Concentration is key to playing your best golf. To play your best golf all the time, you have to be concentrating all the time. We can break the cycle of shotmaking, which I call the Golfing Cycle, into six parts, each with its own demand on your concentration.

Gathering. This is the stage when you stand beside your ball and look at the course ahead of you. You see the possible shots and assess the variables (lie, wind, hazards, etc.). To gather effectively, you must not analyze logically, but calm your mind and let impressions come to you.

Deciding. After you have taken in all the information the course is presenting you, allow the shot to be decided in a process I liken to a wordless knowing. The right shot just makes itself apparent to you on an unspoken level. Do not go through a rational decision-making process.

Preparing. You step up to the ball, take a rehearsal swing, get into your setup, all with nothing more than the feeling of the shot in mind.

Hitting. The movement of taking the club away from the ball can cause your concentration to break. This is where mental strength is most important. Continue to have that feeling of your selected shot in mind. It will guide your swing so that your body will hit that shot as well as you are able to.

Watching. Once the ball has been struck, watch it until it comes to rest or is no longer visible. Do not comment to yourself on how the shot came off, especially if it was a poor one. Critical self-talk erodes your confidence. Besides, too many times I have thought I would be in trouble, but when I got to my ball it turned out to be a lot better than it seemed earlier.

Walking. When you start walking toward the ball you have just hit, that shot is over. Forget about it. Immediately put your mind on the next shot. Even though you don’t know what shot that will be, get yourself in a positive frame of mind, right now, about how well you will be hitting it.

When you get to the ball, it’s back to Gathering.

I know golf is a social game, and you want to spend time talking with your playing companions. That doesn’t mean you have to take yourself out of the frame of mind that lets you play your best. Going through this six-part cycle as you make your way around the course helps keep your concentration at a peak for the entire round.

This cycle, and the concentration you need to apply it, are developed fully in my latest book, The Golfing Self. If you can learn to play this way, golf will seem like a different game.

For about five years I’ve been writing blog posts devoted mainly to helping you play better golf. Most of the instruction posts have been about physcial technique, mainly because it’s the easier to write about, and you need to know it.

Having good technique, though, isn’t necessarily what makes you play better. What does concerns the condition of your mind as you plan your shot and hit it. You know this is true.

When you’re playing poorly, your mind is full of doubt and worry. It’s hard to hit a good shot in that state. Conversely, when you’re playing well, your mind is relaxed and full of quiet confidence. You hit one good shot after another.

Nothing about your technique is different in either case. You’re the same golfer. What changed was the condition of your mind.

As I have improved (begun to shoot lower scores consistently) my technique has certainly improved, but not to the degree that my scores would indicate. My mind is more relaxed than before, which allows my improvement in technique to be applied more often, and that’s the key.

Fact: knowing how to hit better shots doesn’t lower your score. Knowing how to hit better shots more often does, and that part depends on the condition of your mind.

Last year I published a book that guides you through a program to develop a mind that stays clear and calm while you play. There is little I can add to it in a 500-word blog post, except to emphasize in another way how important this is.

My last eighteen holes came in at 74. I played the back nine one Monday morning and turned in a 38. The next Monday morning I played the front nine and shot 36.

At no time did I make what I would call a great shot. They were all good enough, shots that you can make any day. It’s just that I was making one of them after the other, and I attribute that to the state of my mind.

Put another way, if you’re a 15-handicapper, I can easily say that you are just as good a ball-striker as me. The quality of my best shots is no better than yours. What I am that you are not is consistent. I hit my best shots more often because my mind stays calmer than yours does.

Let me be clear on this point.

A golf swing does not have consistency built into it. How you swing now does not influence in any way how you will swing the next time. That influence is entirely contained in the mind.

Once you have trained yourself to the point where you know what to do with a golf club, that is, a good swing is not a matter of luck, repeating that swing is a mental activity. If there is a secret to getting the most out of the skills you have, this is it.

Your mind is your biggest asset on the golf course, but only if you use it in the right way. When you’re assessing your shot, thinking about it, weighing the options logically, is the wrong way, but that’s probably what you do. Instead, take a more intuitive approach. Let the part of your mind that knows what to do make your decision.

The problem a golf shot presents to us is how to project an action into a defined space. We’re doing something here that shows up over there. The question is, what should we do, and what is the easiest way to do it? Reverse that process. Look at the course without judging and let the course project a shot back to you.

Look at the course in the area of where your next shot should end up. Just look, without judging. In a few seconds you will become aware of the shot to hit, and how to hit it.

You won’t visualize it, like a movie. Your mind mind creates a wordless knowing, unaccompanied by an embedded or overlaid visual impression. That strong impression moves out of your mind to be literally felt in your body. It is also accompanied by great confidence.

I use this process with great success everywhere, but especially around and on the green, where there are so many options to choose from for the same shot. A few weeks ago, my ball was just off the green. I looked at the shot and said to myself, “9-iron.” But I usually chip with a sand wedge in this situation, so I got out my sand wedge.

