If you are a dedicated golfer and care about your game you can find yourself riding along on a rollercoaster of emotional turmoil whilst out on the course. One moment you feel like a surfer riding a huge wave as your tee shots split the middle of the fairway or you chip the ball right into the cup, but then moments later your emotions sink like a stone as you miss a putt or get a bad bounce.

That's golf. That's how it is. And a round of golf takes an average of four hours. If you don't learn to control your emotions along the way you can arrive back at the 19th hole with your emotions wrung dry. The ups and downs and golf are experienced from one shot to another, let alone from one round of golf to the next.

A golfing friend made the comment today that she just can't seem to dial in her focus for every shot, every time she plays. I seriously doubt that anyone can accomplish that feat. Just as golfers make physical mistakes in terms of poor shot choices or poor execution, we make mental mistakes as well.

It's easy to get lazy and not take the time to align correctly. It's easy to overlook the absolute necessity to choose an exact point to aim at. It's easy to be thinking about what your friend just said as you set up to the ball instead of applying your mind to hitting the ball squarely. To expect yourself to be perfect is being way too hard upon yourself.

If you were a long distance runner you would pace yourself. You conserve energy during some parts of the race and give everything you have got at other times. A similar strategy should be applied to your mental focus in golf.

I know as well as you do that in a perfect world you would be perfectly focused and zoned in for each and every shot. You and I also know that if you can get yourself to focus in this way consistently for enough consecutive shots you will find that this behavior becomes automatic.

In a round of golf you don't have to focus for the entire four hours. You need to focus for each shot, be they 70 or 100 shots. That's all. But this is still a high demand to expect of yourself when you are not used to doing it. As a golfer begins to embrace the mental side of golf he or she should be patient with him or herself.

We all make mistakes. We all forget to do things. Until your mental focus becomes instinctive and automatic (if indeed it ever does) the key is to do it when you can and also to conserve your energy so that you can apply your focus when it really matters.

If you are a golfer who has only just become aware of the vital importance of the whole mental game of golf, then you might like to consider hypnosis. Hypnosis assists in the acquisition on new mental skills and makes them easier to take on board. Golf hypnosis in this way speeds up the process of making new mental skills automatic and instinctive.

Roseanna Leaton, avid golfer and specialist in golf hypnosis mp3 downloads and author of the GolferWithin golf mind training system.

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