Is Your Golf Up To Scratch? - Part 1

Once you get mid way through the golfing season it can be interesting to look back and see if your golf is meeting the expectations or hopes which you began your golf year with.

We all have our targets for the year, be it simply enjoying the game more, or playing more, or practicing as well as playing, or getting our handicaps as close to scratch as possible. It's a bit like making your New Year's Resolutions, only in this case it's your New Golf Season's Resolutions. And rather like New Year's Resolutions, they can so easily fall by the way side after a couple of weeks, and for some of us, we don't even get started, we don't get past "go".

Most people are really good at planning things at work, organizing work into bite sized chunks and planning when each chunk will be achieved by. Most of us are more comfortable knowing what we need to do and then just getting on with it. As you plan to achieve your goals, they become not only possible to achieve, but highly probable. We don't, however, tend to take this mindset and apply it to our hobbies. A hobby is a game, isn't it? You shouldn't have to work at it, should you?

How much do you want to make your golfing goal probable as opposed to possible? The thing is that if you really want to achieve your golfing dream, you do have to plan for it. Whatever you imagine you can create, and so it's vital that you can see yourself achieving your golfing goal. Can you see this happening for you; can you really see what you want to see?

Here's a quick way of double checking that you can REALLY see yourself getting to that elusive goal. This is very quick and easy, so you can do it now.

Sit down somewhere comfortable, close your eyes and create a picture of yourself in your mind's eye of yourself achieving your goal, really see what you want to see, create this picture in your mind's eye and notice how you feel as well. I'd like you to look at that picture and become aware of a few things. Firstly, can you see what you want to see? This is the first step; unless you can see what you want, it's highly unlikely to happen.

As you look at your picture, is this picture right in front of you or is it to one side? If it's to one side, move it across until it is right in front of you. Make sure that your picture is right in front of you. As you move the picture until it is directly in front of you, make sure that you are seeing what you want to see in every way. As you see yourself in this picture, you should feel a sense of achievement, a feeling of satisfaction, fun and enjoyment. Now, imagine that you are stepping right into the picture, see what you'll see, feel what you'll feel, hear what you'll hear. Really animate your picture and make it big and bright and clear in your mind's eye.

For those of you who didn't see what you wanted to see, I recommend the following quick mental exercise, which everyone can do, young or old, positive or negative in outlook.

Close your eyes again and create that picture in your mind's eye. If you find that you are seeing what you want to see, that's great, savor it and enjoy it, make it really bright and clear, make sure it's right in front of you and then step right into your picture and enjoy the feelings associated with it. If, on the other hand, the picture has elements of what you don't want, what I'd like you to do is to move this picture off to one side, left or right, send it as far to the side that it can go, and then drain the color out of it, and make it go fuzzy and shrink it, and imagine that you can crumple that picture up and literally put it in the bin. Just bin the negatives and create a picture right in front of you of what you do want to experience and achieve in your golf game.

This technique, of "binning the negatives", is really effective in all areas of your golf game, as well as in all areas of your life. If a thought or picture in your mind's eye is powerful and productive, keep it there. If it is negative or unproductive, just send it to one side, drain the color out, shrink it, crumple it up and put it in the bin. You will also find that hypnosis downloads can be used to make this exercise both easier and more compelling.

Roseanna Leaton, specialist in golf hypnosis cds and hypnosis mp3 downloads.