Between the Ears

By Mickey Martin

Between the Ears will help you develop the winning attitude
of a top competitive golfer. In six easy to read chapters you will discover your imagination, realize your abilities, create your success,
and achieve on the course and much more.
Each chapter is filled with positive insights
into mastering your mental golf game. You will easily discover the power of visualization and the confidence of conquering your fears. Between the Ears is a concise lesson on achieving your dream of becoming a better player.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mickey Martin
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005143879

Book preview

BETWEEN

THE EARS©

A player’s guide to the mental aspects of the game of golf

Mickey Martin, BCH

NGH Board Certified Hypnotherapist

Between the Ears

© 2020 Mickey Martin

[e-mail]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

Warm-up Your Attitude

Discover Your Imagination

Realize Your Abilities

Secure The Winner’s Edge

Create Your Success

Achieve On The Course

Enjoy Your Achievement

The 19

th

Green

"If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play a game, it’s recreation.

If you work at it, it’s golf."

Bob Hope

If you’re completely satisfied with the way you play golf, and believe you're playing the best you will ever play; this book isn't for you.

However, if you are like most every golfer I’ve ever known, you’re never satisfied. Many times, you leave the course feeling as if you just went three rounds with Evander Holyfield.

Why do we seem to have these major up and down days in this sport?

It really is a simple sport…isn't it?

There are no complicated defensive strategies to design, no player conflicts to resolve, no field limitations, no 25 second clock, no bad calls, etc. In fact, there really is nobody else to blame but yourself. So maybe that's it.

Maybe that’s why everyone who plays this sport falls into a love hate relationship with the game.

So, what’s the answer to achieving personal satisfaction with this sport?

Is there a way to sharpen your game, enhance the enjoyment, and still live a normal life? (Not everyone can spend two hours a day at the range with David Leadbetter.)

I believe there is. And my experience as a Certified Hypnotherapist backs me up.

I believe it rests with the individual management of the persons mental condition. And that, my friend, is the basis of this book. The mental conditioning and visualization techniques you need to easily accomplish complete personal satisfaction with your golf game.

If this notion makes sense to you, then keep on reading because you will find a great deal of terrific information in this book. But if you believe that the only way to personal success in your golf game is strictly a matter of physical technique, you may as well stop now.

Why?

Because I am not going to mention one thing about physical technique. That's between you and your golf pro. I am here to help you with that area between the ears, hence the name. And many of the unique and innovative ideas you will be exposed to in this book may or may not make sense to you. In fact, they may initially challenge your present attitude.

However, I can promise you that all the visualization, mental conditioning, and self-hypnosis techniques you will learn are all founded on solid evidence.

Only you will be able to prove their effectiveness. You just must use them first before you make that judgement.

These techniques are real, and they exist whether you believe in them or not, and they will exist whether you use them or not. So, if you decide to go on and explore these new ideas in game improvement, base your acceptance of this information on your personal experience, and not on me or anyone else.

Now, if you just take a minute, I’ll tell you why I believe that you will discover this mental approach to game improvement will be so enlightening.

When I first picked up a golf club, I had a basic idea of what I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to step up to the first tee, look defiantly down the fairway and smash a three-hundred-yard drive straight down the middle.

It looked easy enough, but much like the casual observer, I was unaware how complex the golf swing really was.

I had occasionally watched an hour or two of the pro tour on TV, but I never imagined that it could be that hard or that it would become such a big part of my life.

I first became interested in golf because I wanted to play a sport I could continue to play for the rest of my life. The fact that golf courses are without a doubt many of the most beautiful places on earth, provided even more incentive.

What I soon discovered was that this sport carries with it more challenges than any other sport I know. I quickly realized that unlike most sports, golf is truly individual. You have no one to rely on next to you to cover up your errors. Everything that you do matters, and every stroke a player confronts has different implications

The personal responsibility to perform is unlike that of any other sport, and this one mental facet produces a level of anxiety that is difficult to handle for many players.

As you break down the physical attributes of the golf swing, you come to realize that there are so many variables to the golf shot that it seems almost impossible to comprehend. People tell you to keep your head still, let your arms relax, don't sway, do sway, make a turn, take it straight back and so on and so forth.

Not only are there so many variables, but you don't have much time to think about them. After all, the average shot takes way less than 3 seconds.

So, if you figure an average round for an average club player of 95 strokes, that figures out to be only 4 minutes and 45 seconds that you are in the process of striking the golf ball. In a four-hour round of golf, that leaves 3 hours 54 minutes and 15 seconds to think, talk and imagine everything else from your day at work, the last shot, the next putt.

This is precisely why mental conditioning is so important. Without mental conditioning, confusion is bound to surface, creating anxiety, tension, and a generally bad feeling.