I took a practice stroke, and thought, “No, it’s a 9-iron.” I put the wedge back in the bag, took out the 9-iron, stood over the ball and just let the shot come to me as i described above — where to hit the ball and how hard. I hit a gentle chip, and the ball curved into the hole.

I could tell you many stories about driving, approaching, and putting where this technique has paid off famously. It doesn’t mean the ball will go into the hole from wherever you are, or that you’ll hit every fairway or every green. We are human, we make mistakes in execution.

But it does mean that you’ll play much better than you thought you could. Quiet your thinking mind to let your intuitive mind tell you what to do. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Interested? My latest book, The Golfing Self, gives you detailed instruction on how to train your mind to play this way. You’re a better golfer right now than you think you are. Find out how to let your true ability emerge by using your mind correctly.

No matter how much we practice, build our game, learn about it, know what we are capable of doing, and when to do what, there is no escaping the moment of truth — the time when you have to take the club away and hit the shot. Golf, no matter what your level of skill, is played in this moment. To make golf easy, you need to make this moment as easy on yourself as possible.

How do you do that? How do you make the beginning of a shot a movement full of confidence rather than infected with doubt? Quite simply, you play well within yourself, well within your capabilities. You play shots you know you can hit, which do not require your best, but only your average skills.

Reflect for a moment. I’m sure you’ve been through this before, many times. At the driving range, you hit one shot after another that is as fine as you can hit You begin to push ahead to expand your limitations, and often succeed. After all, that’s what the range is for — not only to maintain the skills you do have, but to take them to a new level.

But when it comes time to play, things change. You’re not out there to find out what you possibly could do, but what to apply what you know, really know, that you can do. That’s a very different way of hitting a golf ball. You get conservtive. You don’t go all out, you don’t play on the edge. Your game closes in to what you feel absolutely sure you can do.

That’s why, for example, while we’re learning an improvement on some technique, but have not yet mastered it, we abandon the improvement and go back to what we know, even though we are aware it is what we are trying to move away from. We go back to what we have confidence in being able to do it well, even if it is not what we actually want to do.

There is an average quality of shot that you hit, not your very best, not your worst, either, but one you know you can toss off whenever you want to. That is the shot you should play golf with. Asking more of yourself than that seldom pays off. Trying to hit shots that rate nine or ten is often what leads to hitting shots that rank one or two.

As you take the club away, don’t expect great things of yourself. Hit your average shot, one that gets you in the middle six. That will prevent the pressure to perform from becoming too great. It will lead to a more satisfying and relaxing round, and I might also say, a lower score.

Three days ago I played in an end-of-the-year scramble. I hit the ball flawlessly for about the first six holes, then had a small collapse, but got it back again for the finish of the round. There was nothing wrong with my swing. It was all in my head.

At first, all I thought about was swinging the club, just letting the ball go where the swing sent it. But I started thinking about hitting the ball little farther, or a little more intentionally somehow, and that’s when the problems started. Only until I went back to letting the swing do the work did things get better again.

Part of it is that when you swing the club, you don’t have the satisfaction of you hitting the ball, of you making the shot happen. Golf is paradoxical in that way, that we have to cause a very precise thing to happen, but we have to give our entire body, not our sensitive hands and fingers, the job of getting it done. That means giving up controlling the club and the ball, something we find hard to do.

So when I said to myself, just swing the club, because that is enough, things go better again. A lot better.

So many golfers, especially at the start of their golfing career, think that hitting the ball is the object of the game. When they learn otherwise is when they start to get better, and in a hurry.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

The longer I play golf, the more I become convinced that the key to playing well is not any technique you might have learned, but confidence.

A few weeks ago, I hit into a green about thirty feet to the right of the pin. To go right at it meant playing over a bunker, so this was exactly where I wanted to be — easy approach putt and a tap-in. Except I left my approach putt twelve feet short. The greens had been sanded the week before and were a lot slower than I felt comfortable with.

So! I was not going to three-putt. I read the green, looked at the putt, and said to myself, “This is going in,” as if there were no choice in the matter. And it went in. That’s confidence: not in knowing we’re good enough to sink the putt, but knowing as if doubt didn’t exist and the only possible outcome is for the ball to go in. Big difference.

We can’t gin up that kind of motivation for every shot, though. Fortunately, we don’t need to. If we’ve felt it once, or twice, or more, that feeling in in us. All we have to do is pull it out. Get comfortable with the shot you are about to hit and that feeling of confidence will be there.

If that sounds too easy, it’s because you are used to making golf hard. You have trained your mind to see the possible mistakes surrounding the one success that’s in there somewhere. Retrain your mind. See only the success, just like in those golden moments, and hit the ball.

