How can we define skill? Michael Wade, professor of Kinesiology and Human Factors defines skill as "that which minimises the discrepancy between intent and outcome." So you can say you're skilled at something if you can carry out your intentions with little or no margin of error more often than not.

To achieve a reduction in the discrepancy between what you want to happen and then what actually happens, you first have to have an accurate picture of what needs to be done, and then be able to monitor what you're actually doing to make it happen.

Let's look at this in the context of sinking a putt.

Okay, imagine you have a two-yard putt to sink. You’ve done it many times before, but this time it all goes horribly wrong and you end up further away from the hole than when you started. You didn’t deliberately play to miss and you probably did everything that felt right in your preparation, so why the error?

If your putt does go horribly wrong, it’s because that’s how you told yourself to play it. Your actions caused your body to do it exactly that way! The ball ends up a country mile away from the hole because that’s where you put it – the evidence is irrefutable. Somewhere between your intention and the execution something happened. What came out at the end of the chain did not resemble what you thought you’d put in at the start.

There are two possible explanations:

You incorrectly judged the conditions and the green, so what you thought needed to be done was just plain wrong and consequently you played the wrong shot.
You correctly judged what was needed and in your mind you worked out and played the right shot, but your body didn’t appear to do what you wanted.

In (1) this comes down to experience. The more you play the better able you are to read the green and judge the weight and back swing required to the make the ball go the distance in varying conditions – although you may have already discovered this can change from day to day.

Other factors will affect the outcome, such as the green didn’t play as it looked or there’s a sudden gust of wind or another unforeseen circumstance. But that’s the beauty of the game! It would get a bit dull if these random factors weren’t a part of it. We have to accept that there are things beyond our control. So let’s focus on what we can control.

In (2) I say ‘appear’ because your body can only do what you tell it to do. The trick is to know what you’re telling your body to do. When you concentrate on getting it right, you may unwittingly be doing far more than you’re aware of and hence undermine your ability to execute each shot as intended.

I coach many golfers who are completely unaware of many of the movements they make in order to play their shot. These may include lifting the shoulders, tightening the necks or lower backs. Whatever the action, they have become unknown factors affecting their ability to play a shot as they intended. So I suggest that golfers really should learn the vital skill of being self-aware so they will know exactly what they're doing to bring about the desired result - or as pretty darn close as you can get.