On top of that, most people undergo the difficult task of understanding all these variables, hoping to comprehend how they affect the shot. Without any guidance, these variables tend to create nothing but more confusion in their mind. This confusion frustrates more people than it should, but it doesn't have to.

What these players should recognize is that the confusion they experience is just the sign of learning something new. The cause for their confusion is the information they are dealing with is not organized. After all, confusion is not caused by too little information, it is caused by too much.

What follows is the most common reaction to confusion... creating a variety of permanent physical and emotional reasons to justify why things went bad?

This negative attitude towards yourself usually results in more permanent excuses, and frustration becomes your permanent partner.

Every golfer would benefit greatly from the help of golf pro to ease this confusion, but many people don't. They unfortunately rely on the random thoughts from other confused players.

Along the same lines, at some point or another you've probably heard a golfer rationalize their confusion with words like If only I would have taken this up earlier,' or He's lived on a golf course since he was a kid, or the topper, If I hit as many balls as he does, I'd be just as good."

Most people believe statements like these have little to do with their actual performance on the course, but nothing is further from the truth. Words like these give a real insight into how that person has mentally limited their own personal achievement level.

It also reveals that person's personal success strategy. As we mentioned before, a negative strategy usually leads to frustration.

Along with a good mental condition, the skill to use that condition to your greatest benefit is equally important.

For example, at some time during your golf career, you may have heard a professional or top amateur talk about visualizing their golf swing. They may say things like see the ball...be the ball, or I always shape my shot before I take it.

These are all examples of using your imagination to visualize your shot and to prepare yourself for the desired outcome

Nevertheless, with all the talk about imagination and the other mental aspects of the game, I noticed a void in material available for instruction in these areas.

You can buy almost any kind of game improvement club, spend hours at the range, and purchase every training video currently on the market and still panic every time you face a downhill putt or stare down a narrow fairway with a creek on the right.

If you do hear about the mental conditioning of the game, you only learn what to do, no one tells you how to do it. This experimentation usually leads to constant tinkering with the golf swing, as is common for people who don't know how to mentally change something.

If the problem lies between the ears, the player generally gives up or searches for a way to justify their failure physically

Recognizing the obvious value of the mental aspects of golf, I first wanted to identify the common mental characteristics in successful achievers, then apply the solid techniques I teach in self-hypnosis.

As a Certified Hypnotherapist, I have seen frustrated faces on people as they fell into an attitude of helplessness and despair. Blaming defeat on inherited characteristics or reasons seemingly beyond their control. Hypnotherapy was commonly their last resort.

What I discovered was that they would generally follow certain accepted paths of decision-making and apply the same emotions to every action. This would take them to the same conclusions repeatedly.

As people continue to bring these redundant strategies to everything they do, they most often restrict their achievements. I’m sure you've heard golfers tell you that they always hook because of too much strength in their arms, or they have the yips because they work in construction all day, or even that they slice because their legs are too short.

Nevertheless, uncommon individuals pursue excellence in spite of their perceived physical obstacles. They use their mind to develop a mental attitude that allows them to work within the physical characteristics they possess.

No one better represents this philosophy than a man by the name of Dick Hartwell, a manager of a Dallas energy company and a 7 handicap. That is far from average in a world of 18 and 19 handicaps. However, what is important to know about Dick is that he has improved his handicap from 15 to 7 over the past 14 years.

I'm sure he had the help of a qualified golf pro and learned specific aspects of his swing to improve his consistency. He obviously experienced moments of frustration, as every great player does.

And although you may think that this accomplishment is noteworthy, you're probably saying So what, it's not all that unusual.

Well there is one unusual aspect about Dick's improvement; he has improved his handicap without the assistance of his left leg. You see, he lost his left leg to cancer in 1980, and since then he has learned to create a balanced swing without the use of a left leg. In fact, he doesn't even use prosthesis

What's amazing in this true-life example of a remarkable man, is that he completely relearned his golf swing, created a renewed image of himself, and reduced his handicap in the process. He learned to avoid a defeated mental image and overcome the mental condition that haunts so many golfers.

By committing yourself to learning the techniques in this book, you've taken the first step to understanding one key idea, and that is that all the mentally conditioned responses that may have inhibited your peak performance in the past, not only can be changed, but can be changed quickly.

You don't need to labor under the beliefs of mistaken past images.

However, before you can make these changes, you must first understand that your current beliefs cannot be changed while you are actively involved in the specific action. This explains, for instance, why you can't use temporary will power to ignore the lake in front of you, while concentrating on not hitting it in the lake using your water ball.

What you have done in this situation is ask your brain for results, but your competitive brain isn't designed to get results, it is designed to point you in directions. Therefore, if you want to use your brain to get it to do what you want it to, you need to set the direction you want it to go

You can preprogram yourself ahead of time or you can reprogram yourself later, but again not while you are currently involved in the specific situation. At that point in time, your automatic pilot takes over and