Covert Golf Hypnosis and Secret Plans at the Dubai World Championships

Firstly there was Lee Westwood's much talked about "Secret Plan." When the dust settled he admitted, "Okay, if you really want to know, the secret was making everyone else think I had a secret, when I didn't really have one." He had the rest of the field nervously waiting to find out what the plan was and not concentrating on their own plans. In my forthcoming book, The Secrets of Hypnotic Golf, I talk about protecting yourself against Covert Hypnosis or "Black Ops Golf", as other people refer to it. Although I'm not comfortable with Covert Hypnosis, I have to admit that Lee's approach isn't that much different from Jack Nicklaus taking advantage from "The golf psychology of letting everyone else complain while you win", as I wrote about in September.

Then there was the Lee's personal success story of how he regained his form when he explained that. "The reason for the big turnaround in my confidence and stuff like that was catching my caddie, Billy Foster, at the beach party on Tuesday evening when he probably had enough Heineken to tell me what he really thought." Lee went on saying, "He said I'd not been myself recently. I'd paid too much attention to other people around me. He told me I'd been out here 16 years, which is longer than all three of them (McIlroy, Ross Fisher and Martin Kaymer) put together and have won 30 tournaments, which is more than they've all won. You've got to bully them on the golf course. You've got to be yourself again and get back to the instinct you had in the late 90s and 2000'."

I suspect that Billy's comments had a much more positive golf psychology impact on Lee than any negative one his "Secret" had on his opponents. Having said that, his anticipation of the disadvantage his "Secret" would have on them would clearly help improve his own state of confidence. He certainly seemed to think it had a detrimental effect on Rory McIlroy.

That leads me nicely on to Rory's apparent golf psychology disaster after playing with Lee in the first round at Dubai. Whatever impact that had on his game, it was his putting that let him down, if you consider coming second at Dubai and Second in the Order of Merit a let-down. In contrast, it was Lee's phenomenal putting that made the difference between him and Rory and that was what really sealed his victory.

So if you want to play your best golf, you need to increase your psychological strength and confidence with golf hypnosis and protect yourself from covert hypnosis and other people's "Secret Plans."