Have you ever had the experience that you played your shot before you were ready? You were in the middle of thinking about playing it and then all of a sudden, oops, there it goes. What you thought was going to be a carefully thought out putt just turned into a bit of a howler. You get the feeling it wasn’t you who just played the shot but some mischievous outside force that had taken over your actions.

et’s take this away from the course for a moment and look at the same phenomena in a different situation; getting out of bed. In his book, Principles of Psychology (1890), William James wrote
“We know what it is to get out of bed on a freezing morning in a room without a fire, and how the very vital principle within us protests against the idea… We think how late we shall be, how the duties of the day will suffer; we say, “I must get up, this is ignominious,” and so on.

But still the warm couch feels too delicious, and the cold outside too cruel, and resolution faints away and postpones itself again and again just as it seemed on the verge of the decisive act.

Now how do we ever get up under such circumstances? If I may generalize from my own experience, we more often than not get up without any struggle or decision at all. We suddenly find that we have got up. A fortunate lapse of consciousness occurs, we forget both the warmth and the cold; we fall into some reverie connected with the day’s life, in the course of which the idea flashes across us,

“Hello! I must lie here no longer” – an idea which at that lucky instant awakes no contradictory or paralyzing suggestions, and consequently produces immediately its appropriate motor effects. It was our acute consciousness of both the warmth and the cold during the period of struggle which paralyzed our activity. This case seems to me to contain in miniature form the data for an entire psychology of volition.”

This experience is put down to what scientists call ideomotor movement, an unconscious or involuntary bodily movement made in response to a thought or an idea rather than to a sensory stimulus.
It’s also often referred to as "mischief-making" and has a role in dowsing, playing with an Ouija board and, I believe, in those crucial moments before a putt.

The feeling that the process has just run away from us and taken control out of our hands is because we’re thinking too far ahead. By focusing on how we’re going to do the activity before we actually need to perform that activity sets everything in place long before the muscles are needed – a bit like revving your engine at the lights.

The actions that will carry out the movement are ready, waiting and gaining momentum as you think of taking your putt. A threshold is reached and suddenly the activity happens. Unfortunately, you weren’t able to consciously decide when you were going to do it for yourself.

So how can you prevent this mischief-making activity at the very moment you really don’t need it? You have to be in the moment and focused on the here and now. In this state of mind you’re not racing ahead of yourself and queuing up those movements that will kick in unexpectedly.

When you’re over the ball, be aware of your breathing, the movement of your ribs and the toes in your socks. If you’ve measured up your shot you no longer need to think about it; it’s taken care of. This way you can stay in the moment and focus only on the task in immediate hand and consciously decide when you’re ready to putt.

You can practice this before you even get out of bed in the morning! When you wake up tomorrow see if you can consciously choose the moment you get out of bed. Note how you can achieve this and apply the same technique on the green. See if it doesn’t help.