any shot. Then control the inevitable internal dialogue with a post-hypnotic suggestion, as in number 1 above.
Number 3: Worrying about the Yips
This is basically a mental tightening up on a specific difficult shot, so I‘d handle it the same as Number 2.
Number 4: Telling yourself what NOT to do
Don’t go in the bunker, trees, water, etc! Your unconscious mind doesn’t know how to not do something. If I ask you to think of a blue elephant, you unconsciously have to imagine one – you probably just did! If you want to give yourself or anyone else a suggestion, phrase it using positive progressive language. That’s what a good hypnotist will help you with.
Number 5: Dwell on your mistakes and bad shots
The key thing is to learn from your mistakes, bad luck and plain bad shots before releasing them to the past where they can trouble you no more. Once again, you can make sure you do this with the help of post-hypnotic suggestions from a good hypnotist or use self-hypnosis. You may recall from my earlier post about how Tiger handles this despite, or maybe with the help of, his temper tantrums when he has a bad or unlucky shot. Once you release a bad shot like this, you’re free to hit the next one to the best of your ability and as if you had never hit the bad one.
Number 6: ”Trying” to consciously control your swing mechanics
Do you remember how hard it was to tie your shoe laces the first time and how it’s just an automatic process? To see what I mean, write down the step by step instructions for how you tie your shoelaces and then give them to someone else and ask them to follow them to the letter. Even if they succeed, it’ll take them much longer than just using the unconscious program. Now imagine consciously following those instructions in the time it takes to swing a golf club.
The only effective way to swing a golf club is to switch off your conscious mind and all its thoughts about swing mechanics and trust your unconscious mind – you’ve already programmed it to repeat the best shot you’ve ever hit. And the way to make sure you do that is, as before, to get a good hypnotist to install an appropriate post-hypnotic or use self-hypnosis.
Number 7: Criticising your shot and looking for flaws in your swing
Even using hypnosis, you’ll occasionally mishit a shot or be unlucky. However, that’s no cause for criticism and certainly no reason for changing your swing mechanics out on the course. Just learn from the shot and move on as described in my response to the dwelling on your mistakes and bad shots.
Number 8: Comparing yourself to some other golfer
You can learn a lot in golf from watching a good player at his or her best, but the real challenge of golf is you playing against the course. It really doesn’t matter how well or badly your playing partners or opponents are playing. If you play to the best of your ability and lose, then well done you and well done them. That’s one of the many special things I love about golf.
If it still bothers you then install the post-hypnotic suggestion that you’ll treat every shot as if it’s the last one you’ll ever play There’d be no reason to dwell on your past shots and there wouldn’t be any in the future, so you might as well make the most of the one you’re playing now.
Number 9: Thinking about what could go wrong
In your mind this is interpreted in a similar way to telling yourself what NOT to do. Your unconscious mind will have to think about the thing that could go wrong happening and it will do your best to make it happen. If you want to evaluate what could go wrong, that’s fine, before you make up your mind what you do want to happen. Then you can use your post-hypnotic suggestion or self-hypnosis to switch off your unconscious mind and let your unconscious programming get on with hitting your desired shot.
Number 10: Worrying about other people watching you
If you’re using hypnosis and NLP to manage your state and concentration during the round, you will be consciously unaware and untroubled by the actions of others. Even if they are thinking bad or critical thoughts about you, those thoughts are in their heads and not yours. Once you go into your playing trance you will be blissfully unaware of your conscious self-talk.
So what are my overall conclusions?
Now, it won’t surprise you to hear that my suggestions all revolve around the use of a good hypnotist helping you with appropriate post-hypnotic suggestions tied to a number of carefully chosen golf psychology techniques. Without the hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestions, you will probably forget to remember to execute the techniques on every shot.
You’ll also notice I’m avoiding naming the “someone” who published the original list and hidden his responses. I know that if you really want to read them, you can probably find them on the web, but I don’t want them on my website.
One of the reasons that I failed to benefit from the Inner Game of Golf and the many other books, DVDs and CDs I purchased over my earlier the years is that none of them installed any way of remembering not to forget to do their techniques when I needed them. The nearest anyone has ever got to achieving that has been Dr Karl Morris with his Circle Game, but that worked very intermittently for me.
It would be an improvement if I had a caddy every time I played and the caddy had a checklist of all the golf psychology instructions I had to remember. Even then, I would still need something like hypnosis to manage the interference from my conscious mind while I hit the shots.
Andrew Fogg, the Golf Hypnotist, is an enthusiastic golfer, hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner. He is a 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 http://www.golf-hypnotist.com for information on getting the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from your golf.
Sign up there for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine for your free 25-minute “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis MP3.
Article Source: The Top 10 mental golf mistakes that golfers make
Self-Talk Your Way to Golf Improvement Like Geoff Ogilvy
Posted by in golf on June 8th, 2009
How much do you berate yourself when you play a bad shot at golf? If you’re a typical golfer the answer is pretty badly! In fact, you probably use language that you’d never use in public. It’s a good thing that you save the worst things for expression privately in your head. Just imagine how you would feel if your fourball or foursome partner said the same things to you after you hit a bad shot. You’d be horrified and you’d probably make a mental note never to play with them again.
What’s possibly worse is that many players have similar negative internal dialogue whenever they plan and execute a shot. They recall all the bad shots they’ve ever hit in this situation and focus more on what can go wrong than on what they’re trying to do.
I was surprised to hear Geoff Ogilvy saying that he used to experience negative self talk earlier in his career. In an interview after his recent victory in the World Golf Championship Match Play event, he said that early in his career, he found it almost impossible to suppress any negative feelings he was experiencing. You wouldn’t think that, watching his cool demeanour when playing last week.
After some more research, I found a much older interview where he was talking about how half the Tour talks to themselves badly when they’re out there playing bad. They do it every day and it’s very unconstructive. When asked what he meant, he said
“Yeah, just call yourself useless and what are you doing out here and all sorts of stuff. And I was hopeless. And I’m still not the best out here, but I’m getting a lot better.”
Clearly Geoff has come a long way since then and I’m sure that golf psychology has had a lot to do with it.
With hypnosis and NLP we can do a lot to channel and manage that negative self-talk. One simple approach from NLP is just to give that negative voice in our head a silly or a sexy accent – it would be hard to take the negative self-talk if it came from Donald Duck or a seductive Marilyn Munro. You make up the voice in your head, so it’s yours to do whatever you want with.
Andrew Fogg, the Golf Hypnotist, is an enthusiastic golfer, hypnotherapist and NLP Master Practitioner. He is a 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 http://www.golf-hypnotist.com for information on getting the most success, pleasure and enjoyment from your golf.
Sign up there for the free Golf Hypnotist ezine for your free 25-minute “Your Own Virtual Caddy” golf hypnosis MP3.
Article Source: Self-Talk Your Way to Golf Improvement Like Geoff Ogilvy
