How to Control Your Anger on the Golf Course
When you are really into your golf, you care about what happens to the ball, and that ball doesn't always do what you want. It's all too easy to get angry but nobody else wants to see that and it's not good for you either. With hypnosis downloads you can retrain your mind to stop getting angry on the golf course.
Are you one of those people who cannot stop yourself from throwing a tantrum, or your club, when the golf ball goes off on a "frolic of it's own"? In your defense, I'm sure that you only respond in this way because you care about your game. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard this particular line of defense used by a golfer attempting to justify his bad behavior!
I'm sorry if I appear sexist here in my assumption that this is a "male thing" but it does tend to be mainly men who suffer from such outbursts on the course. Perhaps this is because traditionally men are more competitive in nature, or because they are more concerned about another's opinion of their performance. Maybe this is in the male gene pool, dating back to when we lived in caves, and it was massively important then for the male to perform well. Perform or do not survive.
Certainly, many golfers act as if their life depended on that last shot. A stray ball dents ones pride and ones confidence. It affects you at a very personal level. And the memory of that stray shot goes round and round in your mind, haunting you and taunting you on its way. The rest of the game is ruined as you stomp from hole to hole, head down, muttering obscenities under your breath. The anger induced tension ruins not just your equilibrium and enjoyment of this fantastic game, but it ruins your focus and rhythm too.
A negative cycle of effect ensues. The tense rhythm of your swing snakes its way down your club from hands to shaft to club face…and the ball shoots off in strange and unexpected directions. Yet this shouldn't really be unexpected. It is the natural effect of anger. When angry, not only are you restricted by tension, you cannot think clearly, you cannot focus, your mental capacity is restricted and imprisoned by your pent up emotions.
And in golf, you have to think clearly and focus upon what you want to happen. You have to relax and swing freely and mentally direct your ball towards the hole. Golf balls do as they are told. If you direct then in an angry manner, they will respond in a fierce and angry way!
So what can you do to stop getting angry on the golf course? There are many mental skills involved in playing great golf, and if you do not learn them your golf will never be that great. You can learn to take a step back, dissociate from the emotion and calm both mind and body. This is an art, and one which everyone can learn. You can learn to turn a blind eye to those shots which didn't turn out exactly as you had hoped; you can learn to erase these negative memories from your golfing mind. You can learn to replace these thoughts and images with ones which are far more productive. You can learn to focus clearly and block out unnecessary distractions.
There are as many mental skills to be learned in golf as shots to play. And the key to them all is hypnosis. Hypnosis is a state of relaxation and focus. It is a state which allows easy learning and greater creativity. In learning to use hypnosis you also learn to change state in a moment, to switch from anger to calmness.
Ninety percent of great golf is in your mind, and hypnosis is the key to your inner mind. Try it for yourself - you can get a free hypnosis download from my website.
Roseanna Leaton, specialist in golf hypnosis downloads to stop you getting angry on the golf course.
http://www.RoseannaLeaton.com
http://www.GolferWithin.com
Was golf originally played by men….or was golf originally a ladies game? (Heaven forbid!)
Sometime last year I visited the Ming exhibition at the Asian Arts museum in San Francisco. My interest was piqued by a hand scroll in colored ink on silk, exquisitely beautiful, which featured in part the "beauty and pleasantry" of the Court ladies' lives in the Inner Palace. This wonderful scroll, attributed to Du Jin (1465-1500), depicted the ladies going about their favorite pastimes, including the serving of snacks (no surprise there!), kicking a ball (Did ladies of that period really play soccer or, better still, American football? - my mind is really going overtime trying to picture that one!)...and, even more curious...playing a GOLF game...Wow!
I, needless to say, did a double take; And, yes, it showed ladies (not men wearing kimonos!) holding a club which was clearly a golf club as we know it today; perhaps not your new Nike square headed driver, but depicting a regular iron, complete with grooves on its face, together with a small golf ball sized ball and a hole. So here we clearly see ladies in China in the late 1400's playing a golf-like game inside the walls of the Imperial Palace.
You, like me, may have heard that the letters GOLF actually stand for "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden". Although there is clearly no truth in this being the origin of the name "golf", as this type of word play was not in vogue at that time, over the years there has certainly been a particular school of male golfers who think women should be kept well away from the course...
