Standing at the first tee you may have the advantage of clubs designed scientifically to help you drive further, the right brand of ball for those extra ‘in-flight’ yards, and the brand of shoes Tiger Woods wore when he was ranked number 1, but unless you maintain the right attitude so that you can control your emotions, you’re doing yourself, and your playing partners, a huge disservice.

The most surprising thing to most amateur and recreational golfers is that controlling themselves mentally and emotionally is a key component in every professional golfers game.  These skills are most commonly referred to as mental golf.  Mental golf techniques are far less daunting than you may think, and will improve golf of any golfer, at any level of play.

Just as noise can distract you from your shot, so can your attitude and your fears. The golfers behind you may be loud and obnoxious but that is not something you can control.  Your attitude and your emotions are.  Simple mental golf techniques such as visualizing your success or mentally rehearsing a shot in your mind until it becomes the most likely outcome in reality, have helped professional golfers like Tiger Woods improve golf and stay at the top of their game for years.  In fact Tiger’s recent fall from the top started when he got distracted with personal affairs and his mental golf game suffered.

Sometimes you just know the second the club swings toward the ball that it is going to be a good shot. This is a feeling all golfers have experienced and it greatly improves your attitude during a round. Having this happen all the time may not be possible, but having it happen more often is possible using mental golf techniques.

With golf attitude is everything, and attitude is something you can create by controlling your emotions and allowing yourself to play better. For any golfer who wants to improve golf, all you have to do is choose to do so by improving your mental golf.  You’ll play better and have more fun on the course.

Guest author Kevin Reynolds is a Certified Sports Performance Hypnotist who has been using mental golf to very effectively help his clients improve golf for many years.  Kevin is the creator of the Master Your Inner Golfer program which uses mental golf techniques to empower your subconscious mind to help you play better golf.

The term mental golf is used to broadly describe the many techniques you can use to help control your physical and emotional self with your mind.  The advantages of doing this are readily apparent to any golfer who has let adrenalin affect the mechanics of his game, has second guessed himself into a bad shot, or has done anything that could be described colloquially as “choking.”

Simple mental golf techniques can be used to improve your golf game immediately and adding them to your game is as simple as taking a deep breath. Next time you are standing over a putt practicing the stroke you want to make do this:

1. Take a deep breath, how it for a second or two and then exhale
2. Close your eyes and imagine the stroke you want to make—from the time you draw back your putter to your follow through after striking the ball
3. See your ball in your mind roll into the bottom of the cup
4. Open you eyes take another long, slow deep breath, and make the shot

Do that on every putt you make for a round or two and see if you improve your golf game. I’m betting you do. PS: You’re playing mental golf!

This is a very simple mental golf technique using visualization and mental rehearsal.  You can develop your own techniques for every part of your game.  Admittedly that does sound time consuming but what is the price of playing better golf and having more fun on the course?

If you don’t want to pay the price in time, both researching and perfecting your own techniques, consider a visit to, or mental golf program developed by, a sports performance professional. These programs use techniques to implant mental golf techniques directly into your subconscious mind so using the techniques becomes second nature.  All the benefits without the effort—a real win-win situation.

Use the simple mental golf techniques I outlined next time you putt. You’ll see how easy it really is to use mental golf to improve every part of your golf game.

Like many sports, golf is actually more challenging mentally than it is physically. Almost every golfer can think of instances where they lost focus and concentration at a crucial moment, second guessed themselves into a poor shot or club selection, or failed simply through their own expectations that they would fail. Legendary golfer Arnold Palmer once said the toughest opponent he ever had was himself. He was referring to what every great athlete knows—that how you play is determined by your mind and your mental approach. Its easy to see that improving your mental golf game has the potential to noticeably improve golf especially for those who overlook it.

So why do golfers often overlook improving the mental part of their golf game?

If you love the game enough to want to improve your golf, why would you deny yourself the joy of actually playing? Isn’t getting out on the course and practicing the obvious path to improvement for the golf lover in us all? The reality is that golfers who use mental golf techniques really enjoy playing golf. Many simply want to improve while others have hit a plateau and had been looking for something that would help them reach a higher level of performance.

Even the simplest of mental golf techniques can help a golfer to improve their concentration, enable them to stay calm and focused, and play with more confidence and expectation of success. For any golfer, these abilities contribute greatly to overall enjoyment of the game. Golfers that are new to mental golf are often skeptical until they discover that professional golfers have been using mental golf techniques for years. All the top golfers use them on a regular basis to help them keep their edge so they can perform at the top of their game.

So if you want to improve your golf and get more enjoyment out of every round you play then try improving your mental golf game. Practice makes perfect, and practicing your mental game is as important as practicing your physical game. With a little effort you can literally improve your golf game without touching a club.

The Master Your Inner Golfer program uses several mental golf techniques to address the many issues faced by a golfer.  Hypnosis, visualization, NLP, mental rehearsal, and subliminal techniques are all used to help you improve your focus, your level of confidence, your concentration, and your control of your emotions so you can stay relaxed and perform better. Master Your Inner Golfer helps you to learn to control yourself mentally and emotionally so that you can allow yourself to play to your full potential. While every golfer already has this ability in them, few are able to use it.  The ability to do so is often what separates professional golfers from their competition.

Master Your Inner Golfer is a program on four CD’s that combines mental golf techniques from hypnosis, NLP, guided imagery, visualization, mental rehearsal, and mental persuasion technology to help you improve your golf and play at your very best.  For the user, all you have to do is listen to the CD’s several times to get the full benefit of Kevin’s expertise.

Master Your Inner Golfer is designed to remove mental obstacles that work against you and stop your progress with the goal of creating the most confident, capable, and focused golfer you can be. The program devotes sessions (each CD contains a separate session) to developing the correct golfers mindset, improving your short game, developing your driving, as well as a subliminal persuasion session.

