The Emotional Impact of the Secrets of Hypnotic Golf

I'm reading a recent New Scientist article talking about the Five emotions you never knew you had and I'm starting to think about how our emotions influence our golf. And they're influencing us every time we play.

Now I'm sure that like the rest of us, you're experiencing all sorts of emotions every minute of every day of your life. It's a key element of living whether we are playing golf or doing something less important.

So what are these emotions I'm talking about? Well, as the article says, we all see different ones, but the consensus seems to include what psychologists apparently call the Big Six - Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise and Disgust. Well they all crop up on a regular basis in golf, now don't they? And they all appear either as desires or problems with many of the people who seek help from golf psychologists. They all tie in to Enjoying your Golf; Fear of Golfing Failure and Success; and Anger Management in Golf as some of the Secrets of Hypnotic Golf.

More indirectly, I guess that Sadness, Surprise and Disgust are also addressed by Positive Framing on the Golf Course; Post-Shot Routines: Planning your Shot, State Management in Golf; and Protection from Covert Hypnosis.

So what about the Five emotions you never knew you had? Well, according to New Scientist, these are Elevation, Interest, Gratitude, Pride and Confusion. You may not be surprised to hear that these fit in well with golf psychology as well.

Elevation, the uplifting emotion, is something we feel when we are inspired and motivated. In fact we have many expressions for it in our language like things are looking up. In golf psychology, I relate it to the concept of managing our physiology between shots. As I describe when talking about Physiology and Between Shots, if we walk the fairways with our head held high, we feel uplifted and positive. As a result, we play better golf.

Curiosity is one of the key things that make us human. It's also the key element to planning our shots - an essential part of our pre-shot routines. I know that I'm always talking about trusting your unconscious mind for better golf. However, the conscious mind with its analytical curiosity has a part to play as well.

What about Gratitude? Isn't that just the way we feel about a good shot? Well, that's true, but there's more to it than just that. As I describe in Positive Framing on the Golf Course, you can feel a lot better about a bad lie on the golf course if you think about how much worse it could have been. Being grateful for small mercies can have a very positive effect on your golf.

Pride can be a two edge sword - the New Scientist article describes it as the emotion with two faces. However, feeling proud about what happens on the golf course is what many of us play for. There's nothing wrong with feeling proud of a good drive or breaking 90, 80 or even 70 - whatever level you aspire to. You can store that pride as a resource when using NLP Anchoring for Better Golf.

That leaves us with the most enigmatic of the five - Confusion. Surely there's nothing positive to say about that, Andrew! Well perhaps I should leave that one to Richard Bandler, the co-founder of NLP, to describe why even confusion is a positive emotion for golf and life.

Confusion is the doorway to reorganizing your perceptions and learning something new. If you were never confused, that would mean that everything that happened to you fit your expectations, your model of the world, perfectly. Life would simply be one boring, repetitive experience after another.