Where did golf really start? And was it played by men or women? A few searches on Google and a quick look at other resources did not provide a conclusive answer.
It would seem that there are many different countries who would like to claim that golf started with them. And there is a certain amount of evidence to support each and every claim. Certainly a golf-like game was played in many counties, not just in Scotland or China, but also in Rome, Holland, Belgium, France and England, to name just a few of these claimant countries.
In China, records show that their particular golf like game, called "chiuwan", was played five hundred years before golf was ever mentioned in Scotland (far earlier also than the date of the scroll I spotted at the Ming exhibition). This particular version was played with 10 clubs, not 14, and there is no reference to it being played over 18 holes and totaling an average par of 72. It is suggested by Chinese researchers that golf could have found its way to Europe compliments of Mongolian travelers sometime in the late middle ages.
The Dutch not only claim to have instigated the game of golf, but also lay claim to naming the game. The Dutch word "colf" actually means club, and colf morphed into golf.
These are just two examples of how golf may have started in Countries other than Scotland.
So, how do the Scottish respond to such claims? They agree that stick and ball games have been played all over the world for centuries, but golf as we know it today, played over 18 holes, did indeed originate in Scotland. And the name golf may very well have come from the Dutch.
And as to whether it was originally played by men or women, the rich or the poor, it is clear that both sexes and people from all levels of society have played golf-like games for many centuries.
Roseanna Leaton, specialist in golf hypnosis downloads to train your mind to play great golf.
http://www.GolferWithin.com
The Quickest Way To Cure The Yips
You can cure your yips in just one hour. Read on to find out how this is possible with the use of hypnosis downloads.
Now, I know what you're thinking - that this is impossible, that this is too good to be true. But I can assure you that this can be achieved, with a little bit of APPROPRIATE help. You don't need to spend $200 on a new putter!
First, let’s look at what exactly is happening when you have the yips. You are standing over the ball, putter (or wedge) in hand, you take your practice stroke, your logical mind tells yourself that you can do this, that you can hit the ball as you want to…but despite all this logical self talk your putt is yet again an embarrassingly jerky stab at the ball. You then feel annoyed/upset/frustrated and your brain records this latest experience of the yips, adding this to your pattern of past yipping experiences, confirming and reinforcing the pattern, thereby creating even more certainty of it happening next time.
This is how your mind works; it stores patterns. When you sit in the driving seat of your car you will immediately activate your "driving pattern match" and so instinctively know how to drive. When you go to the airport you will automatically search for a pattern match with airports/flying and respond in accordance with your learned behavior. Your brain will immediately recreate this same emotional response...and you feel and act accordingly; without logically thinking about it...you just act instinctively.
Now this is very useful in a case where you need to feel fear, but not when you don't. Not only that, whenever you feel "primitive emotions" - those of fear or anger - your brain immediately gets locked into instinctive behavior patterns and you CANNOT access the higher, logical thinking parts of your brain.
Applying this knowledge to your experience of the yips, I'm sure you can now understand better why all that logical talking to yourself ("You can do this","it's just a putt", "there's no need to feel anxious", etc) simply doesn't work - your brain is effectively locked into its primitive response as soon as the pattern matching takes place. The two parts of your brain cannot communicate at this time and therefore you cannot modify your response to the situation.
Whether or not you can remember your first yipping experience, or even if you can work out how or why it began is not actually relevant to the cure. What is relevant is that you understand that in order to change your pattern match you have to access the emotional/primitive part of your brain. Using logic will very, very rarely affect a cure because your logical mind is locked out before it can interact in the experience.
The million dollar question is how do you gain access to and modify this primitive/emotional reaction? The answer is...HYPNOSIS. In hypnosis your brain waves alter from the beta of normal waking consciousness to the alpha-theta waves of relaxation and REM sleep. The purpose of REM sleep (dreaming) is to resolve conflicts and find solutions to problems, and research has shown that we cannot survive without this mechanism. Whether you are aware of dreaming or not, you do dream, and hypnosis is this same completely natural and restorative state in which you can choose to resolve mental conflicts and retrain your mind to modify instinctive patterns of behavior.
So, don't go off to spend your dollars on new equipment, go straight to the root of your problem and retrain your brain to putt smoothly and consistently.
Roseanna Leaton, specialist in mind training hypnosis for golf and author of the GolferWithin program for great mental golf.