Session 1 is designed to develop the correct golfers mindset—to improve your confidence, focus, and control, allowing you to believe in your abilities and stay relaxed even under pressure.

Session 2, devoted to your short game, builds on the mindset developed in session 1 to improve your putting and short game. It uses visualization, NLP, and mental rehearsal techniques to create and anchor the perfect shot in your mind so you can recreate it on the course.

Session 3 build on the two previous sessions to bring power and control to your driving. It is designed to guide you to the reality of your true potential as a golfer and develop a mental expectation of excellence that will become reality.

Session 4 uses advanced subliminal persuasion techniques to improve your golf in a session that you can use anytime.  For those with lengthy commutes this allows you to improve your golf while you travel—even if you drive.

At only $97 the Master Your Inner Golfer program offers a good value since to visit an accomplished sports performance hypnotist might cost you more than $200 per session.  By purchasing this program you are able to get the benefit of Kevin’s experience at a fraction of the cost. The Master Your Inner Golfer program comes with a 30 day money back guarantee giving you to time to see the improvement in your golf game—although its likely you will notice changes in your attitude and confidence before you even step foot on a course.

If you want to see how mental golf will improve your golf game then the Master Your Inner Golfer program is definitely worth looking into.

So what are the techniques of mental golf?

The most commonly used mental golf techniques are hypnosis, visualization, NLP, and mental rehearsal.

HYPNOSIS
Hypnosis is often described as the subtle programming of how we perceive the world, our values, and our abilities. This an ongoing process that occurs naturally and starts very early in life. The image we develop of ourselves is usually the result of what we repeatedly see and hear, and our interpretation of these events gets implanted into our subconscious mind.

As a golfer your performance is affected by what you believe you are capable of. Being able to control your mind—your attitude, your confidence, your level of relaxation— has a profound impact how you play. It’s not hard to imagine that if your attitude is cheerful and relaxed and your confidence in your ability is overflowing, the results will be much different than if you are tense, angry, and doubt your ability to make a shot.  Using hypnosis you can implant positive suggestions into your subconscious mind to improve the way you approach a round of golf mentally as well as the actual physical mechanics of your game. Most golfers sabotage their game with self doubt or expectations that they will fail. With hypnosis you can program your subconscious so that you simply know you will succeed. Once you accept this belief, you become more confident and less anxious, your attitude is better, and you perform better in every part of your game.

VISUALIZATION
Visualization is the process of using your mind to imagine what you want to be or what you want to have. Visualization taps into the power of your subconscious mind to allow you to produce a desired result. Just as physical exercise trains your muscles to effectively memorize a routine until it becomes almost second nature, visualization is a way of exercising the mind using positive imagery which you can easily recall and utilize when performing difficult tasks. Through visualization techniques you can harness your thoughts in a way that allows you to imagine success so that it becomes the most likely outcome.

For a golfer, it’s not just important to picture yourself executing the shots you desire, it is also important to be able to achieve a mental state of mind which calms your anxiety and enables you to conquer the fears that a golfer often faces at some point during their round. Through the proper use of visualization you can become familiar with, and even comfortable with, confronting these fears—be it the fear of choking, missing a putt, or simply disappointing yourself. What often separates the mental approach of a top professional golfer from his competition is his ability to create an image of how he wants to feel at the end of his round. Visualization allows you to constructively deal with adversity and consequently enjoy an overall outcome that is much more positive.

MENTAL REHEARSAL
Mental rehearsal is one of the most widely used mental golf techniques. As the name implies, mental rehearsal is a process in which a golfer imagines a desired shot or series of shots which you then replay, or rehearse, in your mind until they become the most likely outcome. A golfer may replay the process of hitting a powerful drive straight down the middle of the fairway or lining up and sinking a birdie putt.  All professional golfers play a shot many more times in their mind than they do on the course.

Mental rehearsal is natural part of of your life—your mind constantly analyzes a number of possible outcomes to every situation. For a golfer, images or expectations of missing an easy putt occur at the same time as images of sinking that putt.  By using mental rehearsal, you can train your mind to focus on only the desired result until that is the most likely outcome. This can decrease learning time and improve performance very quickly—much faster than physical practice since it can be done for a few minutes at a time and it is done in the mind rather than on the golf course.

NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING(NLP)
Neuro-Linguistic Programming was derived from the study of how successful people in many different fields achieved their results. The goal of NLP, developed in the late 1970’s by Drs. Richard Bandler and John Grindler, is to determine how these skills may be learned by others to improve both personally and professionally. NLP can be understood from its three components:

• Neuro—how your brain processes information
• Linguistic—how language affects that information
• Programming—how you implement that information

which are used together to enable you to more efficiently manage your mind and accelerate your learning processes.

Using NLP techniques you are able to effectively study the behavior of successful golfers—how they approach the game, how they prepare mentally, how they conduct themselves during a round to maintain their performance—and adapt that which makes them successful to improve your golf. Using NLP you can not only quickly learn from others you are also able to ‘reframe’ your own experiences in a positive way to learn from your own mistakes. Its often said you learn more from your failures than your successes. The ability to do this without dwelling on your failures is key to progressing as a golfer. By not expecting to fail simply because you have done so previously and effectively learning from your mistakes makes you much more likely to improve your golf and succeed in the future.

The choice of whether to develop your mental golf game on your own or with the help of a professional is a personal one.  Developing your mental golf game on your own is the most time consuming while consulting a sports performance professional the most expensive. Purchasing a product developed by a sports performance professional often proves to be an effective compromise. Ultimately you should do what works best for you to improve your golf.