In golf, as we know troublesome shots create tension in your muscle movements creating what we call freezing and self-diagnosis techniques can be very very efficient and effective ways of overcoming this and other golfing problems.
An understanding of the conscious and subconscious mindset can reveal how fears are created and also how you can keep them under control, simply, effectively, and allowing you to improve your game greatly.
Golf requires concentration but at the same time relaxation and these can be two opposing forces. It is very difficult to concentrate yet to be relaxed when your attention may be focused on the ball and you do not realise that your muscles become tense and this is where self hypnosis can help you achieve the state of mind required to effect that effortless perfect golf swing.
You watch a top golf pro in action his swing is smooth and hopefully easy it has become second nature to him, while you make your way down the course leaving a string of divots behind you. How can this be when you know the fundamental movements of a perfect golf stroke but you are failing? This should alert you immediately to the fact that the problem is mental not physical and we need to understand and fix this mental approach.
The use of self hypnosis techniques will allow you to conquer your muscular tensions at the conscious level of thought while allowing the subconscious to take control of the golf swing and produce that masterful swing technique of the top pros. It is the conscious effort that is killing your golf stroke and we want to develop the subconscious approach.
Forget all the stage antics of people being put in highly embarrassing situations using hypnosis, that is not what we're talking about here. What we want to be out to do is to consciously trigger a highly relaxed state of concentration while eliminating the fear mechanism from the subconscious mind and creating in at a heightened state of suggestibility. This increase suggestibility is the essence of hypnosis and self hypnosis. A good way to do practice this is with one of the many CDs or tapes on self hypnosis and relaxation, they are even available from your local library. You can listen to them in bed at night to gain an understanding of how self hypnosis works and benefit your general well-being as well as learning to apply to your golf game, it really is a very simple technique. What you need to learn is an important part of self hypnosis is various triggers that you can use to induce a highly relaxed state instantaneously.
One useful method is at the height of relaxation you will press your thumb and forefinger together on either hand and tell yourself that you are taking control of your thoughts and will instantly achieved the state of relaxation you're in now. This is a common technique used among people using self-diagnosis for combating panic attacks and anxiety, whereby in a situation they need to gain control of their thought processes very quickly and we can easily adapt this to the golfing situation for those trouble shots and achieve that perfect swing.
Understanding the duality of the human mind can go some way to explaining the usefulness of self hypnosis in golf. Our conscious mind deals with the day today actualities and events that shape our lives whereas the subconscious mind is a quagmire of our fears, phobias and a lot of our repressed feelings and desires. With all of the research gone on to date we still have a relatively small understanding of the subconscious mind, but look at it this way, you do not need to know how a car works in order to drive it do you? That is what we are doing here learning to drive the unconscious mind and use it as an effective tool.
You may have heard professional musicians talk about feel in their music and in the case of classical pianists where they are simply transposing the same pieces of music from musical notes written on sheets to the piano keyboard, what makes one pianist better than another? Quite simply it is feel, the ability to bring alive the emotion of a piece of music. And this is what we are trying to achieve here allowing the subconscious mind to put the music in our swing effortlessly and at will.
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