"Spot The Difference"

Golf Performance Coaching builds upon sound technical skills and teaches you how to trust them by moving your attention away from them and onto the mastery of the skills of anxiety management, concentration, targeting and acceptance. I acknowledge the importance of technical instruction. The better your technical skills, the more critical this training becomes on your potential golf performance. How you have learned to swing and which technical model you employ is of no consequence to my work for it sits over and above them all. This coaching takes you to the next stage of learning so you can learn how to trust your techniques, as you do when driving a car. When you become target oriented, you will feel the difference in your swing and see the ball travel consistently to where it was intended. Have a look at what it looks like in practice.

You are visiting this website because you have developed a sound technique but know there is something significant still missing from your game. There is and more than you can imagine right now. Playing golf requires an awareness and discipline of mind and no-one is teaching you these specialist skills. Neither technical instructors (focus on CONTROL of your actions) or psychologists (books, mental 'tips', hypnosis CD's and personality profiling) and it is why you continue to be so inconsistent. Technical instructors send you away from a swing lesson with no idea or control of what will be occupying your attention, moment by moment, throughout your entire pre and post shot routines in competition. This is why you need Target Oriented Golf. For the first time you will begin to train your conscious mind on the range and learn how to guide your attention throughout your routines so you can begin to play golf, as relaxed and focused as you would be if you were actually throwing the ball at your target.

Performance anxiety kills your swing and putting stroke regardless of technical ability, I remove it from your game. The YIPS and FLINCHING are extreme examples of anxiety borne of poor metacognition. They are obvious to see but more subtle anxiety exists in many places within your game and it kills your golf score. Simply due to the way you CHOOSE to think. Your inner voice is the biggest killer of your golf anywhere from the first tee to the last putting green. What's the inner voice? Listen for a moment. As you read these words notice how you have to verbalise them internally. Why does your brain have to do this do you think? The correct answer lies at the heart of high performance golf. It is this same voice which takes your attention away from your target out on the golf course, as your thoughts wander in time and place, unable to consistently stay in the moment. You drive a car with exactly this same random attention focus but it is impossible to play golf due to its impact on your physiological state and inability to stay target oriented. This becomes most evident when under pressure in competition your game falls apart. Every time.

Clearly, every coach wants to help you perform. Unfortunately, the emphasise on CONTROL of your physical actions in the 1.5 seconds of a golf swing flies in the face of how you perform any other life skill successfully. You only learn how to TRUST your physical self when you switch your attention AWAY from the conscious control of your actions but you are never taught how to do this with golf, which is why you find the game so uniquely difficult to master. Until you are taught how to do this, your performance WILL remain frustratingly inconsistent. You end up LOOKING at targets but never ATTENDING to them because you anxiously take your attentional focus back to your dominant practice behaviour, the control of your swing or worse still the potential outcomes of your shot. If this is your dominant practice mentality, how else can you behave in competitive situations and then the lack of attentional focus training kills your game. Just 1 erroneous conscious thought during your entire pre and post shot can kill your swing and putting stroke in an instant due to elevated arousal and loss of target.

What you think about during the pre-shot and swing transition time is where your golf performance lives. Until you understand why AND learn how to guide your attention focus EVERY second throughout your pre-shot, transition and post-shot routines, inconsistency will be your only one true golfing companion. Your CONSCIOUS mind is the weakest link in your golf game. When you can acknowledge that I would be delighted to help you reveal your true golf potential. Still not convinced? Click HERE to see a Professional make the transiton to Target Oriented Golf. It works for him, it will for you when you are ready to learn the art at the heart of golf - attentional focus.

Professional peer review of Target Oriented Golf DVD:

"There are lots of people who've got the latest 'gimmick' or idea that they claim will improve your golf. However, from the very beginning of the DVD, Colin demonstrated his professionalism, his extensive understanding of attentional focus and its relationship to performance and most of all his passion to help YOU reduce your handicap by winning the mind game of golf. Colin is an excellent teacher and a natural coach and it is with the utmost sincerity that I recommend Target Oriented Golf to you. Believe me when I say that putting into practice the theory Colin shares with you on the DVD WILL make you a better golfer - and a better person."

Jeffrey Hodges B.Sc. M.Sc. (Hons) B.Ed.
Author of 'Sportsmind', and Director of the Sportsmind International Institute for Human Performance Research.