Now here’s the key. File away successes and throw away failures. Every time you visualize the fairway on the eighteenth tee and hit it, file that away. Every time you hit into the pond on the right instead, throw that shot away. Never happened.

Acquire the mental strength to not let setbacks change your mood or your belief in the power of your mind to lead you to your best golf. This takes practice, lots of it. Remember how long it took to learn how to hit the ball reasonably straight, though, and you put in that time.

For a detailed program on how to accomplish this, see my latest book, The Golfing Self, at www.therecreationalgolfer.com.

Get this: you’re playing great. Your swing is clicking, the putts are dropping, you’re chipping it close. Good golf is automatic. Then you get an idea that you think will help you play even better. You try it out, and presto! There goes that good patch of golf.

When something is working in your golf game, working real well, leave it alone. Do not try a little thing that will make it even better. You’re on top of the mountain. A change will only take you downhill. LEAVE IT A-L-O-N-E.

Remember Padraig Harrington? Three major championships in two years? What is there for him to do next but start tinkering with his swing to get even better. That third major, in 2008, is the last time he has won. Zip for five years since then.

Or consider Ian Baker-Finch. The Australian with a working-man’s swing won a few times, then struck gold on the weekend of the 1991 Open Championship and won. Thinking he should be able to contend in every major he entered, instead of merely enjoying his moment, he tried for more distance and ruined his sweet swing. He was off the Tour in a few years and now a single-digit handicapper could give him a run for his money.

Remember that the goal of golf is to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. If you’re doing that, keep doing what you’re doing to do that. Work it for all it’s worth until it stops rewarding you. Then you might try something new.

But as long as you’re finding fairways and greens, putting it close or in, you’ve arrived at the goal you have been seeking. Let development go. Play with what you have learned how to do. Hit the same shots over and over again. Enjoy your success.

I think the reason why so many of us keep changing is that is what we’ve always done. Golf is a process of looking for a better way. That’s what we expect from the game. Now you have got to where you wanted to go, you can’t keep looking at golf as a process of change. Look at it now as a process of performance. Your goal is not to seek, but to repeat.

Really now, isn’t that what you do in other things of your life that you are accomplished at? You use the same skills over and over again. There’s enjoyment in that. Make your enjoyment in golf hitting one good shot after another, with the same skills.

If you’re in that place, it’s because you have sown, and sown, and sown. Now it’s time to reap, reap, reap.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com

I know that every one of you has a pretty good swing. You can use it to get the ball in the fairway, and get the ball on or near the green. But for some reason you don’t. That’s because you get caught up by the #1 swing wrecker in golf — the ball.

Take four practice swings, without rushing, but take four practice swings in a row. Seems simple. Now step up to the ball. Did something change? Did knowing that you were going to hit a ball cause you to think different thoughts, or even have a different state of mind, if you are sensitive to those things?

If so, what’s killing your golf is not some technical flaw in your swing, but the way you use your mind. The ball cannot change things. It just cannot. Your swing is the same whether there is a ball there or not.

When you make your practice swings, you have an expansive, unconcerned state of mind. It feels good. It feels capable. It feels right.

I believe the major golfing skill, more important than any other, is to maintain that state of mind when you are about to hit the ball. If you can, you will play the best golf you are capable of. You will play up to your technical limits, and that is all you can ask of yourself.

Here’s a drill to teach yourself how to do that. Be warned, this is a very difficult drill — and I’m not kidding.

Put a ball on the ground. Now step back a bit and take four or five practice swings. Swing enough times so that the thought of hitting a ball has vanished from your mind, and all you feel is the motion of your swing.

Now step up to the ball and address it. If you switch to thinking about hitting the ball, stop. Don’t make another move. Step back and take more practice swings until “hit the ball” leaves your mind. Step up to the ball once more. If you start thinking, “hit the ball,” step away and begin again.

At some point, you will decide that the ball is not worth all the time you are wasting, and you’ll decide to get it right. When that happens, you will have taken the first step to learning that the ball is not in control — you are. Keep going and take more steps. Having one experience is not enough. To get the most out of this exercise, you should do it all the time, and make it your principle golf drill.

Now I want to add on another condition. If at any time you think, “hit the ball,” stop and start over. Not just at address, but during the swing. If you’re starting your downswing and you think about the ball, stop. Do not complete that swing. If you do, you will reinforce the wrong feeling.

You’re teaching yourself to hit the ball without having hitting the ball in mind. You will teach yourself to do that only if that is your state of mind.

What am I saying? I’m saying this: when you eat your cereal in the morning, you don’t think at all about your spoon, or the cereal you’re loading on to it, or getting the spoon into your mouth instead of hitting your chin. You just scoop up some cereal and eat it.

That is the same state of mind you need to be in when you hit a golf ball. That’s what this drill will teach you if you stick with it. I believe that the more time you put into learning how to do the drill correctly, the better it will be for your golf.

Visit www.therecreationalgolfer.com