8. Trying not to hit the ball too hard

To demolish this mischievous dollop of bullshit, I will simply ask you to consider for a moment or two what exactly (and I mean, exactly) is meant by “too hard”. I rest my case, M’lud.

We need to go back a few millennia to the Serengeti where a John ancestor is out looking for his lunch. John Ugug’s subconscious is only too aware of the many dangers that lurk in the long grasses of the Serengeti, and has learnt by the mysterious process of natural selection that the best chance of survival is to have all the senses on alert.

So, before Ugug sees the lion, he can hear something approaching, he can maybe smell something familiar and he can feel something unwanted crawling up his leg. Only when the danger is imminent will his subconscious allow one of his senses’ information streams (usually the visual) to dominate the others and, only then, because by switching off the other information streams it can process the relevant information as quickly as possible and so have the best chance of warding off the attack.

As the lion attacks, the thing is still crawling up his leg but he can’t feel it anymore and neither is he aware of the sweet scent of mimosas wafting across that part of the plain. His reaction to the pouncing lion is accurate because it has the full attention of the very powerful subconscious. The creepy crawly will have to be dealt with later.

John Ugug survives and, via his genes, passes on his uncanny spear throwing ability to his descendants. By the time you arrive in the world, conditions are such that your subconscious is rarely required to operate on high alert, but the ability to do so is still there because in evolutionary terms it wasn’t that long ago that your ancestor was fighting off starving lions.

So, in order to play golf brilliantly, how do we best exploit the incredible ability the subconscious has to produce astonishingly complicated sequences of muscular movements that result in incredibly accurate forces being applied to objects? Well, there’s a problem: a golf ball carries no inherent visual threat like a tiger does and so the subconscious does not get automatically activated by the sight of the ball.

So, in order to exploit the powers of the subconscious, the subconscious has to be consciously switched on with a golfing version of a slavering sabre-toothed tiger obviously looking for its breakfast, ie extremely precise and highly visual instructions in the form of a visualised golf shot.

But even though using the conscious mind to switch on the subconscious works, it does bring with it another problem: involving the conscious in part of the task of hitting a golf ball accurately runs the risk of allowing the conscious to take over the whole task; and once the club has started moving, any interference by the conscious brain will result in a reduction in “timing”. Unfortunately for the golfer, the conscious brain is highly motivated to take over the task of hitting golf balls, and resisting the temptation to consciously hit the ball is the golfer’s greatest challenge.

“I don’t want to hit the ball too hard today because it will impart too much spin which is not good in windy conditions” is a conscious thought that will only ever have the effect of clouding the vision of the golf shot the subconscious needs, and will therefore result in a reduction in “timing” and all that that means. Telling yourself that it is “the plan for the round” just serves to give your conscious even more permission to interfere in the work of the subconscious.

Take yourself back to that first shot off the first tee, and choose the shot you would play bearing in mind these facts:

• At all times, control of the golf ball is the number one objective. 
• The wind is blowing across the fairway left to right
• There is rough and gorse along the right
• Currently, even your best shots with your driver can fade slightly at the end of the shot
• The hole is not playing longer because of the wind
• You are very, very good with long irons
• With irons, you can shape shots
• You are nervous because you think you have a good chance of winning …
• … and so you want a reasonable first hole to settle your nerves
• You want to give yourself time to get a feel for the conditions

I think you would choose to hit a low-ish draw towards the bunker on the right. Once you had “seen” the shot, you would have chosen the club to execute the shot. Once you had done that, you would have started the process of bringing that shot to full, burning visualisation. If you had been committed to this process (if your “plan” wasn’t clouding the issue), then the image of the shot would have been even brighter than usual because it would have fed off the nervous energy produced by your ambition to win the tournament. The image of that first shot being even brighter than usual would have meant that there was a greater chance that the outcome would have been the exact one desired.

From this florid description it is easy to see why thoughts like “I must try to hit it “soft”” are so insidiously distracting to the subconscious, and thereby so destructive, Had that first shot been a corker then you may have had a quite different experience that morning.

As it is, it is history. Our only duty is to face it responsibly, learn and keep smiling!